By MARY ANN MARGER
© St. Petersburg Times, published April 10, 1998
AMPA — The Museum of African American Art may be down for the count, but it’s far from out.
In a deal pending with Black Entertainment Television Network, the museum will sell its permanent holdings, the Barnett-Aden Collection, which will move to Washington, D.C. The 7-year-old Tampa museum is expected to close its doors for good.
But before that happens, it is presenting a show of impact and relevance. On view are works by three avant-garde artists based in Miami, a departure from the more accessible work that has shown there in the past. The three typify the multifaceted influences on art of the ’90s: a Haitian immigrant (Edouard Duval-Carrie), a descendant of Southern slaves (Onajide Shabaka) and a leading Outsider artist who learned art while in prison (Purvis Young). All are gifted in expressing their heritage on their own terms, contributing to the diversity that is art today; all use unconventional tools and mediums.
Says the museum’s executive director, Radiah Harper, “This show is opening up the doors for people to see another kind of art made by people of African descent. . . . I want to leave them with some new ideas.”
Onajide Shabaka
It should come as no surprise that Onajide Shabaka studied fashion design in college and has also worked as a laborer. His skillful sketchings show his respect for the dignity and value of the urban industrial worker. Sometimes he uses found materials associated with labor, such as a castoff shard of corrugated tin, rusted and broken, in “Sta-Whi.” More often he sketches with traditional artist’s tools, Nupastel or conte crayon, on paper.
In “Homeless/Gagged #2,” a line drawing of a gagged face is vertically at a right angle to the lower half of a fully formed and rounded figure viewed from the rear, as if asleep on the sidewalk. You get a gist, not a complete story, but that is enough.
Less immediately effective though more dramatic are the artist’s two large lightboxes. The lightbox is a relatively new medium in which a photo transparency is mounted to a display case containing a fluorescent light. Shabaka’s photographs each present an image of a young girl turned toward a scene suggesting her heritage, as if to ask: Can we face our heritage without turning our backs on our present?
multi media works, performative actions, photo
