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Silhouettes are distinctive and easily recognized among loyal fans for their artistic themes, including bee and butterfly motifs that are evocative of old Italian wax seals, vintage-influenced coins and crosses. Collections are inspired by her fine arts education, travels throughout Europe, and elements of nature and architecture. All Susan Shaw jewelry is handmade in the U.S.

INITIALLY, THE PAINTINGS THAT I CREATED WERE BASED SOLELY ON STOCK IMAGES OF CELEBRITIES THAT I FOUND ON THE INTERNET. AS I GREW AS AN ARTIST, SO DID MY DESIRE TO BECOME MORE CREATIVE, AND SO I BEGAN PHOTOGRAPHING MEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN THAT I KNOW. OVER THE PAST TWO YEARS, MY PAINTINGS BEGAN TO EVOLVE AND FOCUS MORE ON THE BLACK EXPERIENCE AS I KNOW IT THROUGH MY LIFE, WHICH IS OBVIOUSLY PROJECTED ONTO EACH NEW WORK. MY ART IS MY TRUTH AND MY VOICE. IT REFLECTS A SOFTER SIDE OF BLACK PEOPLE OFTEN NOT PORTRAYED IN THE MEDIA, AND YET IT STILL FINDS A WAY TO SHOW OUR STRENGTH AND RESILIENCE, SOMETHING THAT I WANT TO SEE MORE OF IN GALLERIES AND MUSEUMS.

ARTIST ROBERT PETERSON

EXPANDING THE STORIES WE TELL New Acquisitions by Robert Peterson & Sharif Bey

The Wichita Art Museum continually collects new artwork to expand the stories we tell in our galleries and the histories we preserve for future generations. With 2023 already emerging as an extraordinary year for additions to the collection, WAM is thrilled to announce the acquisition of Sunday Kind of Love by Robert Peterson and Nestle III by Sharif Bey.

Monumental in scale at nearly five feet by 10 feet, Sunday Kind of Love features an entwined couple lounging on their bed, enjoying a moment of relaxation and connection. Although friends posed for the painting, the couple references artist Robert Peterson, his wife Marina, and their life together. After long days working and parenting, they reconnect by curling up together and listening to each other’s heartbeats. Contemporary artist Peterson— who lives only a few hours away in Lawton, Oklahoma—uses his art to celebrate African American experiences, especially the joy found in family, friends, and relationships. Astoundingly, he comes by his ability through talent, passion, hard work, and drive—a self-taught artist who did not attend art school, he picked up a paintbrush for the first time in 2012. His work has been widely exhibited regionally and nationally during the last 10 years.

Peterson shares that his paintings celebrate the “Black experience as I know it” to show the “softer side of Black people often not portrayed in the media,” such as moments of joy, relaxation, playfulness, and intimacy. In 2022, the United States Postal Service commissioned Peterson to paint author Ernest J. Gaines for the Postal Service’s long-running Black Heritage series. This prestigious honor underscores Peterson’s rising star, and memorializing both the acclaimed Black author and Peterson’s art on a Forever stamp is fitting given Peterson’s goal for his subjects to “live forever through my work.”

In the few weeks Sunday Kind of Love has been on view at WAM, our visitors have stood transfixed by what Peterson calls his “spontaneous realism.” The artist renders the human body, glowing flesh tones, and the textures of hair and fabric so precisely and skillfully that his paintings seem threedimensional. Perhaps even more striking is his ability to convey a whole world and story in a single face or pose with just a few details. Indeed, each figure in a painting is imbued by the artist with love and care.

Peterson typically bases his paintings on photographs he or a photographer he commissions has taken of family or friends. Before he photographed men, women, and children he knows—recreating the images in large scale on canvas—he worked from photos of celebrities, such as Muhammad Ali and President and Mrs. Obama. He shoots his models in black-and-white, and the artist selects a few frames to use as reference photos. Studying his models in grayscale leaves Peterson more space for painting his models in his own way, playing up the dimensionality of Black skin tones under studio light. His distinctive style— in which glints of reflected light on his subjects’ collarbones, noses, and shoulders are colorful and iridescent, like the sheen of a pearl—renders skin like a precious material.

Peterson also emphasizes his models’ tattoos, clothing, and hairstyles—often setting off mens’ durags, for example—to insert contemporary Black American culture into the history of portraiture. By responding to centuries of traditions for depicting distinguished people in European and American portraits, Peterson honors Black individuality today—emphasizing tenderness, confidence, and self-expression in his community at large rather than the wealth and power of a precious few.

THE SCULPTURE Nestle III is another important acquisition for the permanent collection, layered with complex ideas about power, history, and the Black experience. At nearly three feet by three feet, Nestle III is a dramatically oversized necklace made from glowing gold and purple glass beads, each slightly curved and resembling teeth, claws, or feathers. The glass beads reference objects that have intrigued artist Sharif Bey throughout his career: bones, fossils, rock and plant forms, and archaeological finds from Oceania and Africa. Nestle III also responds to the importance of beads and adornment in African cultures— Bey’s series of sculptural necklaces was inspired by a photograph of a Berber girl in North Africa wearing heavy amber necklaces, which the artist notes “didn’t look comfortable,” and are worn not just for their beauty but because they instill their wearer with power.

As in all of Bey’s artwork, Nestle III brims with other references, including the importance of beads to enslaved people in the American South who may have bartered with them and contemporary urban “bling.” Throughout his career, the artist has been fascinated by objects that are functional— like beaded jewelry or pots—that become more than functional. They transcend their use to symbolize power, community, opulence, individuality, and other values.

As both an artist and professor at Syracuse University, Bey combines his intellectual curiosity, scholarly research, and love of physically making art to create work that is not simply beautiful but layered with history, cultural critique, and knowledge of biology and geology. These lifelong interests go back to Bey’s childhood in Pittsburgh wandering the halls of the Carnegie Museum of Art and Carnegie Museum of Natural History, where he was inspired by Kongo sculptures from Central Africa, as well as his first exposure to ceramics as a teenager. Bey often reminisces about his “antiimperialist” upbringing and parents who raised him and his 11 brothers and sisters and taught them to question everything, particularly media narratives

Bey works mostly in ceramics but also in glass and other media. The foundation of his art is the pinch pot—one of the oldest pottery making methods, and one that is alive and well today in children’s art classrooms, where potters press clay between their fingers and thumbs, spreading the clay thinner as it forms into a rounded hollow shape. Bey originally made the bead shapes that look like bird skulls, tusks, and bones in clay before turning to glass, like he did for Nestle III. He compares the many, many beads that he makes—which eventually become the building blocks of a finished work—to the individual letters that make up a much larger thought. “The metaphor that I use [is]...letters becoming words and words becoming sentences, becoming paragraphs… One of these beads might serve as a letter in a much bigger conversation.”

Pinch pots and beads are just two examples of ancient customs that show up in contemporary culture and fascinate Bey:

“THERE SHOULD BE A HUMILITY THAT COMES OUT OF THE AWESOMENESS OF THAT WHICH IS ALREADY HERE AND THAT WAS HERE LONG BEFORE US.

He admires beautifully formed elements of the natural world, too—like dinosaur bones and brilliantly colored birds. “Sometimes we have these fragments of history, and those of us artists who are inspired by…the mystery of these objects have to kind of fill in the blanks,” he explains. Bey associates the idea of craft—making utilitarian objects in materials like glass, wood, metal, ceramic, and fiber—with quiet, listening, and humility. In academic contexts, craft traditions are sometimes considered less sophisticated, intellectual, or impressive than so-called fine art practices such as oil painting and bronze sculpture. Bey embraces that quiet quality of his art to encourage viewers to slow down—“listening a little harder, focusing a little more… think[ing] differently about how time passes.”