Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation Changing Exhibits Gallery
They are neighbors and friends. Families and individuals. People ready and willing to come together and make a difference. To make the places we call home, better places for all. At Highmark we salute this spirit of giving back and are proud that the ideals of community service, philanthropy and volunteerism are so deeply woven into the fabric of our company and our employees.
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Introductions
In My Father’s House is a mixed-media exhibition that focuses on collecting from the perspective of five different lived-in environments, each with a distinct era. The title of the exhibit is inspired from a passage in the Bible found in John 14:2, which begins “In my Father’s house there are many mansions...” however, the context of the exhibition, while certainly spiritually evocative, is not religious but secular in focus. In keeping with the August Wilson Center for African American Culture’s mission of presenting the best of both the performing and visual arts under one roof, the five rooms of the exhibit create a dramatic vision of a single dwelling comprised of four different “houses.” In this way, we use theatrical convention to provide a deeper and more multi-dimensional context for the material selected by the exhibit’s six curators. The exhibition asks the visitor to consider the different ways of approaching the preservation of the material culture of people of African descent. It poses the question of what is important to keep for future generations? What do we hold dear? What is it that we pass on to those who come after us, and what stories do those objects tell about the people who lived or still live in these rooms? It is my hope that visitors to this exhibition are inspired to think critically about their own lives and in particular what they are preserving for future generations so that the stories of our people continue to be told house by house, room by room.
Neil Barclay Founding President and CEO August Wilson Center for African American Culture (2003-09)
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A doily, a photograph, a wooden spoon. Seemingly, these three things have nothing in common. Yet, they do. They are everyday items that have graced our homes for years. They are things that connect us to our own past, our stories and our upbringing. They are things that we’ve seen, touched and looked at a million times, but never thought much about... until now. In My Father’s House is an exhibition that focuses on the things that we use, that we collect, that we hold sacred to tell a particular aspect of what makes us—us. It is unique in that it encompasses an entire five room-house with each room created, by a renowned curator, to reflect the life and times of families, not unlike our own. Each curator has done a magnificent job in developing his or her room and creating a back story to explain why each family has the things it has, how those things were acquired and why they are so special. While the fictitious families in the exhibition are African American, the themes of home, memory, family history and collecting are universal. However, In My Father’s House is not only about the past, but about how those families, their homes and their belongings affect modern-day life. It’s also about how today’s technology has shaped how we live and interact. On behalf of the August Wilson Center Board of Directors, I would like to congratulate and thank the curators and The Center’s staff for all their hard work in bringing this exhibition to fruition in our new building. We are also grateful to our title sponsor UPMC and major supporters FedEx Ground and H.J. Heinz Company Foundation. We appreciate their continued support of the Pittsburgh region’s African American community and The Center’s mission. As you peruse the rooms of In My Father’s House, we hope your own profound memories of family, and the things that make your house a home, are stirred.
André Kimo Stone Guess President & CEO August Wilson Center for African American Culture
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Collector’s Story All photographs were reproduced with the knowledge and prior consent of the following individuals: Muriel Fox Alim Charlene Foggie Barnett Joyce E. Baucum Christine Bethea Ernest Bey Joachim Boko Aboubacar Oscar Camara Sarah Williams-Devereux Tracy Edmunds Carmen Ellington Elnora & Walter Fortson Ron Garland Robert W. Goode Roberta Goode-Wilburn & Ronald Goode Velma Griggs Mayota Hill Michelle Jones Erika Gentry Lagana Gail Manker Mary Martin Julianne McAdoo Sharon Mohale Sharon Morris Saihou Njie Denise Owens Shirley Page James Perkins Minerva Pilachowski Lorraine W. Poindexter Aisha Sani Brenda Simpson Millicent Smith Dawn Webb Turner Martha Agedew Vasser Valeria Williams Janis Burley Wilson
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The Collector of Memories This entryway installation is created to display the images of a Pittsburgh Collector of Memories. In this space, individuals will view a “gathering of images” representing a cross section of Pittsburgh’s diverse and multifaceted African American community. The photos originate from the private collections of these Pittsburgh families. They depict native Pittsburghers, as well as immigrant families, linking Pittsburgh to the African Diaspora. The entryway of family photos attests to migrations from Benin, Ethiopia, Gambia, Jamaica, New Guinea, Nigeria, South Africa and Trinidad. The aim of the Collector is to reflect her values, familiarity with, and spiritual connection between the viewer and who is being viewed. This entryway transcends a specific time period, giving each photo a unique narrative. Just as other rooms of this “house” are meant to be a reflection of various households, each portrait on display in the entryway could potentially be the image of an inhabitant of this “house.” Photography plays a significant role in capturing a genuine account of how African Americans view themselves. Each image captures a particular moment, documenting the everyday life, celebratory occasions and rare candid moments of African American families. The installation of images reflects the distinction, pride, and dignity of shared experiences. The images selected are both candid and staged photos taken from within the home (defining family life), or in a photographer’s studio (representing a more controlled environment where the individual dictates how he/she wants to be remembered). A collection of visual memories becomes a collage of images—each a distinct story interpreting the complexities of African American experiences. Mary Martin Art Instructor Winchester Thurston School
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Collector’s Story At the turn of the century, Tom and Mary Graham journeyed from Hickory, N.C. to Charleroi, Pa., which although a mere 30 miles north of the Mason-Dixon Line must have seemed like a world away. They came with their teenage daughters, Dora, Addie and Lizzie. Lizzie and Addie worked for two of the wealthy white families. Dora commuted to Greensburg where she worked for a doctor before getting a job at the Corning Glass Factory in Monessen. Large numbers of blacks worked in the iron and glass industry between 1919 and 1930. Working in Monessen, Dora met her future husband Floyd, who was half black and half Blackfoot and one of the few men of color in the American Federation of Labor. They borrowed $900 from her mother to purchase a house in the Hill District. The couple became faithful readers of the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the largest black newspapers in the country, founded by Robert L. Vann in 1910. Certainly, the masthead, “work, integrity, tact, temperance, prudence, courage, faith,” applied to them. They loved the portraits of black life captured by Courier photographer Charles “Teenie” Harris, who joined the paper full-time in 1936, after having worked there as a freelancer. They even had a family portrait taken at his studio on Centre Avenue. Their children inherited this home and passed it on to their children, who kept ownership but rented it to a cousin.
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Material Culture This installation explores a typical Pittsburgh home and how life in this house has played a key role in shaping values about family, identity, place, and community. By incorporating artifacts and personal stories in this installation of common and daily life objects, we hope to bring forth ideas found in the spirit of the plays by August Wilson. There are multiple intergenerational stories found in our installation. This room imagines the life of an extended family who lived in the house in the Hill District from 1922 to the present. Art is the successful communication of a particular human experience. In constructing these tableaux, we mean to help the viewer transcend a common viewing experience and begin to think about ways to communicate ideas about their own life. The objects in this room are used to engage the viewer in a way that a conventional exhibition of images cannot, allowing access to the viewer, by engaging the senses and providing the visitor with an idea that personal memory is a stimulus for storytelling. By using images and sound, we hope to transport the viewer in time and space in an attempt to immerse the visitor in an environment that will relate directly to their own personal experience in a meaningful way, thereby rendering this work more powerful and relevant for every single visitor. Lonnie Graham Professor of Integrative Arts and Photography The Pennsylvania State University, School of Visual Arts
Deborah Willis, Ph.D. Professor of Photography and Imaging New York University Tisch School of the Arts
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Collector’s Story He was his parents’ bright shining prince. The one who would reap the full benefit of the opportunities they traveled to Pittsburgh to find. Migrant workers in Palatka, Florida, they left there and settled in the Hill District, where their son was born in 1935. They were part of the great migration of blacks from the South to northern industrial cities full of promise. His father was a steelworker, his mother a nurse. They wanted nothing more for their son than for him to become a doctor or a lawyer. At his parents’ insistence, he attended Howard, went on to dental school and became a dentist. Then the revolution came—the Black Power Movement— he abandoned his practice and became part of it. Choosing to live as an ex-patriot led him to Jamaica for a while. There he met a fierce Jamaican woman as passionate about the struggle as he. Eventually, he returned to Pittsburgh with her. Their kitchen becomes the “situation room,” the place where he and his comrades talk revolution, plan rallies and craft speeches. It is also her domain, as she earns a living catering for local rallies. In their kitchen, books about cooking share space with books about struggle and revolution.
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African/African Diaspora Inspired by the August Wilson play Two Trains Running, this room invites the viewer to experience a sensorial dimension of African American history and culture from the Black Power era to the present. The aroma of spices from far away Mauritius beckon the taste buds to imagine a savory gumbo that fortifies the body both spiritually and culturally. An altar pays homage to the heroes and she-roes of black liberation struggles, while a jukebox plays some of their more memorable speeches and anthems. A library of significant texts nurture the minds of the gregarious activist couple that occupy this space with its focus on education, Africa and its diasporas. Prints, photographs, video, material objects and sculpture enliven every corner of the room suggesting both a tactile and a visual dimension to the narrative. The kitchen table provides a space to strengthen familial bonds while commemorating the fruition of the long-held dreams of black people. Cheryl Finley, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Art Department of History of Art and Visual Studies Cornell University
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Collector’s Story This room is inspired by the collecting habits of African American art collectors in Pittsburgh as well as around the nation. The room represents the joint collection of a father, John Johnson, and his daughter, Barbara Johnson. Born in 1910, John Johnson came of age during the Harlem Renaissance. John was the only child of relatively middle-class parents. His mother worked as a seamstress and his father in the local steel mills. John’s parents worked hard to save enough money to send their child to college and in 1929, he enrolled at Howard University, where he became the first person in his family to earn a college degree. He went on to earn a medical degree as well. John’s experience at Howard opened his eyes to a world of possibilities. He became particularly interested in art and took classes from such luminaries as Lois Mailou Jones, James V. Herring, and later, James Porter who introduced him to what was then called “Negro Art.” After John’s graduation, he moved back to Pittsburgh, married, established a thriving medical practice, and began to avidly collect art by African Americans. John made a special effort to expose his daughter Barbara to the arts. She grew up surrounded by pieces from his collection, going to art museums, meeting African American artists, and taking art history classes in college. Having come of age during the 1960s, Barbara became very interested in the Black Arts Movement and Abstraction. Following in her father’s footsteps, Barbara became a doctor. Upon her father’s death, she took over his practice and moved into the family home. Although rarely used for formal entertaining, Barbara often visits this room where she marvels at how the visual combination of her mother’s furnishings and her and her father’s art collections fill her with a sense of pride and joy related to what her father used to call the “collecting spirit.”
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African American Masters I created this room to show that the practice of celebrating and collecting art by African American artists has a long and multifaceted history in the black community. This historical tradition is best exemplified in the art collections of historically black colleges and universities, African American galleries and museums, and perhaps most importantly, in the homes of African American art enthusiasts from all walks of life. African Americans have expressed themselves within a visual construct from the time our African ancestors first set foot on American soil to the present day. Throughout our history in this country we have saved, cherished, and proudly displayed the fruits of our visual creativity in all of its manifestations, including walking canes, basketry, quilts, ceramics, furniture, textiles, drawings, paintings, and sculpture. Historically, patronage of the arts has been a pastime traditionally reserved for the most elite and wealthiest segments of American society. Within the African American community writ large, however, some of the most esteemed black art collections have been amassed by people who represent a variety of backgrounds, from the most humble to the most privileged. In most cases, African American art collectors are not particularly wealthy, but rather work to earn a living in positions such as college and university professors, postal workers, teachers, small business owners, lawyers, and government employees. The African American Masters gallery was created to explore, through their art collection, the fictional story of a father and daughter who lived and worked in Pittsburgh. Tuliza Fleming, Ph.D. Curatorial Consultant and Museum Curator Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
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Collector’s Story The family who lives here are black Westerners meaning they were educated in the West but have a global perspective and a special appreciation for their African roots. The mother and father are both professors and second-generation college-educated. Her Ph.D. dissertation was on Negritude. He has a Ph.D. in Philosophy, specifically Marxist thought. Their home is wired and their personal library contains more than 3,000 books. Their daughter, 16, wants to be an architect and is adept at using the software CAD (Computer-Aided Design). Like most boys his age, their 14-year-old son is a video game expert who attends tech camp every year to learn video game programming. Each member of the family also blogs. They consider themselves citizens of the world, equally at home in Paris or in Senegal. Their overarching family philosophy is “for those who have been given more, more is expected.�
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From Drums to Zeroes and Ones James Baldwin once said that black Americans are the only black Westerners. For me that means confronting and transforming (as compared to “transcending”) the complexities of what Toni Morrison calls the multiplicity of consciousness. As computers become more complex, they also become more and more non-linear; challenging Western concepts of what is “rational” or “logical.” Indeed, it is not lost on me as a female black Westerner that I’ve been allowed to find my voice within the medium of technology. That technology, which allows me to create in the modality of past, present and future, is only one aspect of the journey Africans took when they came to these shores and their method of communicating was through the drums. I stand, at this particular point in history, as part of the continuum of black thought and expression. As I work, I still hear in my “soul” those “drums” and I am privileged, as a black westerner living in the 21st century, to communicate in zeros and ones, the language of computer code, programming and technology. Demetria Royals Producer/Director Director’s Guild Of America
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Curators Cheryl Finley Dr. Cheryl Finley was named one of Cornell University’s “young faculty innovators” by the Office of the Vice Provost for Research in October 2009. An Assistant Professor in the History of Art Department, Dr. Finley is also an art critic, columnist and curator specializing in photography, African American art, heritage tourism and memory politics. She joined the Cornell faculty in 2004, after holding visiting positions at Wellesley (where she also was an adjunct curator of the Davis Museum and Cultural Center) and Cornell (where she held an appointment in Art History and Visual Culture at the Africana Studies Research Center). She is the author of many books, articles and essays, including Diaspora, Memory, Place: David Hammons, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Pamela Z (Prestel, 2008), a book of collected essays from the critically acclaimed exhibition 3x3: Three Artists/Three Projects, which she co-curated with Salah Hassan for the 2004 Dak’Art Biennial of Contemporary African Art in Dakar, Senegal. Dr. Finley is the co-founder with Dr. Laura Wexler of Photographic Memory Workshop at Yale University in 1998, where she also received her doctorate in the departments of African American Studies and History of Art in 2002. At Cornell, Dr. Finley teaches courses on film, African diaspora art, museum studies and contemporary art. The recipient of numerous awards and grants, her research has been supported by an Alphonse Fletcher Sr. Fellowship, the Ford Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, among others. Her forthcoming manuscripts include Committed to Memory: the Slave Ship Icon in the Black Atlantic Imagination (Princeton University Press) and a monograph on Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons (UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center/University of Minnesota Press).
Tuliza Fleming Dr. Tuliza Fleming is a Museum Curator at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), Smithsonian Institution. She received her bachelor’s from Spelman College in 1994 and her master’s and doctorate in American art history from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1997 and 2007, respectively. In her current capacity, Dr. Fleming is responsible for researching, curating and scripting museum exhibitions, locating objects for the museum’s collection by working with potential donors, creating the collections plan for the museum’s visual art collection, assisting with the acquisition of objects for the popular culture collection and contributing to the development of the Center of African American Media Arts. Most recently, Dr. Fleming was the co-curator and contributing essayist for the NMAAHC’s traveling exhibition and book titled Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing: How The Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment. Prior to joining the NMAAHC, Dr. Fleming was the Associate Curator and head of the American Art Department at The Dayton Art Institute in Dayton, Ohio. During her nearly five-year tenure there, Dr. Fleming
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curated 17 in-house and traveling exhibitions including Around the Bend: Monumental Steel Sculptures by Bret Price (2006), The Art of Louis Comfort Tiffany (2003), and Monet and the Age of American Impressionism (2003). She has also served as curator for more than 30 exhibitions and worked in and consulted for a variety of museums and cultural institutions including: The Taft Museum of Art, The Cincinnati Museum Center, The DuSable Museum of African American History, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, The National Museum of American History and the National Gallery of Art.
Lonnie Graham Lonnie Graham is a Pew Fellow and Associate Professor at The Pennsylvania State University. Prior to his current position, he worked as the Director of Photography at Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild in Pittsburgh, PA, an urban arts organization dedicated to arts and education for at-risk youth. There, Professor Graham developed innovative pilot projects merging arts and academics, which were ultimately cited by, then-First Lady Hillary Clinton as a National Model for Arts Education. In 1996, he was commissioned to create the “African/American Garden Project,” which provided a physical and cultural exchange of disadvantaged urban single mothers in Pittsburgh, and farmers from Muguga, a small farming village in Kenya, to build a series of urban subsistence gardens. In 2005, Professor Graham was named Artist of the Year in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and was presented the Governor’s Award by former Gov. Edward Rendell. Professor Graham serves as a panel member for the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, DC. He is also the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts/Pew Charitable Trust Travel Grant for travel to Ghana and is a four-time recipient of the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Fellowship. Professor Graham was also awarded the Creative Achievement Award by The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust. Professor Graham’s work includes an exhibition of photographs at Goethe Institute, Accra Ghana; a full-scale reproduction of one of the educational galleries in the Barnes Foundation shown at La Maison de Etat-Unis, Paris, France; an exhibition of larger-than-life photographs at the Toyota City Museum in Aichi, Japan as well as a room-sized installation featured at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Graham’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, MA and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in Philadelphia, PA. Professor Graham’s art, artifacts and his collection of African American art is used primarily for the room that he and Dr. Deborah Willis were co-curators for this exhibition.
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Curators (continued) Mary Martin Mary Martin is a native Pittsburgh artist and art educator. She received her bachelor’s degrees in both Architecture and Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design. Ms. Martin is currently an art instructor at the Winchester-Thurston School. She has also worked for the Senator John Heinz History Center, Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild, as well as various Pittsburgh Public Schools and other regional arts organizations. Her artwork in many media, including ceramic, collage, printmaking and glass works, has been exhibited in art galleries and cultural institutions across the country. Locally, she is Vice President of Women of Visions, Inc., a Pittsburghbased arts collective of African American women visual artists. She also is an active member of the Yan Taru Muslim Women’s Educational and Charitable organization. She is actively involved in coordinating and collaborating on educational programming, grant writing, and special project initiatives for organizations including Women of Visions, Inc., Society for Contemporary Craft, August Wilson Center for African American Culture, and the Islamic Center of Pittsburgh’s Weekend School. An advisor for the August Wilson Center’s programming committee, she has also been a curator for and consulted on various art exhibits in the region. She has served as a panelist for the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Howard Heinz Endowments Small Grants Initiative and the August Wilson Center Fellowship Program.
Demetria Royals Demetria Royals is an award-wining director, writer, producer and educator. She is an award-winning independent filmmaker, adept at designing filmmaking curriculum using digital, new media and other emerging/ cutting-edge artistic disciplines. Ms. Royals is a critical thinker, collaborator and strategic thought partner whose work has received support from the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Black Programming Consortium, the Independent Television Service and the American Film Institute, among others. Ms. Royals directed and co-edited the performance/arts documentary, “BrotherMen” broadcast nationally on PBS (2001) and currently distributed by WQED Video. Ms. Royals was a 1999 artist-in-residence at the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue at Harvard University. She received an additional residency award, “Artist as Catalyst 2000,” from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, as well as grants from the Rockefeller Foundation Multi-Arts Production Fund and the National Endowment for the Arts Multidisciplinary Arts Program, to direct a collaborative adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage.” Ms. Royals is the recipient of a fellowship from the Writers Guild of America as well as a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in video and a writing development grant from The Funding Exchange Women’s Project Scriptwriting Development Fund for her first dramatic feature.
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A member in the Directors Guild of America, Ms. Royals earned her master’s in fine arts from New York University’s Graduate Institute of Film and Television and a bachelor’s in journalism and philosophy also from New York University. She was a research fellow at the Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University as well as Professor of media arts production at Ramapo College of New Jersey for 10 years. From 2001 to 2008, she served as a professor and director of the film program at Sarah Lawrence College. She left that post to go full-time into production of a documentary on the New York foster care system, titled “Quis custodiet ipsos custodies, Who Watches the Watchers.”
Deborah Willis Listed among the “100 Most Important People in Photography” by American Photography Magazine, Dr. Deborah Willis is Chair and Professor of Photography and Imaging at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, where she also has an affiliated appointment with the College of Arts and Sciences, Africana Studies. A 2005 Guggenheim and Fletcher Fellow, a 2000 MacArthur Fellow, 1996 recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation Award and an exhibiting artist, she is one of the nation’s leading historians of African American photography and curator of African American culture. Some of her notable projects include Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers—1840 to the Present, A Small Nation of People: W.E.B. DuBois and African American Portraits of Progress, The Black Female Body in Photography, and Let Your Motto be Resistance. Her most recent works are Posing Beauty—African American Images from the 1890s to the Present, Michelle Obama, The First Lady in Photographs and Black Venus 2010: They Called Her “Hottentot” (editor). Michelle Obama, The First Lady in Photographs garnered Dr. Willis the 2010 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work—Biography/Autobiography, and she is the 2010 recipient of The Society of Photographic Education’s National Conference’s Honored Educator Award.
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Featured Artists Romare Bearden (1911–1988) One of the most prolific and highly-acclaimed artists of his generation, Romare Bearden was born in North Carolina, but lived in Pittsburgh, Harlem and the Caribbean Island of St. Maarten, and used those experiences as well as music, literature and history to inspire his work. His piece, The Piano Lesson, included in this exhibition, was the inspiration for the August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name. Also included in this exhibit, the well-known piece Pittsburgh Memories, loaned by the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Bearden, who earned a degree in education from New York University, studied at the Art Student League in New York and at The Sarbonne in Paris. His work, which has been exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, is part of many public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Studio Museum of Harlem and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Frank Bowling (1936– ) Internationally recognized and one of Britain’s most distinguished artists, Frank Bowling was elected as a member of the Royal Academy of Art in 2005, the first Black British artist to hold such a position in that institution’s 200-year history. Born in Guyana, South America, he moved to England as a teenager and graduated from the Royal College of Art in London in 1962, along with famed British pop movement artists David Hockney, Derek Bossier and Peter Phillips. He moved to New York in 1966 and five years later won a place in the 1971 Whitney Biennial. He has been a lecturer and teacher at in the U.S. and in England, including Rutgers University, the School of Visual Arts in New York and the Maidstone College of Art in Kent and the Byham Shaw in London. His works are part of the permanent collections at the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum in the U.S. and the Tate Gallery, Lloyds of London and the V & A Museum in the UK.
Herbert Gentry (1919–2003) A world renowned artist, Herbert Gentry’s work was deeply influenced by his life experience as a world traveler and by the writers, artists, musicians and great minds he met along the way—including Duke Ellington, Richard Wright, Jean-Paul Sartre, Romare Bearden, Beauford Delaney and Larry Rivers among others. Born in Pittsburgh, he was raised in Harlem during its cultural heyday. As a soldier during World War II, he traveled to Europe and returned to Paris to study art in 1946 at Academie de le Grande Chaumiere. Later, he exhibited and worked in Copenhagen and eventually moved to Stockholm, Sweden, but always kept a place in Paris. He returned to New York City in 1969 establishing a residence in the famed Chelsea Hotel, but continuing to paint and exhibit both here and across the Atlantic.
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Norman W. Lewis (1909–1979) Norman Lewis was an award-winning abstract expressionist artist, scholar and teacher. Born in Harlem, he became a member of the 306 Group, a group of artists that included Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Ralph Ellison and Charles Alston. In 1955, one of his best known works, Migrating Birds, won the Popular Prize at the Carnegie Museum’s Carnegie International. Among his many awards, Lewis received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a grant from the Mark Rothko Foundation.
Chris Ofili (1968– ) Perhaps best known for the use of dried elephant dung and the controversy it caused at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999, Chris Ofili, challenges a myriad of cultural stereotypes in his work. Born in Manchester, England, he references his Nigerian roots as well as hip hop and blaxploitation films in pieces that also include layers of paint, resin, glitter and the aforementioned dung. His painting, Holy Virgin Mary, sparked outrage from some including New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, because it portrayed a black Virgin Mary surrounded by images of blaxploitation films, female genitalia and elephant dung. Giuliani ended up filing a lawsuit against the museum. Ofili, a winner of the Tate Gallery’s Turner Prize in 1998, has had his work exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas; the St. Petersburg Russian Museum; Carnegie Museum of Art and the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
Hank Willis Thomas (1976– ) A photo conceptual artist, Hank Willis Thomas works primarily with themes related to identity, history and popular culture. He received his bachelor’s of fine arts from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and his master’s degrees in photography and visual criticism from California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. Thomas has acted as a visiting professor at CCA, Maryland Institute College of Art and ICP/Bard and has lectured at Yale University, Princeton University, the Birmingham Museum of Art and the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. His work has been featured in many publications including Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present, 25 under 25: Up-and-Coming American Photographers and 30 Americans. His monograph, Pitch Blackness, was published by Aperture in 2008. He received a new media fellowship through the Tribeca Film Institute and was an artist in residence at Johns Hopkins University. He has exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the U.S. and abroad including Galerie Anne De Villepoix, Paris; the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Harvey B. Gantt Center, in Charlotte; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford.
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Acknowledgments Art & Artifact Loan Acknowledgments Sharif Bey, Ph.D. Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, Temple University Libraries Carnegie Museum of Art Carnegie Museum of Art Charles “Teenie” Harris Archives Charles “Teenie” Harris, Jr. Dr. Judith & Ronald R. Davenport Dorothy Davis Donnie Day Pomeroy Jamela Donaldson Dr. and Mrs. Walter O. Evans & Savannah College of Art and Design Cheryl Finley, Ph.D. Phyllis Galembo Lonnie Graham Ada Gay Griffin
Karen Hanchett Sharon Howard Levin Furniture G. & C. N’Namdi Erin O’Neill Rugs America Jack Shainman Gallery Cecile Springer Bill Strickland Diane Turner Lewis Tanner Moore Dr. Nancy Washington & Milton A. Washington Carrie Mae Weems Deborah Willis Ph.D. Pamela Z.
August Wilson Center for African American Culture Neil A. Barclay, Founding President & CEO Joyce E. Baucum, Exhibitions Associate Carmen Ellington, Manager of Executive Affairs Ada Gay Griffin, Director of Annual Giving Ryan Holandes, Exhibitions Associate (2007–09) T Keaton-Woods, Program Manager (2008–09) Shaunda Miles, Director of Programming & Cultivation Erin O’Neill, Exhibitions Manager & Registrar Pam Quatchak, Director of Marketing & Communications (2006–10) Treshea N. Wade, Manager, Marketing & Communications Shay Wafer, Vice President of Programs (2007–10)
Curators Cheryl Finley, Ph.D., Curator Tuliza Fleming Ph.D., Curator Lonnie Graham, Curator Mary Martin, Curator & Local Resource Consultant Demetria Royals, Curator/Artist Deborah Wills, Ph.D., Curator Donnie Day Pomeroy, Curatorial Assistant
Exhibition Design & Fabrication Springboard/COLAB Joint Venture Paul Rosenblatt, Design Principal, Springboard Felecia Davis, Exhibit Development Principal, COLAB Carpenter Connection Brie Daigle, Transport Consulting International
Support UPMC H.J. Heinz Company Foundation Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission Allegheny Regional Asset District Pittsburgh Foundation “From Drums to Zeros and Ones” supported by FedEx Ground photography: Lonnie Graham publications consultant: Monica Haynes © 2011, August Wilson Center for African American Culture
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