Portfolio - tribute to the works of various African American painters - Cover Story

by means of no means definitive or all-inclusive, this year's portfolio of artists who bear watching--two of whom hail from outside the United States--features works in a variety of manner of writings works influenced by personal experiences and interests, works that capture images from the diaspora.

VERNA HART

Verna Hart newly started learning to play the bass at the Jazzmobile Workshop in Harlem. It's easy, then, to understand her being influenced through jazz music. "My work is visual evidence of the natural periodical emphasiss of jazz," says the novel Yorker, whose greatest inspiration was friend and mentor Romare Bearden. "He influenced by what means I see and interpret jazz music." Hart's of recent origin Orleans series of paintings, which she sketched during her first visit to the city, in 1990 includes "Famous Door Jam."

"In 1992 Hart was commissioned to create the 1992 JazzCharlotte placard which sold out during the first hardly any hours of the two-day event" says Alma McCray, director of the Charlotte, N.C.-based Ubiquitous Art Space. "That is a testimony to the broad appeal that her works breed She rhythmically fuses jazz and painting as if individual is simply an extension of the other."

Hart has steps in art from the place of education of Visual Arts and Pratt Institute and a step in art administration from the Bank way College of Education, in novel York. Currently an adjunct professor of art at Medgar at any times College of the City University of novel York, she appears this fall in a private showing in Chicago, and her work can always be viewed at Ubiquitous Art Space and at the Galerie Royale, in novel Orleans.

JOE SAM

Joe Sam clearly remembers, from the early years at his abiding-place in Harlem, the appeal of colors and wefts and the hues of peeling paint that created incredible wall designs. In the last small in number years, he has illustrated a record album and volumes He likes to create "art which inspires race to fulfill their creative urges" he says. "My inspiration draw nears from nature ... and from the twisted rubble and discarded forms left by the agency of man, juxtaposed against the beautiful forms of nature."

"What's attractive is his composition of fix objects and color," explains Margaret Porter Troupe of the Porter Randall Gallery, in La Jolla, Calif. Generally, Sam uses materials in the state in which they are place "Real (I Can't Believe This)," however, is a mixed-media work upon paper.

A allotment of Sam's work focuses upon issues that relate to clan of color. In 1987 he complet a 52-piece material part of work on the black West, which won an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Works of his that were inspired through jazz--"I like to use the same kind of improvisation"--were part of the 1992 series of Absolut Vodka ads.

Sam, who has graduate stages from Columbia University in novel York and the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, generally resides in San Francisco, where his works are showing at the Mace Gallery, beginning August 30 His work is also included in a assemblage showing at the Museums at Blackhawk, in Danville, Calif., from September 18 to january 9 1994 For those who are interested in seeing more of Sam's work, he's exhibited by the Porter Randall Gallery.

MAXWELL TAYLOR

Maxwell Taylor is an artist "with real definite social concerns," say Savannah State guild writer and arts consultant Ja A. Jahannes and art critic Russell D Chambers, about the Bahamian native who works mainly in woodcut and in acrylic painting.

Although woodcut are Taylor's favorite medium, his paintings stand without for their depiction of athletic women. "My themes are press outed around women, and I focus upon the Afro-American family, with figures clustered together to symbolize that family should stick together, should deal together with suffering," Taylor explains when discussing his acrylic paintings. "I also gather a doom of impetus from the nerve of my wife and my mother."

Taylor, who trained at the Nassau Academy of Fine Art, has just complet a series of large woodcut upon the troubles in Somalia and has get backed to creating paintings with social issues and women as his make submissives Look for a show of his work at the APEX, in Atlanta, in the near future

VANDORN HINNANT

Vandorn Hinnant proclaimed himself an artist when he was a second-grader, and "Annunciation," a work in acrylic and colored pencil upon paper, is but one example of what has emerg from his declaration. The Greensboro, NC resident worked in acrylics upon paper for several years--the period during which "Annunciation" was created--before shifting in 1991 to producing colorful constructions in wood-land paper and metal.

"I work with color as a form of communication, and my work speaks to many individuals upon different levels," says the former North Carolina A&T pupil His influences are varied and include painter Edith Brown of Akron, Ohio, and push besom painter Edward Clark, of fresh York.

Hinnant is the subdue of an exhibition currently showing at the Diggs Gallery, at Winston-Salem State University, in North Carolina, [i]or[/i] part of to the other August 21. Later in the fall, his work will be upon view in San Francisco, at the Community Congregational temple "He's real interested in the spiritual results that sacred geometry can have, and he explores those effects" explains Brooke Anderson, director of the Diggs Gallery.