the spider and used that memory to push himself forward. He eventually enlisted in the army where military physical therapy rejuvenated his hand. He could finally draw again. Through the military, he was able to pay for college and just completed his final semester as a graphic design major. For his final project at Fontbonne University, Henderson found it only fitting that he pay homage to the spider who gave him strength in the face of so much adversity. When asked what Anansi meant to him, Henderson replied, “He represents the opposite of everything said about black folk. The things they said we weren’t, he is.” This sentiment perfectly describes Henderson as well.
www.fontbonne.edu/academics/departments/ fine_arts_departments/fine_arts_gallery
Andre Henderson, Anansi (photo credit: Fatima La’Juan Muse)
NO SEMBLANCE OF MEANING According to legend, the great abstract artist Kazimir Malevich experienced a spiritual vision in 1913, when he painted a black square on a white field, demonstrating that a painting could exist completely free of any reflection or imitation of the external world. In his defiant brush strokes he managed to transform art itself from the dead weight of the real world and appropriate a black square into a symbol
of iconic negation. He wrote: “Objectivity, in itself, is meaningless, the concepts of the conscious mind are worthless. Feeling is the determining factor... and thus Art arrives at non-objective representation.” Malevich’s Suprematism movement ushered in a new receptivity in modern art that could transform the pictorial arts into a “supremacy
of pure feeling.” Malevich became one of the most important artistic voices in postRevolution Russia. In 1928 his painting Head of a Peasant prompted public outcry because, critics claimed, he’d reduced the human face to meaninglessness. By then the Stalinists had taken power and declared Socialist Realism as the only official art form, Malevich’s work was destroyed and he was forced to paint representational art until his death. Another Russian abstract artist working with non-objective art was Wassily Kandinsky. He believed color contained a spiritual level that transcended meaning and moved beyond representation, that one could feel the essence of each color.
Draven Steinbecker poses beside her grandfather Randy Titus’s representational but still absurd painting in her Chop Shop hair salon in the Grove (left), Randy Titus (right), (image courtesy of Draven Steinbecker) COMMUNITY VOICES
SPRING 2019 ALLTHEARTSTL.COM 16
COMMUNITY VOICES
By Lew Blink
