Barbara Bullock Fearless Vision

Barbara Bullock

Fearless Vision

WoodmereArtMuseum

Fearless Vision Barbara Bullock

CONTENTS

Foreword 4 by William

R. Valerio

A Conversation with Lowery Stokes Sims, Leslie King Hammond, William R. Valerio, and Barbara Bullock 12

A Conversation about Art, Community, and Teaching with Barbara Bullock, Diane Pieri, and Hildy Tow 46

Where People Grow, Like Flowers: The Jasmine Gardens of Barbara Bullock 76 by Tess Wei

The Inspiration of Barbara Bullock 84 by Elbrite Brown

Selected

88 Works

102

Water Spirit for Yemaja, 1997

(Collection of Lewis Tanner Moore)

Support for Barbara Bullock: Fearless Vision is provided by The Edna Wright Andrade Fund of the Philadelphia Foundation, the William M. King Charitable Foundation, Robert and Frances Kohler, the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art, the Dorothy J. del Bueno Endowed Exhibition Fund at Woodmere, the Nixon Family on the behalf of James V. Nixon, Jr., and other generous contributors, including those who wish to remain anonymous. Woodmere thanks the Lomax family and WURD, who are the exhibition’s media partners.

DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD

One of the privileges that comes with being on the staff at Woodmere, a museum dedicated to the arts of Philadelphia, is to constantly work with the artists of our community. We have built many longterm relationships with artists, but are especially grateful for the bond we share with Barbara Bullock. Together, we have organized exhibitions, presented public programs and lectures, made podcast episodes and videos, and offered hands-on art projects to museum visitors and schoolchildren alike. Bullock is rightly revered in Philadelphia as a queen in the art world, and like so many others, we bow to her gentle directness and diva-like strength. Our show’s title, Barbara Bullock: Fearless Vision, comes from a conversation, transcribed in this catalogue, between Bullock and distinguished scholars and curators Leslie King Hammond and Lowery Stokes Sims, who are similarly humbled by the power of the artist’s work.

Bullock’s art is unique for its many distinctive qualities. An artist who cannot be confined by the four edges of a rectangular tableau, Bullock makes dynamic wall sculptures in cut, folded, twisted, curled, and gesturally painted paper that navigate an ever-shifting conversation between figuration and abstraction, painting and sculpture. Her unique approach to color is integrated into her collage-based process: elements with bright, primary hues are juxtaposed and made to glow against deep, dark blacks, or fiery yellows and oranges. At the same time, gestural applications of flowing color create nuanced, even rainbowlike color mixing. Complex patterns, sinuous lines, and intricate shapes seem woven into two- and three-dimensional works as if they are expansive

fabrics. The distinctive iconography and stylistic inspiration of Bullock’s travels across Africa stand out; she often describes to me that to visit Ethiopia is a different experience entirely than to visit Nigeria. Her encounters with cultures and people across the African continent has shaped her approach to depicting the human figure and its movement, dancing, carrying of weight, healing, and love making. The work is also nourished by African dance as practiced in Philadelphia, and Bullock’s defining relationship with dancer Arthur Hall. Similarly important was her friendship and admiration for the work of her peers, including Twins Seven Seven, Charles Searles, Ellen Powell Tiberino, Moe Brooker, Martha Jackson Jarvis, and many others. A main point of our exhibition is that Bullock’s work is entirely satisfying and incomparable in its fearless beauty and directness of vision. It also conveys an embrace of African inspiration that not only compels, but also expresses a firm knowledge of an unbroken African lineage that persists across time despite the history of slavery and discrimination.

An aspect of Bullock’s studio practice going back to the 1960s and central to the thesis of our exhibition is that she has always embraced art as a force of active social agency in shaping people’s lives. The artist rejects the notion of paintings and sculptures as objects of passive contemplation. Instead, like the art she encountered firsthand in Africa, or the works she came to know in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (now the Penn Museum), Bullock makes objects that are active and dynamic, literally reaching out to viewers, leaping off walls. Her work sometimes performs

functions in classrooms and community spaces, having been designed to show the process behind a hands-on project. These are mirrors, theaters, houses, puppets, figurative forms, gameboards and game pieces, boxes for secret letters, containers for messages, pop-up books, and more. As demonstrated in the archive of lesson plans Bullock has graciously entrusted to Woodmere, there is a professional educator’s sense of project design and intentionality when it comes to inputs and outcomes. All of this encourages dialogues that are as social as they are personal. I have counted more than two hundred distinct residencies, workshops, community projects, and teaching jobs on Bullock’s CV, and it is not hard to see that this rich history

of making art with others, especially children, cross-inspires to the vocabulary of her studio work. Standing together in front of her wonderful Water Bearers, she described the pure joy of depicting the sun as children so often do: a big yellow circle with rays like the petals of a sunflower. Subjects invented for projects with children with characters like cats, snakes, and spiders also find their way into works made for galleries, collectors’ homes, and museums. Bullock has sometimes incorporated specific parts of objects, or complete works made for the classroom, in her studio work if doing so has proven an expedient way to move a project along. I know many artists who have worked as teachers and make a real difference in their students’ lives.

BARBARA BULLOCK: FEARLESS VISION 5

The Origin of Regina, 2022 (Collection of the artist)

Bullock does that and more by creating a unique flow of energy that fortifies her own practice and everyone else who is touched in the process. Bullock has brought creativity and the vitality of world cultures into the lives of generations of people across our region, many of whom might not have had access to the arts. While doing this, she has also built a body of work in the studio that expresses deep emotions, curiosity, joy, and pride in Blackness.

Finally, for an artist whose primary medium is paper, it is surprising that Bullock’s drawings have received little attention. And so, as encouraged by our mutual friend Lewis Tanner Moore, a unique

contribution of our exhibition is the inclusion of numerous drawings. Some of these works document the encounters of a world traveler, while others are diagrams for classroom projects. A large portion of Bullock’s drawings are figurative subjects like dancers in motion and lovers intertwined, usually rendered in gestural lines of ink, pencil, and watercolor. It is thrilling to show Bullock’s monumental Black Panther, a central element in her large Bitches Brew installation of 2014, and even more exciting to show it together with the many related drawings of panthers and leopards that bridge the journey from study and observation to imagination and expression.

Water Bearers, 1996, from the series Journey (Collection of Lewis Tanner Moore)

Barbara Bullock: Fearless Vision is truly a labor of love for everyone at Woodmere, and we are grateful to the generous donors who have made our exhibition and this catalogue possible. Rob Kohler and his late wife Frances Kohler have been instrumental in helping us build a strong representation of Bullock’s work in our collection. Rob is also a generous funder of the exhibition. With the leadership of Jim Petrucci and Claudia Volpe at the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art, that organization has become a true partner to Woodmere in this exhibition, and in other projects grounded in a shared commitment to exploring the work of African American artists.

The Edna Wright Andrade Fund of the Philadelphia Foundation stepped in with generous support in the spirit of its founder, Edna Andrade. Like Bullock, Andrade was one of the great artists of our city. We are equally grateful to Theresa and Lamont King as well as Mira Zergani at the William M. King Charitable Foundation, whose support is particularly important as we build audience and engage our visitors with public programs, lectures, and music events that are so much a part of Bullock’s work. We thank our wonderful, late trustee Dorothy J. Del Bueno for creating the Dorothy J. del Bueno Endowed Exhibition Fund at Woodmere, which provides invaluable support we

BARBARA BULLOCK: FEARLESS VISION

Panther study, 2014, from the series Bitches Brew (Collection of the artist)

count on for exhibitions, year in and year out. I recall that Bullock’s work initially stretched Dorothy’s understanding of contemporary art, but she soon became an ardent champion of the artist. People grow through art, as did Dorothy. The Lomax family and WURD are media partners for the exhibition, and we are deeply grateful for the collaborative spirit and shared understanding of Bullock’s

importance and the priority to engage community, both locally and nationally. And finally, it means a great deal that Jennifer Nixon and the Nixon family have not only made a financial contribution, but also made the gift of an important work of art, Bitches Brew (2014), in honor of Bullock and on the behalf of our late friend James V. Nixon, Jr. Jim was a visionary collector and will always be an angel in

Leopard study, 1990s (Collection of the artist)

Leopard study, 1990s (Collection of the artist)

the Woodmere universe. He became like a son—an advisor and often personal driver—to the artist, and we are thrilled to celebrate their special friendship.

Judy Heggestad and Lewis Tanner Moore have been friends to Woodmere in so many ways, and, in addition to lending generously to the show, they are long-term advocates for Bullock’s unique importance in American art. We are also grateful to Elaine Finkelstein, who has once again been generous in honoring our request to borrow her exceptional Healer (1994) for the show. We are thrilled to know that it is a promised gift to the Museum’s collection. Woodmere’s friends and longtime collaborative partners Klare Scarborough and Andrea Packard each helped us in many ways. Everything about Woodmere’s exhibition builds on their excellent exhibitions and catalogues: Klare’s Barbara Bullock: Chasing After Spirits at the La Salle University Art Museum in 2016 and Andrea’s Ubiquitous Presence: Selected Works by Barbara Bullock at the List Gallery at Swarthmore College in 2022.

Thanks also to Leslie King Hammond, Lowery Stokes Sims, and Diane Pieri, our thought partners

and participants in the conversations with Bullock that are transcribed in this catalogue. Tess Wei, whose work at the List Gallery at Swarthmore College we admire, became a special partner in helping us organize our show. Woodmere’s staff has shined bright as always, and I must recognize the Deputy Director of Exhibitions Rick Ortwein, Associate Curator Rachel Hruszkewycz, and Registrar Laura Heemer for conceiving, planning, and implementing the show. With our purpose being so grounded in education, special appreciation goes to Hildy Tow, the Robert L. McNeil Jr. Curator of Education. More than any other staff member, she gave shape to all aspects of the presentation. And finally, Woodmere is indebted to Barbara Bullock herself. This exhibition could not have happened without her direct participation, and every step in the journey has been beautiful and revelatory. Woodmere is honored, and as director I extend the museum’s sincere gratitude.

WILLIAM R. VALERIO, PHD

The Patricia Van Burgh Allison Director and Chief Executive Officer

Leopard study, 1990s (Collection of the artist)

A Conversation with Barbara Bullock, Lowery Stokes Sims, and Leslie King Hammond

A CONVERSATION WITH BARBARA BULLOCK, LOWERY STOKES SIMS, AND LESLIE KING HAMMOND

On May 12, 2023, Woodmere Director William Valerio and independent art historians and curators Lowery Stokes Sims and Leslie King Hammond joined Barbara Bullock in her studio to discuss her work.

WILLIAM VALERIO: Barbara, I’m honored to be here today in your studio, with Lowery Stokes Sims and Leslie King Hammond and excited about the exhibition of your work coming up at Woodmere. This will be a career-spanning show that focuses on the crossover between your work in the studio and your work in the community. You’ve been a socially active artist your entire career, bringing art into classrooms and community centers, and you’re the first I know to have brought art into prisons. In the 1970s, you were the founding director of the art program at the Ile Ife Black Humanitarian Center and in the 1980s, you became the leader of the Germantown Workshop of Prints in Progress. I’m grateful to you, Leslie and Lowery, for being here today to talk with Barbara about her history, which needs to be shared.

LOWERY STOKES SIMS: Bill, that’s a wonderful introduction to what I believe is going to be a really critical conversation. Barbara, this show is going to cover six decades, so I’d like to start by understanding your formative period. What was your life like growing up?

BARBARA BULLOCK: I was born in North Philadelphia. I lived with my mother, my brother, Jack, and my sister, Delores at 1908 North Newkirk Street. It was a great community. I still think about it and I dream about it, although the house that I

lived in is gone. I went to Blaine Elementary School. I always felt like I was creative. I was constantly looking at people, trying to understand them and who they were.

I don’t really talk about elementary school, to be honest with you. I just couldn’t stay in school. I knew that I was different—I had this sort of excitement about life. I felt like I was the only one in the school that had that kind of excitement. One time, in second or third grade, we were all in the auditorium, watching Little Red Riding Hood. I got extremely excited and I jumped up on the seat. So I was told to leave the auditorium. That happened a lot. I just always felt that you were supposed to express yourself.

There were other things that happened. I had a friend in elementary school. He had little red freckles all over and we would play in the schoolyard constantly.

I was a ballet dancer, he was—I forget what, some kind of cowboy or something. One day after school, his father came up to me and said, Barbara, I’m taking you and my son to get an ice cream cone. He buys the ice cream cone and he hands one to his son, and then I noticed mine was melting in his hand. He was like, listen, if you promise not to play with my son, you can have this ice cream.

So I looked at the ice cream cone. I was like, look, I’ll take the ice cream cone because I knew we were going to be playing together anyway. [LAUGHS]

BARBARA BULLOCK: FEARLESS VISION 13

Healing Feeling, 1998 (Woodmere Art Museum: Museum purchase with funds generously provided by Frances and Robert Kohler, 2020)

14 WOODMERE ART MUSEUM

Trayvon Martin, Most Precious Blood, 2013–14 (Woodmere Art Museum: Museum purchase, 2014)

VALERIO: This father didn’t matter.

BULLOCK: Things like that you realize in life. Being a child, things like that constantly happen. People say things to you. I spent a lot of my childhood during the summer in the South with my grandmother and grandfather.

LESLIE KING HAMMOND: What part of the South?

BULLOCK: In North Carolina, and in Norfolk, Virginia. My grandfather was a freed man. His father was a slave. He worked in the mines. There was a mine cave-in, and he had a brain injury. He would tell me things he saw. I would see them too. We would see birds in the sky and I would say what color they were. My grandmother told me that she had lost a child—she had, I think, eleven children— and she said, without a doubt, I was the child that she lost.

KING HAMMOND: Coming back?

BULLOCK: Right, coming back. Her oldest daughter believed it too. I felt like it could explain some things, because I had this thing about looking at people constantly and just seeing different things. I loved to write—I wasn’t actually writing, I was scribbling, but I felt like it was beautiful. When I was in the third grade, the teacher would come around and she would put these little gold stars on everybody’s homework. She would usually just look at me and . . . [LAUGHS]

One day, she put a star on my paper. I knew I was in trouble. But she had this tutor and the tutor came and took me out of class. She said, I’m going to teach you how to write and how to read. I was like, no, I’m not going to read. This is the way I like to

write. But within the week, I started writing for her. I said, if that’s what you wanted, you should have said so. So I had always just this thing about being different and knowing it.

KING HAMMOND: That was the time of the Great Migration—lots of Black families moved from the South to the North, coming from rural areas to northern urban areas. In your elementary school, how many Black students were there? Were you an “only” or a “first?”

BULLOCK: No, there was a mixture.

KING HAMMOND: Did you have a lot of interaction with other students?

BULLOCK: Definitely. But I think the other thing was you realized that you were poor. There were a lot of things you couldn’t do, you couldn’t afford. Every year at school there was a festival with rides and candy. We didn’t have much money so I would go to the festival and look on the ground for lost tickets. That’s how I got on the rides. There was a public housing project across the street, and Ridge Avenue was very close. But the community was so different from the way things are now. We had a dog named Icky. He slept in the street, and the cars drove around him. He would have been a pancake today. When there was a funeral, which was always held in the family’s home, we as children would go and knock on the door and tell everybody we were so sorry.

VALERIO: Barbara, you attended the Most Precious Blood Roman Catholic Church, is that right? I know that’s figured in the title of one of your works, Trayvon Martin, Most Precious Blood. The church was unfortunately demolished recently.

BULLOCK: Yes. We went to Catholic school in the summer. I was really afraid of the nuns. The nuns didn’t like me either. [LAUGHS] But one Easter, we were all searching for Easter eggs. Everybody’s out there, you have your little black patent leather shoes and your black patent leather pocketbook. I found an egg. The nun came to me and said, so Barbara, how many eggs do you have? I had a little mirror in my pocketbook, so it made it look like I had two eggs. I said two. She says, you’re getting one. So she took the egg out. [LAUGHS]

KING HAMMOND: What were the nuns like? Aside from the egg incident.

BULLOCK: They were very strict. At that time, they could hit you with a ruler.

KING HAMMOND: How many times did you get hit?

BULLOCK: Oh, so many times. [LAUGHS] I don’t have a very clear memory of that time. But I remember the name of the church. Years later, I fell in love with the names of churches. Most Precious Blood—I thought of that name when all the brothers were being shot in the street. It happened in front of me a couple of times. I remember the mothers and thinking, God, that’s their most precious blood.

STOKES SIMS: You have a brother and sister also?

BULLOCK: Yes. My brother was always a mystery to me. He was nomadic and I loved and admired him. He passed away in the pandemic. My sister wanted to be an actress and she wrote stories and has a wonderful singing voice.

KING HAMMOND: With all the scribblings in school and being slightly rebellious and different, when did you get a sense that you were an artist?

The Whirling Dance, 1985, from the series Chasing After Spirits (Courtesy of the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art)

like in the Black communities, where you had painting and drawing. So I was always being creative.

I also wanted to be a dancer. I hadn’t seen African dancing yet and at first I wanted to be a ballet dancer. Two weeks after taking my first class, I bought a pair of toe slippers. I put them on and tried to stand up, and that was the end of that. No way. No, we’re not doing this. [LAUGHS]

STOKES SIMS: Did you see any ballets when you were a kid?

BULLOCK: Yes, we did. We saw a lot of dance.

KING HAMMOND: Did you get to go to the theater?

BULLOCK: As a child, you’re always drawing, you’re always creative. I remember one time when I was about eight years old, I had made a school out of paper and little paper cutouts of children, teachers, and desks. Because I was having a hard time in school, I made up stories. In one, I was the favorite student in the school and the paper teachers would come and get me to teach the other children.

KING HAMMOND: It was probably the first time you recognized the power of a creative act. Even though your teachers were dismissive, you held on to the fact that you were a maker.

BULLOCK: In the school system back then, art was part of the curriculum. They had clubs after school, so you were always doing art. Then we had centers,

BULLOCK: Not the theater, but it was dance that made the difference in my life as I got older. The first very serious dancer I knew was Arthur Hall and the Afro-American Dance Ensemble in North Philadelphia. That would have been in the early 1960s. We had [Babatunde] Olatunji, we had Ossie Davis and his wife Ruby Dee. We had jazz musicians. We had photography and printmaking. Everyone came through. It was like a mecca.

I led the art department at Ile Ife, the studio and school Hall founded. We had an excellent group of artists. We had Charles Searles and Winnie Owens. Winnie was a very strong person. She said if anyone called clay “mud” that she was going to punch them. [LAUGHS]

She worked there for a while and then she went to Howard University. And then Martha Jackson Jarvis came. She would sit down on the ground and talk to children about what they were doing. She was the kind of person that worked naturally with children. The way she worked with the children was just amazing. All of our students were Black

Bullock teaching at the Ile Ife Black Humanitarian Center, c. 1972. Courtesy of Barbara Bullock.

children. We would have them draw their parents’ faces. Some of them would draw this outline and they would draw blonde hair, and it was like, OK, everybody just stop for a minute. What does your mother really look like? I want you to look at her hair, and you’re going to draw so that when we see this portrait, we’re going to know her when we see her. And so they did. They started using black, brown, and beige colors, and they did the hair. Charles and I were constantly painting and drawing and showing them.

STOKES SIMS: So where did you go to art school?

BULLOCK: I went to Hussian School of Art, which was basically a commercial school. That was the school I could afford to go to, because I was always working. I would have two and three jobs and then I would go to school at night.

KING HAMMOND: Black women artists of your age found that when they sought to become an artist, their families would ask, how are you going to support yourself? Many were able to earn degrees in education or commercial art. Was that your idea to have a job and keep your mother happy, or did you really like commercial art?

BULLOCK: Really, I didn’t think that way. Hussian School of Art was a school that I could afford to go to. I realized while I was there that pretty much everybody else was on the GI Bill, but I wasn’t. When they asked us to sketch Michelangelo’s David statue, I made him African American.

VALERIO: Now that’s something we need for the show!

BULLOCK: It’s long gone, but it was during this time that I met John Simpson and Richard Watson. I was on my way home from Hussian School of Art,

and I was walking toward the subway and City Hall, and here come these guys. John loved women, and so he came up to me and he was like, you know, I’ve been watching you and I would like to draw you. I was like, I’m an artist myself. He said, well, we’re on our way to the studio and we want you to come with us. I was like, sure. After that day, we were always together. I was so fortunate to meet them. We would have these conversations, from 10:00 at night to 3:00 in the morning about being Black artists. They had all graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and they

Lizard Spirit, 1997, from the series Child in the Land of the Spirits (Woodmere Art Museum: Museum purchase with funding generously provided by Robert and Frances Kohler, 2023)

were constantly talking about how it was so great, what they had learned, but now they had to find themselves.

We talked about whether we wanted to be known as Black artists or just as artists. We talked about our struggle and were constantly in conversation. At that time, it was so urgent—because we couldn’t exhibit anywhere.

KING HAMMOND: This was the 1960s, right?

BULLOCK: Yes. We found some recreation centers, and there were people in New York who opened

their homes for our shows. Every month, we would try to have exhibitions. That was also when we had the National Conference of Artists—we had many people who would come into the group, like younger artists. I felt like these were the people I understood, when I would look at their work and how strong it was. They constantly talked to me about trying to get into another art school. They said, we want you. We’re going to teach you. We’re going to tutor you. We just want you to be yourself and just never, ever do anything that someone asks you to do. I was happy to do that.

BARBARA BULLOCK: FEARLESS VISION 19

Untitled (Ethiopia), 1998 (Collection of the artist)

KING HAMMOND: You were blessed. That was a very rich period of Black nationalist awakening with the beginning of the Black Arts movement. Those artists you first met were at the forefront in the Philadelphia region. I often say that Jacob Lawrence was educated in the “University of Harlem.” Barbara, you were educated in the “University of Philadelphia,” in those inspired communities and workshops who recognized your artistic capacity. This becomes a really pivotal moment in your development that I don’t think people are aware of—in terms of the narrative that’s going to be presented in your Woodmere retrospective. This is so important!

Historically, in the beginning of the migration, as these artists moved North, many of them could not go to schools of art for training. Augusta Savage was able to attend Cooper Union. William Henry Johnson studied at the National Academy of Design. But they were the “only onlys.” Later Columbia University’s programs opened up. And in between that time, there was the WPA experience.

Many of those artists who did have access and privilege came out of those educational systems to teach other artists. They would convene meetings and artists gatherings, similar to what you and Jacob experienced, in the Harlem art workshops. You are much like the Jacob Lawrence of Philadelphia.

BULLOCK: Do you remember Ellen Powell Tiberino?

KING HAMMOND: Yes, I remember Ellen Powell Tiberino.

BULLOCK: All of us were able to, as you said, commune. Those were the people we worked with. So you had—it was absolutely strong.

STOKES SIMS: You have all these people supporting you, providing input, examples. Tell us about your style, how it developed over the years, and how you reached all these different possibilities of abstraction and figuration.

BULLOCK: I started out more figurative because, basically, you just naturally do that for portraits. Because I worked with a lot of dancers and musicians, I began to draw dancers constantly. Dancers are amazing—what they do with their bodies and their energy. I began to draw on my own, without models, knowing that it had to be right because I was always working with them.

KING HAMMOND: So you were interested in capturing motion and movement?

BULLOCK: Movement, definitely. You do a lot of drawing before you begin to paint because it’s sort of like a fear there when you see the painting. It’s like, God, can I really do this? I had hundreds of drawings hidden all over the place. At one of my jobs, they found the drawings. They didn’t fire me, though.

KING HAMMOND: This is in an office building?

BULLOCK: No, this is in a regular home. I did everything—I would babysit and I was a private cook—in order to survive. I didn’t want the kind of job where there was a boss telling me what to do, so that kind of work was easiest. Mentally, I could think about art because everything else was simple to do.

VALERIO: Barbara, did you ever exhibit at the Pyramid Club? I think of it as an important exhibition venue. Humbert Howard organized the gallery program there. Did you know him?

BULLOCK: Yes, I knew Humbert Howard. But that’s almost a different universe. You know why? Because

that had to do with color. You had to pass the paper bag test.

KING HAMMOND: Oh yes, you had to be a certain complexion. They put a paper bag on the door to an event and if you were darker than the bag, you could not gain admission. This was an act of intracultural racism.

VALERIO: Oh, I didn’t know about this.

KING HAMMOND: Barbara, we understand why this is hard for you because you lived it and experienced it. Having been bounced out of classrooms, workshops, and other situations, you understood racial biases within your own culture. Being denied

entry to Black art salons and private clubs takes on a different level of pain and dismissiveness. This was a very active process of classist discrimination within privileged communities of Black people stemming from old line plantation politics.

BULLOCK: I remember my parents talked about that all the time.

STOKES SIMS: Do you think they didn’t take you as seriously because you were a woman?

BULLOCK: Oh, always. Yes. But I really didn’t pay much attention to that. I was really close to Ellen Powell Tiberino. I remember visiting her, and she showed me a drawer of her drawings. She said that

BARBARA BULLOCK: FEARLESS VISION 21

The Cock Crows, 1988, by Ellen Powell Tiberino (Woodmere Art Museum: Gift of Jason Friedland, Andrew Eisenstein, and Matthew Canno, 2023)

it was painful for her to draw. I felt she was speaking emotionally about her work. She was a very strong artist. She was speaking about the spiritual pain of creativity.

KING HAMMOND: I went to see her toward the end of her illness because the African American Museum was considering an exhibition. I was so torn by her condition. That was the hardest thing I have ever experienced in working with an artist. I could see and feel her pain. It was hard for her, and hard for me—it was a life lesson that I had to learn, how to deal with artists navigating their health and their artmaking processes. It’s good to know that you knew her.

BULLOCK: Oh yeah. In fact, when she passed, her husband said, I want you to be one of the pallbearers. I said, yes, I will be one of the pallbearers. I remember that I couldn’t believe that

Dancers, c. 1985 (Collection of the artist)

Ellen was leaving. I worried about what was going to happen to her work. I still worry.

VALERIO: We have about fifteen works by Ellen Powell Tiberino at Woodmere, and each one is deeply felt. A colorful pastel of a white rooster crowing at dawn, for example, represents her husband, Joseph Tiberino. I’m told by one of their children that she was ill at the time and imagining the future, thinking ahead to her husband’s life after her own death. The rooster’s shadow and the red markings of the sun are intense. There’s also the intensity of the social context that needs to be explored. She was one of the main cultural voices in the MOVE resistance in West Philly.

KING HAMMOND: Absolutely.

STOKES SIMS: Now I want to move on to something else: travel. Barbara, what were your first journeys abroad?

BULLOCK: The first place I went to was Egypt. I thought that should be the first place. I brought sketchbooks with me, I was going to draw, but everything you see in Egypt I felt has been drawn already. I couldn’t do anything that would be original.

STOKES SIMS: When was that approximately? Was that the 1960s or the 1970s?

BULLOCK: 1970s. When we were on the Nile, I choreographed a dance. We won the contest and they gave us a bottle of wine. [LAUGHS]

But it was a wonderful trip. All I wanted to do is be in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo—oh my god, we would go there every day, basically. The next place I went was Morocco. I went with a friend and that was amazing too.

We decided that since no one could tell us what to do, we could do whatever we wanted to do. When we got there, put our things in the room, put up anything like money or what we had to put away, and walked out in the street. Then down the street came hundreds of guys. Hundreds of guys came running, and we ran back into the hotel.

We told the people in the hotel what had happened and they said, just touch one or two, and the others will just go away. And that’s what happened. We just pulled one guy, and everybody else left. So it was like, that’s how they got jobs, taking people around. But it was hundreds. It was raining men, you know?

We went to all the bazaars, and we went to this one restaurant, and we met the owner. He said we should stay there for a while, so we said OK. But it was wonderful. We were so naive at that point. But the one guy had a friend who was a soldier. We

were like, well this is different really. What are we really doing here?

STOKES SIMS: Sometimes you have those encounters. I had that with a friend in Turkey in the early 1970s. We met these two Turkish students who saw the two of us with these two German guys and said, you’re coming home with us because you don’t know what you’re doing. Now I’m sure the whole neighborhood talked about the two of us women in there with five men, but you know. Anyway, but yeah, it was a much more innocent time.

BULLOCK: Yeah, you really didn’t know the dangers or anything like that.

KING HAMMOND: Were people more protective of you at that time?

BULLOCK: Nowadays they’re not. I know when I really started traveling, when I went to Senegal the first time—I went with a group. I realized that when you travel, you have to know what you’re doing and who you’re traveling with. A lot of times when you’re in a car with a group, and driving somewhere, you want to stop and see something that looks interesting. But it’s impossible. They say no, we can’t get off the road. So I decided that I would start traveling by myself. So the next time I went to Senegal, I went by myself. I just wanted to travel all over Africa.

The next few places I went, I only had $30 once I got there. So that meant I ate all the food I wasn’t supposed to eat. I never got sick. I drank all the water I wasn’t supposed to drink. This friend and I, we cooked fish on the beach, and we cooked fish for children. We had crowds of children, and were cooking for them, and they were bringing us tea. It was just amazing. He also had me read by a diviner.

Remembrance, 1985, from the series Initiation (Woodmere Art Museum: Partial gift of the artist and museum purchase with funds generously provided by Robert Kohler, Osagie Imasogie, and Jim Nixon, 2020)

KING HAMMOND: What did the diviner tell you? Was this in Senegal?

BULLOCK: In Senegal. They had a lean-to. You had to get down and crawl in it. And when he was reading the stones and the bones, it all came out that when I got home, I would be selling African sculpture and artifacts when I finished my journey.

We went into the country to visit a farm and met these women who were so dark and beautiful. I have never seen anything as beautiful. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. They had an aura. Their voices were like bells. When I spoke to them, they just laughed.

I ate with the men, which is unusual. We ate out of this big bowl, and they told me to use a particular hand—

STOKES SIMS: I think it’s your left hand.

BULLOCK: Yes, that’s the answer. They tell you to wash your hands before you eat. There were five of them, and we’re just eating. They talked to me about farming in Africa. They said that the tools they were using were so old, and they needed to get better tools—good farming tools. Basically they were farming by hand. We went to another area in Senegal, way up country, where it was all Arabic. But all these things I was able to do is because of a man I met named Mustapha. He made sure we went to Gorée Island. Gorée Island, off the coast of Senegal, known as “the door of no return” in the slave trade. Gorée Island is an emotional experience and feels sacred.

KING HAMMOND: Changing topics, inquiring minds want to know: were there any significant relationships that impacted your work, your life,

even though you didn’t get married? You observed that so many women artists had trouble being married that you decided not to get married so you could do your art. You don’t have to give details.

BULLOCK: Yes, there were several. All my life I wanted friends and I felt like friendship lasts so much longer than marriages and all that. Knowing Charles and all of them, it was like being around these guys that this is what they did. Art was their life. But they were married, and their wives were cooking and doing all the other stuff. I was like, you know what? I’m not getting married. I am going to be an artist. I want to know who I am. I don’t want someone to tell me who I am.

So when someone would ask to get married, I felt insulted. Like we were good friends, why would you mess that up, you know? I really felt that way. I know my mother, she never even thought that I would get married, but she never asked, she never pushed me to. She really wanted me to tell her everything that I did, though. She was like that. I was lucky, you know? She didn’t say I was wrong or anything.

STOKES SIMS: She was protecting you.

BULLOCK: She was protecting me and then she would tell me about her life, so—

STOKES SIMS: I think many of us had that experience, where our mothers would complain about their own partners, but assured us that it would be different for us. But I am interested to know, is it true that you knew Twins Seven Seven?

BULLOCK: Yes.

STOKES SIMS: How did you meet him?

BARBARA BULLOCK: FEARLESS VISION

BULLOCK: Twins Seven Seven came to Model Cities and Ile Ife, where I was working at the time. He came to the art department, and explained to Charles and me that he was an artist, and a musician, and a dancer. He went on and on, and we were like, how do you have time to do work? My God. But when we saw his work, it was like another world, just extraordinary. The forms and the

meanings—you could look at it for forever and you’d still never see everything in it. He was Yoruba. So there were a lot of spirits in his work.

VALERIO: The show we did at Woodmere in 2020, Africa in the Arts of Philadelphia, brought together your work with that of Charles and Twins. It was an amazing “conversation” of artists.

The Spirits of My Reincarnation Brothers and Sisters, 2006–7, by Twins Seven Seven (Woodmere Art Museum: Museum purchase with funds provided by Robert and Frances Kohler, 2018) © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

KING HAMMOND: How did that impact you spiritually? Did it change your work?

BULLOCK: Well, it was the whole thing, that you can paint spirits. You can draw spirits, you know? And it’s that whole thing of the freedom of your belief, you know? He would talk about the forest in his work, and about the magicians. I was just so inspired, deeply inspired, and just really loving what he did. And I just knew it was going to change me.

STOKES SIMS: Looking back on it, did you see your travels in Africa, your contact with Twins Seven Seven as a way for you to get in touch with your ancestral heritage? How did that begin to appear in your work?

BULLOCK: I did a lot of research. I love to do research. It gave me answers, you know? I was always influenced by life, by the people I met, and their homes. And I know that the people who really influenced me were people I had to remember. I remember that with my grandmother in the South, when she cooked, all her daughters were cooking with her. They were all married. They all lived in the South in different places. But they would come together on a Sunday, and they would just cook everything. And I would just listen to them speaking while they were cooking. Looking at them and listening to their conversations was like experiencing a celebration of females.

I would look at the dishes, and a lot of the dishes were cracked. And I was influenced by that. The kitchen was just the most wonderful part of the house. That whole communal thing. When I was really young, I remember my grandmother and all of them cooking fried chicken, stewed chicken, sweet potato pudding—they cooked everything.

Then they would take us into the living room, and everybody would have to grab a chair, and then they would pray. They would say prayers. And I was like, we need to go in the kitchen and eat, you know? They were long prayers—I mean, we were thankful about a lot of things.

STOKES SIMS: But in terms of your style, how did you develop that? There are certain things that are very distinctive about your work. The decorative surfaces. You have this way of doing these razorsharp edges, and using this heavy paper. How did that all come together for you?

BULLOCK: Well, I love paper, and the fact that people make paper. In the beginning, I was working figuratively, and I was working with gouache. And I felt like I was doing what everybody else was doing. I didn’t want to do what anybody else was doing.

So I started working on a piece that had to do with a dancer. I got up early in the morning and cut it up and put it back together again, and put it together in a different way. That was Animal Healer

I felt like, this is really what I want to do. I had to figure out how to do something that would speak for me. It’s like that language that you’re looking for. And it’s not only with figures, with faces, it’s with your materials. You’re respecting your materials and changing them at the same time.

Working with 300 lb. watercolor paper, I would layer constantly five layers on the top, five layers on the other side. And then it feels like it’s something—like it’s real. And I started moving it and shaping it. In the beginning, it amazed me that it would keep its shape. And I knew how to do that, but it was still a lot of work.

When you’re working on something, you’re changing it. In other words, when I’m painting, I’m never going to paint exactly what I want to shape out. That’s impossible. So the painting is, in itself, totally different. And it’s really so wonderful just to mix these forms and shapes while you’re painting. But I don’t know what I’m doing sometimes. So I’m just going to keep painting and discovering and experimenting. I started using fabric paints, with acrylics, and oil paints, and they would just do all these amazing things. When I wake up in the morning, I feel like I really want to experiment more.

STOKES SIMS: Have you ever physically made paper?

BULLOCK: Yes, I had a couple of friends who made paper. We did that with children too.

STOKES SIMS: I look around your studio and I say, it’s almost like occasionally this sculpture is trying to come out. And you sort of go back and forth between the flat surface and the sculptural surface. I’m really intrigued by how prominent black is in your work.

BULLOCK: At one point in time, I was only going to paint with black. I knew how to use other colors,

Bitches Brew, 2014 (Woodmere Art Museum: Gift of the Nixon family on the behalf of James V. Nixon, Jr. in honor of Barbara Bullock, 2023)

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Animal Healer, 1990, from the series Healer (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia: The Harold A. and Ann R. Sorgenti Collection of Contemporary African American Art, 2004.20.12) © Barbara Bullock

too, but I only paint with black. There was always a negativity that was given to it, you know? It’s just the most powerful color. I was talking to my late friend, A. M. Weaver, the curator and writer, and we would talk about a lot of things and she would just say, you know, when you cut these thin strips, it’s almost like you’re drawing. When you let them hang, it’s like a continuum.

I started painting black birds, black cats, Black people, black houses. And I said, you know what? I’m going to use a little bit of yellow in here. I’ll just use a little bit of yellow. And I would add some—I would use yellow first, and then I’d add green and red, and then put that black on there, and it’s just beautiful.

KING HAMMOND: Black is the composite amalgam of the entire spectrum of colors.

STOKES SIMS: What kind of paints do you use? What brands?

BULLOCK: It’s French—flashe paint. I used it when I did the Philadelphia International Airport project. It was just amazing. I bought about $500 or $600 worth of it—these huge containers. But I also use gouache and acrylics. Charles was like, Barbara, you really need to use acrylic because it dries easily, and you can be spontaneous, or whatever, but that was a decision I had made to really work with black. When I was teaching, the students questioned me, why black? I said, OK, sit down. I will tell y’all why I use black. So I told them, you know, I said, it’s given

Panther, 2014, from the series Bitches Brew (Collection of the artist)

such a negative reference. So they understood. But they said, OK, that’s basically the way you feel as a Black woman. So it was—at least they knew that.

STOKES SIMS: The interesting thing is the color black has become such a focal point in the art world because the British painter Anish Kapoor has patented a specific black that he uses. I remember going to see his work once in a gallery, and they were these basalt sculptures. They had little areas of black in them. There was a stele form that had a black hole in it.

I was being a smartass, and I said, I’m going to walk up to that thing real quick and stop just short of putting my nose in the black. The next thing I knew, my head was in the sculpture because that black had no reflective quality. It was the most powerful, palpable experience I had with the color black.

VALERIO: I want to just clarify something, Barbara. The black that we see, like Black Panther, for example, or these black figures, that’s paper that you’ve painted black? Or are you buying paper that’s already dyed black?

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George Floyd (portrait #7), 2022 (Collection of the artist)

BULLOCK: Oh, God, no. I paint it black.

VALERIO: So all of this is white paper that you’ve painted black?

BULLOCK: Yeah, which takes a lot of layers.

KING HAMMOND: Those portraits that you did during the pandemic, those are also the same white—this white, heavy paper?

BULLOCK: Right. 300 pound.

KING HAMMOND: Now you mix your own black?

BULLOCK: I do. But a lot of times, I paint right from the jar, that flashe paint. It’s water-based. I’ve only used water-based paint for the last thirty or forty years.

I’m thinking about when I made Chasing After Spirits. I thought about history. It’s like chasing after spirits, chasing after the people who have gone before, all the people, everything that has happened, you know? I felt that was a title that was going to cover over a lot of work that I was doing.

Chasing After Spirits 1, 2011 (Collection of the artist)

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Used Furniture, 2007, from the series Katrina (Woodmere Art Museum: Museum purchase with funding generously provided by Robert and Frances Kohler, 2023)

And then I remember when Hurricane Katrina happened in Louisiana—I would keep the TV on. And my friend Ife Nii Owoo and I were looking at these people, and I was like, oh my God. I started putting that series together right then and there. It was called the Katrina series. I showed it at Sande Webster’s gallery and some other venues. When they wrote about it, they wrote something totally

different than what I was thinking, but I felt like, OK, that works too, you know?

I think as far as Most Precious Blood went, it was that same thing. It was like working emotionally, which is not always the best way to work. But at times, you have to do that. I was following the trial with Trayvon Martin’s mother watching—and I just

Dark Gods, 1982, from the series Jasmine Gardens (Collection of the artist)

started working with that red. And I remember thinking that it’s a lot of red in life. And that was blood, I felt it was a powerful color.

When I did that piece, it was so personal. I was so glad I did it. But it wasn’t enough. I felt like this is what we can do. We can say how we feel, but how do we really solve problems? What are we as artists doing? That’s my reaction to a lot of things that happen in life, that’s how I work out a lot of the artwork that I do.

KING HAMMOND: You are clearly an artist who developed your own style, craft, and processes by your own invention, vision, instinct, and impulse. Which one of your series do you think was the most challenging? And which ones do you think taught you the most?

BULLOCK: I think—well, the erotic series, let’s face it. I mean, being wise in one way, and vulnerable in another way. I just decided, OK, if you’re going to do an erotic series, you’re going to do the whole thing. You’re not going to leave anything out, you’re not going to leave anybody out, any whatever out. And you’re going to do the research. And so I went to the bookstores, and I went to the back of the bookstore where all the guys were looking at the magazines. [LAUGHS] I even went to bars, you know? The gay bar, they would tell me to leave. It was like, no, I’m doing research. And they’re like, no. You have to leave. In Atlantic City, they asked me to leave.

STOKES SIMS: So you did get thrown out again? [LAUGHS]

BULLOCK: I’m so used to it. It’s like, just don’t let the door hit you in the face. And I have friends who would say, if there’s anything you need to know, just come to us and we’ll show you. I went to the baths

in New York City. And that was—God, that was tiring. I mean, some of us would get tired watching. [LAUGHS]

STOKES SIMS: So when did you do this series? I’m curious. You know, I ask because Al Loving, after he broke from his cubes, he did his drape sculptures. Then he started doing his collage sculptures that were based on the inspiration of the Monet show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And then he went into an erotic series, with cut paper and shapes. It was kind of like Matisse and Al sort of getting together. You didn’t know about that, though, did you?

BULLOCK: No, I didn’t. But actually, I was inspired by the Japanese. I love what they did with the fabric and the love letters, and everything.

VALERIO: Now, Barbara, you had friends who were gay men in this period, too, who were artists.

BULLOCK: Oh, I had many friends who were gay.

VALERIO: And I think of the gay culture of that time opening up the ideas of sexual freedom and eroticism for the straight world too.

BULLOCK: Well, yes. I was invited to do a lecture, which I really wasn’t ready to do. But it was gay women on one side and gay men on the other side. And they wanted me to show all the photographs of everything. And I would show them, and I talked to them, and they were like, oh, wow, you’re so brave. And I was like, I don’t think about bravery. I think it’s just something that I was inspired to do. And of all the people on the planet, they loved what I was doing. So I was able to talk to them about the different drawings and paintings that I did.

VALERIO: Barbara, with regard to the figure, it’s

BARBARA BULLOCK: FEARLESS VISION

fascinating to think about the group of artists who were your colleagues: Ellen Powell Tiberino, Charles Searles, Clarence Morgan, James Brantley. They started out steeped in the realism of the Academy— realism as handed down through the generations from Thomas Eakins. We have that beautiful painting of a boxer by Charles Searles at Woodmere, and I can’t look at it without thinking about Eakins. Did you have greater freedom to explore subjects like the erotic core of life, or your Blackness, or your African heritage because you weren’t weighed down by the Academy and its traditions?

BULLOCK: There are these strange questions that people ask you all the time. Are you a Black artist? Are you an artist? Why do I even have to answer

any of it? That was always my whole thing. And it was like, obviously I’m not a white artist. I mean, I must be a Black artist then. But you know, they use that to explain you, to color and place you.

And to make that separation. Only more recently, I saw something on YouTube where—and I think with the artists in Chicago—that said, there are two arts. There has to be two arts because the way we think about our lives and the things that we want to talk about, we have to talk about our lives. It was so brilliant.

STOKES SIMS: You mean terms of abstraction and figuration? Or in terms of—

BULLOCK: Black people and white people. It’s

Studies of Dancers, for Releasing the Energies, Balances the Spirits, 1990, Terminal B Public Art Process Commission, Philadelphia International Airport (Judith Heggestad Collection)

like the way we write, the way we think—even in color, you know? I mean, I can remember teaching children who were not allowed to use red. They weren’t allowed to use red and they weren’t allowed to use yellow. And they said, their parents told them that. I was like, look, we have a lot of red. You’re going to have to use that red. You’ve got to use the yellow. You use the colors that you love.

We talked about the palette. The palette was going to be different. It’s totally different, you know? And I remember Charles speaking on that. I didn’t always understand everything he was saying, but he said, our palette is different. And what we have to say is our lives. This is what we have to say. But you put us in this group. Oh, that’s Black art, you know?

It’s so insulting. It doesn’t make sense. I mean, if you look at it even as a child, how could you explain it? What does that mean? What is it about?

We are going to say what we have to say regardless of what we’re told not to do. And I do see with some artists that really get lost in that. They really get lost in it. I think James Brantley was very strong on that. He definitely was, look, I’m an artist. But he was very clear what he wanted to do. And that’s the thing. So that limitation—that you’re actually saying there’s a limitation, you know? You should paint this. I’ve had people—when I was living on Harvey Street not too long ago—who would come and they would tell me, you’re never going to make it if you keep painting Black people. They would say that.

STOKES SIMS: In New York, in the 1960s and 1970s, there was so much polemic around the art made by Black people. It was weaponized, to a certain extent, one group against the other—Blackstream or white mainstream. I remember being at many a dinner table talking about am I an artist? Am I a Black

artist? Do I paint the Black experience exclusively? If I do abstract work, am I copping out? If I do abstract work, are my colors different from anybody else’s? And to a certain extent, from my point of view, you can sort of say, yes, that’s true. But from another point of view, you can say, no, that isn’t true.

I remember visiting with Alex Katz—I think it was when the Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series show was at MoMA. And he said, I always thought Jacob used the Black colors. And I went, well what does that mean? And he couldn’t explain to me exactly. So I think people impose their own perspective on things that conform to their ideas, and make them feel comfortable with how they’re situated in the world.

BULLOCK: God, I mean, the arts are not supposed to be like that. I mean, that’s your expression. That’s your language, really. I could never understand that. But I could see where it was coming from.

I remember the FESTAC in Nigeria. Charles was like, we’re not doing any of that. So it was a problem there somewhere. We sat in a meeting—Romare Bearden was there. And I remember him saying, I’m definitely not going to go. And I was like, I’m not going either. If you’re not going, I’m not going. Next thing I knew, Charles was on the plane to Nigeria.

KING HAMMOND: FESTAC ’77 was the Second World Festival of Black Arts. Artists from the Black Atlantic diaspora and throughout the Africa continent convened in Lagos, Nigeria, to do an exposition of the arts in all genres. The US had a contingent of 200 artists who went under the leadership—this was the problem—of Jeff Donaldson. Because of the AfriCOBRA-ist aesthetic—which was expounded at length in Chicago—there was significant pressure on Black

artists to visualize their artistry more figuratively and within the “Kool-Aid color” palette.

There were a lot of artists who were pushing back against it because at the same time, there were many African American artists who were going to Africa independently on their own journeys— just like you—to seek their ancestral roots, to demythicize whatever had been laid upon them in terms of the expectations of being an artist. There was a lot of the Blackstream versus the whitestream tensions in the art world.

All the way back to the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro Movement this was a constant discourse among Black artists. As modernism began to emerge Hale Woodruff asked, “I have to go modern?” What is this tension about modernism and an aesthetic authenticity of Blackness?

STOKES SIMS: Which came from Africa.

KING HAMMOND: Which came from Africa—where did Picasso get it from? It came from Africa. There was a lot of reckoning at the time with artists who prioritized their authority and agency to tell other artists what they should and should not do. Abstractionist Richard Mayhew caught hell because his landscapes are stunningly evocative, spiritual compositions of emotive colors. Too many artists were dismissed and looked over because they did not let their aesthetic integrity be compromised by the currency of this politics.

STOKES SIMS: The irony is now that they’re in their eighties or dead, the art world is looking back at those abstract artists—William T. Williams, Sam Gilliam, Howardena Pindell, Frank Bowling—and they’re getting their due. People are recognizing what they were doing.

KING HAMMOND: During that period of history there was minimal capacity to recognize levels of aesthetic expression that went beyond a Black consciousness in terms of style, content, and context. Multiple psychic spaces of an aesthetic Black ethos were being visualized and articulated in new and meaningful ways beyond figuration.

Barbara, you were probably saved by not having come from an experience of being educated in the Beaux-art academic realm, where curricula were too specific, weighted, and biased with condoned visual languages. Black artists who were first-time admitted into these institutions found themselves in the crosshairs of discovery to define their own sense of identity and agency.

You were spared those experiences because you were mentored similar to Jacob Lawrence. It gave you the critical freedom that affirmed and gave you the confidence needed to continue your experimentation. In spite of being dismissed and negated, it did not deter you. You felt the strength and support of your peers and colleagues and let them deal with those political battles while you went on your own journey.

BULLOCK: Definitely. And family, you know? And friends. It was just that whole thing of beauty. And you’re looking at your friends who are absolutely beautiful people. And hair—when it got to hair, it was like, oh, God. It was like, please, just don’t do this to me.

KING HAMMOND: The issues of Black hair have been worse than the paper bag. Between hair and the paper bags—the journey struggles on.

STOKES SIMS: So Barbara, here we are in 2023. You’re about to have a big retrospective. How would you evaluate the situation that you find yourself in,

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Altar for Yemaja, c. 2005 (Collection of the artist)

and other artists find themselves in, given what’s going on in the global art market?

BULLOCK: To be honest with you, the global art market is very confusing. It’s so filled with everything. And I sort of help myself to see that because I stay on my computer, and I look at all these different exhibitions. And I don’t know, I just walk in my studio, and I look at my work. And I know the questions that are asked of me, I have to remember the 1960s and the ’70s and ’80s, and my head isn’t there. And I have to push it.

I know that I love what I did. I know there’s a continuum there. But I don’t really concentrate that much on what the continuum is. When I look around the studio, it’s like from the Dark Gods painting on the end, I look at a panther, I look at other pieces. And I think that—I know there’s a continuum. All I can say is that it’s life, you know? And I wish I didn’t get all the questions all the time because they’re kind of hard to answer. It’s like a ride. It’s the different stages of your life.

I was able to do that erotic series because that was the stage I was in. Because I worked in prisons and different places, things would happen. I would see people being shot. I would stand in front of someone who was being stabbed. I would see that. That changed me. I knew I had to talk about it, but you know, how do I talk about this?

I don’t want to paint negativity. But I know that I have to put it into my work. Hurricane Katrina, all the brothers that I’ve seen killed, and everything. I’ve actually seen it. And when I look at the paper, and I look at the paintings, I don’t know what’s going to happen until I work. Let’s put it like that.

So I continue to paint. And then when I begin to move shapes around, it’s sort of inside knowledge

of what a shape means to me. It just happens like that. Like with the mother and the son, it was like, those were two hearts. They didn’t look like hearts. Nobody thought they were hearts. But they were hearts that were entwined and broken.

If you begin to explain art, you’re going to lose it. I honestly believe that. I think you can’t talk about it. You have to do it. You have to mess with it. You have to experiment with it. And like I said, it’s that language. It just happens. So figurative—no problem.

But when it comes to the abstract—in my belief, life is abstract. It’s totally abstract. It’s not figurative. And it’s filled with all these brilliant colors, and forms, and this language that artists have, that we feel, like we know what we’re doing.

And at the same time, you do your exhibition, and people don’t know what you’re doing. And they want you to explain, what is this painting about? I find that now I’ve learned because of Ife Nii Owoo, my dear friend, who had a chance to sell work. And she had a piece in an exhibition, and the people were looking at it, and they went to buy this painting.

And so she went over to them. She said, I’ll tell you what that painting is about. And then when she told them, they were like, oh, that’s not what we thought. We don’t want that.

I said, that’s a lesson. Let them tell you. Let them look at it and see what they see in it.

STOKES SIMS: It’s about the relationship.

KING HAMMOND: Many people don’t have that confidence. They feel that the visual arts are this indecipherable language. Sometimes people just need to let themselves play with colors, shapes, harmonies, and see what these relationships do to create an interesting artistic experience.

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Stories My Grandmother Told Me

2012 (Courtesy of the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art)

Otherworldly 1 (portrait #13), 2022 (Woodmere Art Museum: Museum purchase with funding generously provided by Robert and Frances Kohler, 2023)

BULLOCK: Yeah, especially the children. I found some of the most wonderful work by children. They never questioned it. When Charles and I said, we’re going to be painting spirits today, they were like, OK, where’s the paint? [LAUGHS]

I’ve worked in so many different schools in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, New York. The Guggenheim, that was interesting. But children are, like—you’re learning through them. The thing you’re learning is not to forget why you really wanted to do this in the first place. But that’s what they’re doing.

KING HAMMOND: Barbara, you’ve been so eloquent.

STOKES SIMS: Absolutely.

KING HAMMOND: Thank you so much. Is there anything else that you want to say?

BULLOCK: No, you really helped. It’s hard to talk about your work. You’re really hoping that people will see it. Oh, I also taught seniors. They were amazing to work with. I really wanted them to realize that all their photographs, and all of their furniture, and their clothes and everything, that we would make art with that. We would say, you know, your children will see this as artwork. These are your time capsules.

I remember a person from the office at the Center in the Park, the place where I was teaching the seniors, had come down and said, we want you to sell your stuff because your family’s only going to throw it away. It doesn’t have any meaning to it. And I had to really speak to that person. But I looked at the seniors, and they let it get into their heads like that. So we talked about that afterward. That’s when I introduced them to Betye Saar. And they just flew after that.

I also did work in Shippensburg. Shippensburg was like the South, but it was in Pennsylvania. I was the only Black person in Shippensburg. And everybody knew I was there. I was the artist in residence. In the beginning, nobody talked to me. In the middle, some people began to talk to me. At the end, everybody spoke to me, including the children— they gave me secrets. The girls talked about the boyfriends that their mothers didn’t know about. And they told me everything.

KING HAMMOND: That’s part of our fascinating experience in exploring the depths, profundity, and remarkable essence in the experiences of our Black lives.

BULLOCK: They were like, look at that, and what’s that down there? It’s like, it’s a seashell, you know? I also taught teachers—teachers are extremely creative, if you give them a chance.

VALERIO: One of Woodmere’s goals is to slow people down when they come in the museum in order to tap into creativity.

BULLOCK: I don’t know how people must feel about everyone having a camera now, like, click, click, click, click. I was at Gardens of the Mind at the African American Museum—I really loved that show. That was A. M. Weaver’s last exhibition. But when the people came in, the first thing they did was start snapping pictures and posing in front of the work.

STOKES SIMS: Missing the whole thing.

BULLOCK: Yeah, but that’s the way it is now.

KING HAMMOND: Thank you, Barbara.

STOKES SIMS: This was a beautiful conversation.

A Conversation about Art, Community, and Teaching with Barbara Bullock, Diane Pieri, and Hildy Tow

A CONVERSATION ABOUT ART, COMMUNITY, AND TEACHING WITH BARBARA BULLOCK, DIANE PIERI, AND HILDY TOW

On April 20, 2023, Hildy Tow, The Robert L. McNeil, Jr. Curator of Education, met with Barbara Bullock and her artist colleague Diane Pieri in Bullock’s studio to discuss their work as art educators.

HILDY TOW: Barbara, Woodmere is very excited to be presenting an exhibition that will highlight both the evolution of your artistic practice and your career as an art educator. This conversation will focus on the creativity you have inspired in children and adults in the many public schools and community centers in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. The exhibition will include several of the prototypes used in your teaching. We consider these artworks in and of themselves. Do you?

BULLOCK: Yes, I do. Art is art, and there was always a back-and-forth relationship between the work I was doing in classrooms and community centers and the work I was doing in the studio. The discoveries of the studio flowed into the classroom, and the people—students, teachers, and colleagues—constantly inspired me too. However, teaching was the profession through which I earned my living. The studio art was always my highest aspiration.

TOW: Diane, you and Barbara have a long friendship that began with collaborative teaching. How did you meet?

DIANE PIERI: It was 1980, and I hired Barbara as the associate artist when I was working as the head artist at the Germantown Workshop of Prints in Progress. Those were the titles of the jobs, but as soon as I met Barbara, we were co-teaching and coequal from day one. I thought that the head artist

meant that I was responsible for the administrative stuff, and to turn the heat on and off in the building.

TOW: [LAUGHS] Can you tell us more?

PIERI: Prints in Progress began in 1960 as an outreach program of the Philadelphia Print Club. It brought together artists and children through printmaking. I was hired for their free, after-school printmaking workshop for kids. It was supported by philanthropic Philadelphians.

TOW: I read that Walter L. Wolf, a board member of the Print Club (now the Print Center), launched the program “to bring art to children with limited access to creative experiences.” A 1965 article in Art Education states that he raised funding for the program from “public-spirited Philadelphians including the Loeb and Philadelphia Foundations.”

BULLOCK: At the Model Cities program at Ile Ife and I was told about Prints in Progress by Anne Lee Pitts [now Anne Edmunds], one of the early directors. This was in the mid-1970s. I remember the day that I met Diane. Diane was so busy with all the children. I came in, and said, “I would like to work here.” You said, “Wait over there.” [LAUGHTER]

Working at Model Cities prepared me. I saw that Diane had a similar approach to teaching children to draw and paint, so I felt really sure about working there. It was a great job, it really was. I can remember so many of the children because they

were so serious. The children told us they were artists and they expected to be treated like artists.

We would walk around while they were working and we would talk about what we were doing in our studios. If we stopped talking, the children wanted us to continue speaking, because they considered themselves artists also. It was one of those jobs where you knew that you were really going to be able to work with the children. So many of them could draw already and it was so natural.

PIERI: Barbara and I also talked about how committed we were to our own work. We would talk

about how much our lives were invested in our art.

BULLOCK: And how much time we needed to work. We often designed projects for the students that were similar to what we were working on in our studios.

TOW: Was Prints in Progress five days a week?

PIERI: It was an after-school program five afternoons a week, 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. The original Prints in Progress was the Green Street Workshop in the Spring Garden Community. They slowly opened up workshops in different areas of the city. There was one on Brandywine Street led

BARBARA BULLOCK: FEARLESS VISION 47

Bullock working at the Girls’ Club of Nicetown/Tioga, Philadelphia, a residency supported by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, 1980. Courtesy of Barbara Bullock.

by Allan Edmunds, which developed into the Brandywine Workshop and Archives in 1972, as well as workshops at the Free Library of Philadelphia and the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial, and in Germantown. I believe there was also a van called Print Mobile that traveled all over the city.

TOW: And you both ran the workshop’s Germantown after-school program?

BULLOCK: It was in a building across the street from Germantown Friends. The building still has a plaque on it that says “Prints in Progress.”

TOW: How old were the children you were teaching?

PIERI: Six to fourteen years old.

TOW: Both of you were and still are living in

Bullock and Diane Pieri in front of Bottle Tree for Arthur Hall, 2007, commissioned by Village of the Arts and Humanities for Evoking Spirit, Embracing Memory, installation at Baobab Park in North Philadelphia. Courtesy of Barbara Bullock.

TOW: What kind of projects would you do?

BULLOCK: In the beginning, we were doing prints. They wanted to make T-shirts and other things so we chose to work with silk-screen printing. They also made potholders.

PIERI: Right, we were doing silk-screen—it’s a printing process where multiple copies of the same image or design can be produced. Stencils are supported by a mesh fabric that is stretched across a frame called a screen. Ink is forced into the mesh openings with a squeegee and the design is transferred onto another surface below.

Germantown. What was the impact of living in the same community as the students?

BULLOCK: I was on Greene Street in Germantown and lived three blocks away.

PIERI: It was absolutely terrific. There was a fabulous thrift store called Village Thrift where we would go to buy materials for different projects. The kids would be walking down the avenue and they would say, “Hi Barbara. Hi Diane.” We would say, “Are we going to see you on Tuesday? Don’t forget.” We were always walking advertisements for the Germantown Workshop of Prints in Progress. As a result, our attendance was always excellent and consistent.

BULLOCK: Students felt so close to us, like friends.

BULLOCK: They began by drawing a design in the art room. Then the children would go to the office where there was a long table set up with the screens. They would get in line to make their print. Diane and I helped them move the squeegee to push the ink through the screen and make the print. It felt almost like a factory. I said, “Diane, we’re not getting to know the children at all because they’re drawing in one room, and then they come and print and leave. We need to have other projects.” We decided at that point that we were going to do more than printmaking. We were going to work on drawing.

PIERI: They made really beautiful drawings. We also introduced sewing, beading, and using shells.

TOW: What kinds of projects were those?

BULLOCK: Years before, I was looking at African sculptures and had this idea to create figurative forms that involved sewing, beads, shells, and other things. I showed them to Diane and we decided it was a good idea to introduce a sewing project to the students. We made dolls but couldn’t call them dolls because we had boys in the class and

A child’s silkscreen potholder, Prints in Progress silkscreen class. Sewn by artist Betty Leacraft, c. 1980 (Collection of Barbara Bullock)

Figurative Form, c. 1978 (Collection of the artist)

Figurative Form, c. 1978 (Collection of the artist)

Student’s mask, Prints in Progress. c. 1980s (Collection of Barbara Bullock)

weren’t sure they would want to make them. We told the students they would be making “figures.” They could be based on someone in their family, or an imaginary figure. I remember bringing in a bag of fabric, beads, shells, and other things. The next thing I knew the children had emptied out the bag and were just going through it.

PIERI: I remember the enthusiasm just with the materials.

BULLOCK: We gave them a choice of black, red, and white fabric to use for their figures. They had to draw a pattern of their figure on paper that was then pinned onto two pieces of fabric. The children cut out the pattern on the fabric and cut a long slot down the middle of one of the pieces to be used as an opening for stuffing the figure later. After sewing the fabric pieces together along the edges, they turned it inside out and filled it with stuffing to make a solid form.

There was a grocery store on Wayne Avenue that let us go upstairs and work together around a large round table. We taught them to sew and how to be careful about their stitching. We were all sewing away. This one little girl, a little Italian girl who sang opera and was actually the boss of all the other children, stood up with her needle and her little figure and said, “We are so fortunate because we are making girls who have Virginias and the boys are making boys that have ducks.” She was talking about female and male genitalia. [LAUGHS]

While we were sewing, the children would talk about their lives and ask questions. Diane and I would listen and respond. I noticed how similar Diane and I were in working with children. Diane taught them embroidery and a stitch that her grandmother had taught her. It was all step by step.

Bullock’s prototype for mask project at Prints in Progress, c. 1980s. (Collection of the artist)

TOP: Alligator Puppet, c. 1980-83 (Private collection). BOTTOM: Bullock’s lesson plan for the Delightful, Colorful Alligator Hand Puppet project (Collection of the artist)

They embroidered the faces and chose different fabrics to make clothes. They made hair with three or four strings and macramé knots and added beads and shells.

PIERI: It was a very time-consuming process to make these projects, for example, the masks. And you don’t want to show kids too much because sometimes they would just imitate what they saw.

BULLOCK: For the masks, we had the students create an armature out of poster board strips. We had pre-cut the strips into different sizes, long, medium, and short, curvy and straight. They would begin by connecting long strips to create the outside form, and then use more strips to mold the three-dimensional structure of a face. They would use medium and small strips to fill up the curves of the cheeks, forehead, and nose until the armature was complete. We used lots of staples to connect the strips.

Next the children layered newspaper, brown paper, and colored tissue paper on top. They used matte medium as the adhesive so the tissue paper colors wouldn’t bleed.

PIERI: I made a monkey lady mask as a prototype. To build the features, we told the kids to put the skin on the face and make it more solid. It took weeks!

BULLOCK: They left spaces for eyes and painted or molded a mouth. For the nose, we suggested openings for the nostrils so the mask was more comfortable to wear.

PIERI: Since this process took a long time, we made little sketchbooks for the kids and after projects were complete or they got to a stopping point we would say, get your sketchbook and draw.

BULLOCK: We would have children of different ages in the classes so it was important to have a schedule and a structure for every class.

PIERI: Prints in Progress did not supply snacks for the kids. Barbara and I instituted the idea that kids bring their own snacks so they could calm down, relax, replenish their energy and draw before starting to work on the projects, so we started the program by giving the children snack time. And having them relax after school. The class ended with time to draw.

BULLOCK: One project we did was the “Delightful, Colorful Alligator Hand Puppet.”

TOW: Yes. I love the drawing you made and your handwritten directions in this lesson plan.

BULLOCK: First they needed to draw a pattern for the puppet’s body. The head would be made separately and connected later. They worked on heavyweight drawing paper with crayons, colored pencils, and markers. We looked at pictures of alligators, noticing the shape of their bodies, tails, legs, and feet. They also had to create a neck and create patterns of shapes and colors for the scales of their skin. The head was a separate attachment made by folding a smaller sheet of paper. One side of the head would be the face and the folded shape became the mouth that could open and close. This project took a few days.

PIERI: We made rattle puppets one year, puppets that made noise. There was one child, Hakeem, I think his name was, we had them bring in things that they thought would make noise. He came in with a bag full of pistachio nut shells, which was really great. We had a hammer and a nail to make a hole in the shell so it could be sewn onto the

puppet. Only one out of three hits by the hammer didn’t crack the whole shell. Hakeem sewed the shells onto the puppet and it would make noise.

TOW: That’s a great idea.

BULLOCK: We spent the last part of each session having the children draw. We wanted them to work together and learn that drawing was part of being creative. We had noticed that their drawings of houses, people, lollipop trees, and flowers, suns in the corner of the paper, and the sky as something separate, all looked alike. So after the students worked on their puppets or other projects, we would end the class drawing.

TOW: How did you talk to them about their drawings?

BULLOCK: We would bring them over to the window and ask if they could find the sun. “Is it separate from the sky? Is it in the corner?”

PIERI: “Is there a corner to the sky?” I always tell students, “There’s no law that says you only have to draw one sun. You can have three suns in the sky. You can have five suns.” And that was a way of encouraging them to imagine and draw any possibility they can think of.

TOW: You were giving them the freedom to create.

PIERI: You have to say that to middle school kids also. It’s not just little kids.

BULLOCK: The children would draw on one large sheet of paper using pencils and markers. I asked them to think about where they lived. “Are there sidewalks, cars, trees? Who do you see on your street? What do you see when you walk where you live? Think about the weather. “Questions like that. By the end of the semester, the paper would be full.

After Diane left, I became the head artist/teacher. I worked at Prints in Progress for thirteen years, from 1980 to 1993. We were able to create projects that were worthy of the great creative ability of children. The projects and sharing inspiration with young artists will always be important to me.

TOW: Barbara, you had been teaching prior to your time at Prints in Progress. I’m wondering how you began to teach. Take us back in time.

BULLOCK: I started teaching in the late 1960s, during the civil rights movement. I belonged to a loosely organized group in North Philadelphia that taught children to read, draw, and learn about African American history. There were such good people working there and opening doors for young people.

TOW: Around the same time, you also met a community of artists that were very supportive and helpful to you.

BULLOCK: Yes. I had met Moe Brooker, Charles Searles, Ellen Powell Tiberino, Richard Watson, John Simpson, and Charles Pridgeon. Many of them came out of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. They were serious artists. I was so fortunate. I know at this point that in life, you get to meet people that you really need. We had discussions into the night about being Black artists and creating work that spoke to who we were as African Americans. We talked about finding venues so we could exhibit. Those venues were not there so we created our own.

At this time, I was making my living as a private cook. They encouraged me to take myself seriously as an artist, saying you have to have your freedom. You can’t let anyone tell you what to do, how

to paint. You have to know yourself. There’s a difference between exhibiting work that talks about nothing basically and then there’s work that comes from your soul. This is what was discussed constantly.

Through this group of artists, I also met the dancer and choreographer Arthur Hall when he was developing Ile Ife.

TOW: Ile Ife was the Ile Ife Black Humanitarian Center that Arthur Hall started in 1969. For nearly twenty years, it served over two thousand children and adults annually at its North Philadelphia location with support from private organizations and the Model Cities program. Ile Ife offered instruction in dance, visual art, music, and drama.

BULLOCK: It was 1971 and Charles Searles, Clarence Morgan, a few others and I were sitting in a meeting with Arthur. He said, Barbara, you’re going to be my art teacher. I said, “No I’m really learning from them.” He said, “You’re going to be the director of the art department.” So I said to myself, OK, then I’m going to get all the artists I know so they can teach there too. They’re professional and know what they’re doing. That way the children would truly learn. Clarence Morgan, Charles Searles, and I were the painting teachers, R. B. (Reggie) Brown taught printmaking. John Simpson, Harry Banton, and Martha Jackson Jarvis taught sculpture.

It worked perfectly to have this amazing group of artists in the art department at Ile Ife. It was wonderful to work with so many creative people.

ABOVE: Arthur Hall, date unknown. Arthur Hall Collection, Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, PA. RIGHT: Bullock at the Ile Ife Black Humanitarian Center. Courtesy of Barbara Bullock.

Everyone was really dedicated to Arthur’s philosophy that all programs needed to nourish and support the community. He wanted children to feel proud of and embrace their African heritage and culture, and to give the children something they could not get anywhere else. Arthur chose the name Ile Ife, meaning “house of love,” to recall the ancient Nigerian city, Ife, the spiritual seat of West African Yoruba culture, to emphasize the importance of the community’s African ancestry. Providing children with a variety of art experiences felt like a natural way to do this. They could take classes in art, music, drama, and dance. The classes were all free and the doors stayed open. You were always learning.

TOW: Were there any experiences that stand out to you?

BULLOCK: We were constantly painting. One day Charles and I said, “Let’s paint spirits.”

TOW: How did you talk about spirits?

BULLOCK: We said, you’re going to create a spirit, a tree spirit, or an animal spirit, anything like that. I used the word “spirit” to talk about energy, imagination, and creative forms. We would ask, “How many hands can a spirit have? What might they be wearing?” The children just started painting. They loved the idea. Some “spirits” had six legs or four arms. They just used their imagination. They also watched us paint. Spirit Painting by Charles Searles was made at Ile Ife right

Bullock teaching at the Ile Ife Black Humanitarian Center. Courtesy of Barbara Bullock.

Spirit Painting, c. 1970s, by Charles Searles (Collection of Barbara Bullock)

in front of the kids. He later gave me the painting, knowing how special it is to me.

TOW: Sounds like everything you said was enough to inspire and get them going. After Ile Ife and around 1977, you began teaching in public schools and community centers as an artist in residence through the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) program. This was a federal program to stimulate job growth during the economic recession and was managed by the Department of Labor. It became one of the largest federal arts programs in this country.

BULLOCK: Yes. This was processed through the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. I was part of the Visual Artist in Public Schools project from 1977 to 1980. They connected me with different venues in Philadelphia. Sometimes it would be one day a week, sometimes it would be for several weeks. It was great because it provided full-time employment that allowed half of the time to be spent working in the studio and the other half teaching.

TOW: Barbara, I’ve noticed that many of your students’ projects began with experiments with

colors and paint applications, a process similar to your studio practice. You would have the students paint the paper with layers and layers of colors and textures, cut the painted paper into different shapes, and arrange them into shaped collage paintings.

BULLOCK: Yes, painting is always an important part of the project. Teaching children to be brave using materials, mixing colors, painting and layering opaque and transparent colors, and using different types of brushes and tools. I wanted them to explore, discover, and enjoy the painting process.

For me, painting feels like the most wonderful freedom. It’s between you and the materials that you’re working on. I love mixing colors. I paint in layers, which is sometimes hard because the first layer looks really great, but then I think, no, no, no. This is not going to do. I wanted children to have that kind of freedom when they painted.

TOW: While going through your educational materials, I read about your shaped collage painting project with the students at St. Cecilia School in Pennsauken Township, New Jersey. The title is “Sacred Waters.”

Sacred Waters 1990s, student project at St. Cecilia’s School, New Jersey (Collection of Barbara Bullock)

BULLOCK: This was in 1990s when I began creating my own shaped collage paintings. I loved the idea that we could use such a spiritual title from the very beginning of the project to the finish. The students showed so much enthusiasm to create this collage mural.

First of all, we had good supplies, paints—great colors, watercolor paper with a good tooth, drawing materials, scissors, adhesives. There’s so much material on the oceans, waterways, books, photographs, videos, posters.

The project was twofold. They began by drawing sea creatures, foliage, seashells, and all kinds of things that lived and were part of the oceans. They then painted papers and cut them up into shapes of creatures, plants, and imaginary sea life. Their creatures were so colorful and their forms, shapes, and texture were unbelievable. We created it with the belief that if you could imagine it, it probably did exist. They included so much visual detail in the

oceans and waterways. We discussed the fact that such a wonderful part of our environment could be in danger of being harmed by human carelessness. The children named their sea creatures and wrote stories about saving our oceans and waterways, the Sacred Waters.

Another project I really enjoyed doing with students in many schools was pop-up books. We called them sandwiches or hoagies because everything was hanging out. They would include people, dragons, trees, food, and they were funny.

TOW: Your pop-up books are amazing. Tell me how you did these.

BULLOCK: The pop-up book began with students and teachers choosing a theme. For example, the theme of the rainforest would focus on its beauty and a concern for its survival. I showed the students pop-up books and other inspirational materials to get things going and looked at the mechanics of pop-ups.

African Garden, 1990 (Private collection)

To make the pop-up book, we used old and new game boards as a foundation. Game boards fold so you can open and close them. This was perfect for creating a book. When folded closed, the game board was transformed into the cover and back cover of the book. When opened, the game board became the inside of the pop-up book.

The students painted 140-pound watercolor paper with acrylic paints. They cut the papers into shapes based on their themes and collaged them to embellish the construction of the book. With the book closed, the shapes would fold and lay flat. When opened, they would stand up automatically. The finished projects were colorful and exciting.

PIERI: The thing about Barbara is that she does extensive research. Years ago, she would spend half of her days at Borders bookstore and buy all these books. After I stopped working at Prints in Progress, we would get together and reminisce and show each other what we were doing. I remember that she was doing the pop-up book. I had just gotten a residency through the Philadelphia Museum of Art to go into a middle school and do a project. We were talking and she said, well, I was just doing these pop-up books. She brought out her research books and said you can do this fold, and look, you can do that fold, and look, you can do this. I stole that project from her and did the pop-up books at the Woodrow Wilson Middle School and a junior high school.

I know you do this, Barbara, but when you do a residency and you have all these painted papers, you just don’t throw them out. You keep them.

I would go to different residencies and I would bring a huge folder of leftover painted papers by other students and me and put them out to combine with

the decorative papers that I would buy. I still to this day have a huge stock.

TOW: Yes and it certainly cuts down on prep time. One of the prototypes I’ve seen in your studio and am fascinated by is the theater project, Barbara. How did these come about?

BULLOCK: I walked into Prints in Progress one day and on the mantle was a little box with a pinhole camera. When you look through the tiny hole, you see an image. The idea of a theater came to me. I thought it would be a great project because children would paint, create something three-dimensional, and write a story to go with it. I liked the idea that the project combined painting and creative writing, and could be like a theater for performance, all inspired by the children’s imagination.

I made about ten prototypes of the theaters in my studio before I brought them to the schools. I introduced the project to the children by setting them up on the floor. They interacted with them right away. They crawled over and looked through the little hole and were so curious.

TOW: What were some of the images you used in these prototypes?

BULLOCK: I used some great postcards I collected over time and in my travels. The children loved the idea of looking through the pinhole and discovering an image. I showed them how I could switch the images. They loved talking about what they saw.

TOW: They seem pretty complicated. How did the children make them?

BULLOCK: They began by painting and layering paint on sheets of 140-pound and 300-pound watercolor paper. They painted on both sides of

the paper until it became its own material. Once the papers dried, they folded two sheets of the 140-pound paper accordion style to become the two sides of the theaters. The accordion folded papers provided a flexibility when used to connect the front side to the back side of the theater. The front and back were made from the heavier 300-pound paper.

They cut the leftover painted papers into shapes based on the theme of their theaters and collaged them on the inside and outside of the

three-dimensional structure. Some of the shapes extended above and outward.

TOW: And each theater construction had a pinhole in it where you could look inside and see an image. Am I understanding this correctly?

BULLOCK: Yes. The image could be anything they wanted, a photograph or postcard, or an image they drew. They drew dragons and basketball players. They had so many ideas. They could also switch their images.

BARBARA BULLOCK: FEARLESS VISION 61

LEFT: Watermelon Café Pop-Up Book, 2009, (cover). ABOVE: Watermelon Café Pop-Up Book, 2009 (open) (Private Collection)

PIERI: So many children wanted to tell stories about being on the basketball court.

BULLOCK: Yes, one child said he wanted to create an image for the back wall of the theater of a basketball player and the rest of the boys wanted to do the same thing. I said fine as long as they painted them.

I really loved doing magic theater projects with the children. Their imagination and memories inspired all kinds of theaters. And the added element is that every theater had a story that went along with it, so they became more like a theater or a performance for the children.

TOW: In La Salle University’s 2016 exhibition catalogue Barbara Bullock: Chasing After Spirits, you describe how later on, you cut up some of your theater prototypes and incorporated them into your Katrina series.

BULLOCK: If I’m working on something, and I look around my studio, and see a piece that I know would look better on the one I’m working on, then I use it to make my work stronger.

TOW: That shows your fluidity, too.

BULLOCK: Yeah. I’ve looked at different pieces— different series that Diane has worked on and I think like with most artists, you continue to grow. We always change. We go from feeling one thing to not feeling that, and doing something different. You constantly grow and it was time for a change. When I began working with acrylics a long time ago, that allowed me to use collage.

TOW: Because it dries quickly.

BULLOCK: Yes, it can dry quickly. The feeling is different. With the Katrina series, my work became

more and more three-dimensional, coming off the wall. Once you begin to do collage and threedimensional work, it’s really hard to go back to twodimensional work. It’s just another feeling that you have like you’re building something.

PIERI: Right, exactly. You build up a supply of all these painted papers and you start to know and feel the colors, the spirit of something. You don’t immediately think, oh, I’m going to do this. You leave it open.

BULLOCK: I don’t know if you feel this way, Diane, but when you do something like this piece (Sometimes in the Strangest Places) someone says to you, well, explain to me exactly how you did it. I say, no. I can’t do that. It’s a process. It changes.

I decided that when people look at my work, I wouldn’t tell them the title, because before they knew the title they thought one thing about the work and after I told them the title they would think something else. I believe it’s a good thing for people to look at a work of art and find something that they feel in it.

PIERI: The thing about being an artist is that you try and forget what you know because that’s how you can invent new things. You don’t want the process to become formulaic. It’s something that you try, in a very short period of time, to impart to students as best you can, but it takes a lifetime. With some students who are very gifted, it just helps them on the road.

TOW: And by giving children the opportunity to engage freely with materials, to explore their process and discovery, you teach them to trust their intuitive responses and to enjoy their creativity and what comes from within. Another project we will

BARBARA BULLOCK: FEARLESS VISION 63

Magic Theater

2: New Orleans Magic, 2007, from the series Katrina (Collection of the artist).

Photograph by Stan Sadowski

include in the exhibition is the gameboards. What made you think of this project?

BULLOCK: I saw the movie Jumanji and it made me want to create a gameboard. I thought it was really going to be a great project for students because they had to create a game, explain the rules, and make the players. This was a project that I taught to teachers through the Art Horizon Institute at Rutgers University in Camden during the summers, starting in 2000. They would learn how to do this and then take it into their classrooms.

I chose a Chinese checkers-like game for myself as an example and made clay figures to serve as the playing pieces. The playing pieces are based on African stories. I explained how the gameboards could be many things: games that you like/love to

Game Board, 2010 (Collection of the artist)

Game pieces, 2010 (Collection of the artist)

play or games that children play. Or games that teach, or games that help you achieve a personal goal. Games about the heart, about joy, travel, about the weather. Games that get lost cats and dogs back home. Games about strategy, mystery, loss, gain. Games about getting a job. Games that teach students to read, write, and speak another language. Games that get you home in time for dinner. Games that help you survive being on an island by yourself. Games where you have to eat what’s on the menu. Games about an artist. Games about sayings, proverbs, pretend, moving, or “Who do you want to be when you grow up?” Games that make statements about situations that concern you. Games about faraway places and cultures.

The teachers would all just start thinking and building on their own. They were very motivated.

They made their games and they were amazing. Some of the teachers brought in sand and seashells, and we used soap molding clay to make the players.

TOW: Did you ever make gameboards with younger students?

BULLOCK: No, getting all the materials into the schools was going to be difficult.

TOW: Well, think of the enormous impact on hundreds of students by having teachers bring these amazing ideas and projects into their classrooms. How many years did you lead these teacher workshops?

BULLOCK: Ten years. I loved working with teachers. They would create installation-type projects such as painting chairs and large boxes and time capsules

Sometimes in the Strangest Places, 2013 (Collection of the artist)

that they could put letters in. I liked the idea of having letters tell a story and thought that would be a great project to do with students.

I remember some of them were so touching. There was one teacher whose wife wasn’t doing well and he was doing this time capsule about her. With the teachers, you give them a project, introduce them to the material and they would just go on their own. You’re not going to tell them what to do, because they’re artists anyway. Their work was just amazing.

TOW: Let’s talk about your experiences at Center in the Park and working with seniors.

BULLOCK: I was there for ten years starting in 1995. It was a different experience because they were seniors. I was not a senior at the time and

sometimes they would give me a hard time, just teasing me.

They really loved coming to Center in the Park. They wanted to paint more traditionally than the projects I was presenting. At first, they reacted like, “Well, we really, really just want to paint. We want to paint a bowl of flowers. Why are you giving us so much stuff to do and different materials?” I said, “You’re going to be using your photographs, old hats, and things you’ve collected over time and create them into an artwork. These things are important because you don’t want to throw them away anyway, so we’re going to make them into art.”

They began to love doing these projects. We made the pinhole theaters, pop-up books, murals, and

Egyptian Board Game, 2005 (Private collection)

fans. They brought in photographs, stamps, jewelry, buttons—things they had stored away and not looked at for years. It was very interesting to talk to them about their lives and the objects they had kept because they meant something to them that would have little meaning for others. It was about the importance and meaning of memories.

There were often times when the projects became emotional for them. Working at Center in the Park wasn’t always easy because they really loved to talk and sometimes we couldn’t get anything done. But I loved it.

TOW: Memories are also something important in your work. I want to ask you about the spirit houses you had children make. These have a lot to do with memories. You created many of these in your studio practice too. Please tell me more about those.

BULLOCK: I often had the children make spirit houses when I went to schools. I loved talking to children about houses. We would talk about empty houses and how we would see areas where houses

El Dancers, 2008, an installation by Bullock on the Market-Frankford Line, 46th Street Station for the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority’s (SEPTA) Art in Transit Program.

had been torn down and there would be a shape in plaster against brick of a now-gone staircase leading up. We talked about their house. Some children felt a house looked like a face. We talked about the stories and memories we get from our houses. The children’s spirit houses had dragons and all kinds of things.

TOW: These were projects that made children think in a broader way, that inspired them to imagine the house as an active player in their life, the keeper of our memories, feelings, experiences, and changes. It’s a fascinating way to explore the idea of home.

BULLOCK: I loved teaching children, introducing them to new materials, encouraging them to use their imagination, and seeing what they do. I also wanted to give them projects that would have meaning for them. Art is nourishment for students and definitely increases their self-esteem.

PIERI: Barbara and I always prided ourselves on buying really top-quality materials for our students, because we knew that art teachers had very limited

Photograph by Stan Sadowski (Collection of SEPTA)

budgets. From the beginning, we would always tell the students, we do this because you are worth it. This is what professional artists use. It sets the tone for believing in themselves.

Every time Barbara and I get together, we tell stories about the children and teaching and we are hysterical. One of my favorite stories involved a little girl who must have been about six or seven years old. We were doing a project, it might have been a reverse painting on glass that we did. She painted the Statue of Liberty and under it, she had these colored circles, these balls of color.

I looked at it and said, “Oh, this is really fantastic. It’s so creative. I love that you put these flowers underneath the Statue of Liberty.” She looked at me and said, “Those aren’t flowers. Those are the huddled masses.” [LAUGHS]

BULLOCK: Interacting with children, you see much more of yourself. You introduce them to color and materials and off they go on a journey that can be revealing. I did a project called Child Dreams of Snakes in the Grass, and by making art, all kinds of secrets and emotions got stirred up. Some children’s lives are hard. There’s a cutout figure of a boy, to whom I gave a blue shirt with the crown symbol that represents Jean-Michel Basquiat, an artist of amazing strength. That figure in the blue shirt is the last remaining element I have from Child Dreams of Snakes in the Grass

TOW: I’ve always liked the way you display that figure on the wall in your studio together with your Child in the Land of the Spirits, another important work about children and their emotional core, and the way they carry the spirit of their ancestors and history. When I look at them, both figures come from your ability as a figurative artist,

Time Capsule project, 2005, for Art Horizons Residency, Teacher Workshop, Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey (Collection of the artist)

BARBARA BULLOCK: FEARLESS VISION

I Go There All the Time (Spirit House 3), 1995 (Collection of Lewis Tanner Moore)

and the nuanced lines and silhouettes convey emotions through body language. In a way, the two figures of children have the same qualities as works of art as the figures in your installation for SEPTA (Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority) at 46th and Market Streets, the dancing figures. This work has always reminded me of Matisse’s murals of the dance at the Barnes Foundation. Were you inspired by Matisse?

BULLOCK: Yes, Matisse was a favorite of mine for the longest time! What artist in Philadelphia hasn’t fallen in love with those murals by Matisse? My dancing figures for SEPTA represent the joy of dance, and specific types of dance that interest me, and even specific dancers. Lewis Tanner Moore owns the series of preparatory figures I made for the project, and I hope those can be in the exhibition. The tap dancer in blue is Savion Glover. Next to him, the African dancer is Karen Warrington, who was my friend from Ile Ife, and one of the closest collaborators with Arthur Hall. The third figure is a Brazilian dancer. The fourth is Judith Jamison, whose tall, svelte body could move in ways nobody had ever seen before; she represents Black dance as reinvented by Alvin Ailey. I once had a roommate who was her close friend. The fifth figure represents contemporary dance, and a dancer from Joan Myers Brown’s Philadanco group. The sixth dancer is a praise dancer. She represents spiritual dance and dancers moved by mystical, divine faith in the Black community. All those dancers are moved by spirit.

PIERI: Something I want to bring up, which is also remarkable about Barbara’s teaching life, is that Barbara does not drive. She would schlep things at 5:00 in the morning on public transportation to go to her different residencies in New Jersey, Delaware, and all over the city of Philadelphia.

BULLOCK: Oh, New Jersey was the worst. I was up at 3:00 and out at 4:00 in the morning. I was the only one on the street.

PIERI: Sometimes people would drive you up, though, and take you to a residency.

BULLOCK: Once I was there I would meet people. Years ago, there was a comic strip in the newspaper with a character named Mrs. Worth. She was a teacher who traveled all over to all these different schools. A lot of them were girls-only schools. She had adventures meeting people along the way. That’s what I wanted to do: travel the world.

Child in the Land of the Spirits, 1997, from the series Child in the Land of the Spirits (Collection of the artist)

BARBARA BULLOCK: FEARLESS VISION 71

Child Dreams of Snakes in the Grass, c. 2005 (Woodmere Art Museum: Museum purchase with funding generously provided by Robert and Frances Kohler, 2023)

TOW: Well, you did. You traveled to many places, especially Africa.

BULLOCK: I did. I traveled many times to Africa with a friend that helped build schools and taught there. They were wonderful experiences.

TOW: You’ve known each other for over forty years as artists, friends, and teachers. How did working together influence the work you were doing in your studios?

PIERI: Barbara opened up a whole world of African art to me that I knew nothing about. I loved it, I

was doing a lot of collage at the time. I think that opened up a world of collage for you Barbara.

BULLOCK: Yes, and working on paper. I remember you were working with gouache and introduced it to me. I just loved gouache. I was working in gold leaf. Then Diane started working in gold leaf. And I began to travel a lot.

I’d try to get grants and other support to travel to Africa.

PIERI: You would come home and make these albums, these memory books of your tour, writing

Study for El Dancers, installation at SEPTA 46th and Market Street El station, 2008 (Collection of Lewis Tanner Moore)

things down, and collaging, and pasting things. That’s what I did when I got to travel later on and go to different countries. I immediately came home, got my photographs developed, got a photobook, and documented everything. Now I refer back to them and remember things.

TOW: Back in the days when we developed photographs. Barbara has shown me several of these books. They convey so much about the people you spent time with and places you traveled. When you hold these albums, you know you are opening something special.

Barbara, you told me, “When I was growing up, I needed a language. I realized early on that art was going to be that language. I say to students creativity is a language, a conversation between yourself, and you, and your art. Say what you feel, explore, experience, open your mind.”

I think that’s a gift that you’ve given to all of your students, children and adults, that you’ve given to us, and that you and Diane have given together. Thank you for your generosity and inspiration.

BULLOCK: Thank you.

BARBARA BULLOCK: FEARLESS VISION

Study for El Dancers, installation at SEPTA 46th and Market Street El station, 2008 (Collection of Lewis Tanner Moore)

Where People Grow, Like Flowers: The Jasmine Gardens of Barbara Bullock

Tess Wei

WHERE PEOPLE GROW, LIKE FLOWERS: THE JASMINE GARDENS OF BARBARA BULLOCK

TESS WEI

As Barbara Bullock’s time leading the art program at the Ile Ife Black Humanitarian Center was coming to a close in 1975, her friend and colleague Martha Jackson Jarvis asked, “What’s next?” Bullock answered, “I want to do something about love.”

What followed, from the mid-1970s through the 1980s, was the development of Jasmine Gardens, a series of hundreds of figurative drawings and paintings dedicated to exploring and celebrating what Bullock felt to be the vital depths of eroticism.

The drawings, by virtue of their often gestural and varying nature, express the attributes of sensual and sexual identity that Bullock saw as natural in the world: exploratory, intense, tender, free, and often seemingly unfinished. The context of Jasmine Gardens is a period of transformation in the expression of sexuality that evolved in the United States prior to the horrors of AIDS, as well as the ongoing fearlessness of an artist whose faith in the beauty of human sexuality has remained certain to this day.

Jasmine Gardens, 1980 (Collection of the artist)

Bullock’s erotic drawings are works on paper of diverse sizes rendered with rippling lines, hatchings, sweeps, and blotches from pen, ink, and watercolor. Much like the figures they depict, the lines themselves lack self-consciousness—they flow, scribble, pierce, and double back on themselves in colors of black, brown, blue, purple, and gold. The bodies in these drawings are all expressly muscular and elongated, and they enact a great range of positions in lovemaking and foreplay. They are entirely nude except for occasional adornment from an amulet or bracelet.

At the time, Bullock was given a book of erotic art, Japanese Erotism (1981) by Bernard Soulié,1 and she became immediately absorbed in the sensual world-building found in the Shunga tradition. She

was captivated not only by the bodies portrayed in these centuries-old woodblock prints and paintings, but also by the provocative fabrics, foods, plants, and animals that participate in the inventive sensual play. Here the artist found sexuality that was blissful, not sinful, and recognized the type of liberated space she was creating in Jasmine Gardens

Bullock’s erotic drawings, however, reflected her own social milieu and political concerns at the time. She populated her works with Black warriors whose Herculean bodies symbolize the fortitude of mind, body, and spirit of the people who led the civil rights era and the continuing movements for Black liberation. In one particular drawing with a yellow palette, two figures are suspended in an embrace with one figure laying back, penis erect and cradled

Jasmine Gardens, 1980 (Collection of the artist)

between the limbs of the other. The two figures are similar in size and stature, and have long, thick dreadlocks whose shapes reverberate into the shadows and surrounding atmospheric landscape. This drawing recalls a monumental painting from the same series, Dark Gods (1982), whose androgynous figures—one of whom is inspired by Bullock’s friend and fellow artist, Deryl Mackie—float while caressing in a moment gripped by pleasure. “...Man is one with animal / animal is one with man / woman—peers from the side of a God / woman

emerges from / the dark side / on both sides / who is god / who is man / both unite…” reads a portion of the poem Dark Gods in the Gardens by Naomi Nelson, which Bullock transcribed in a notebook at the time.2

Research by way of observational study has always been an essential part of Bullock’s creative practice. For this series, she made frequent visits to the erotic sections of bookstores and went to bathhouses and gay bars in New York and Atlantic City. From one such establishment she was

Jasmine Gardens, 1980 (Collection of the artist)

eventually asked to leave. Bullock was committed to “trying to see and understand everything that was out there” in order to record and communicate the natural expanse of human sexual experience. Her sustained study of her subjects is apparent in works with figures that repeat in various poses across the page—overlapping and blending into each other with multiple views of the same face or with arms stretched, legs in motion. These figures not only overlap, but also begin to blend into each other, exploring one another just as much as they

become one. She wrote accompanying, nonlinear texts to further “flesh out” this world of unrestricted lovemakers: “Jasmine gardens are love gardens, where people grow, like flowers. Where men are like flowers and like herbs and the trees. Where their hair grows wild like branches matted, strong like roots of a tree. Their perfume under their arms and in their crotch are like the exotic smells of flowers. Their cum is that delicious taste of the passion fruit. Many of my loves live in this garden…”

BARBARA

Jasmine Gardens, 1980 (Collection of the artist)

At the time, Bullock’s peers, primarily her straight, cis-male colleagues, criticized the Jasmine Gardens series. They found obscenity in the sexually explicit content and, more acutely, they deemed it inappropriate for a woman to venture into this territory. Despite shared values in celebrating liberated identities when it came to Blackness, many of Bullock’s peers believed that female artists should not generate erotic images. In addition, works from the Jasmine Gardens series were censored from several exhibitions of Bullock’s work. But the artist’s creative voice has always been her freedom, and the prudishness of colleagues and institutions only affirmed the need to continue nurturing the specific line of inquiry and purpose. The drawings are not erotic to be shocking. Instead, they represent Bullock’s drive to explore a phenomenon that naturally exists in humanity—a sensuality absent of boundaries that dissolves the socially constructed dichotomies of human/

nature, man/woman, gay/straight, black/white, and so forth. For those (like me) who came of age after the 1980s, the Jasmine Gardens series speaks across time to the changing understanding of sexuality and identity we grapple with as a society today. Bullock proposes that when our sexual and sensuous bodies exist without categorization, that is perhaps the greatest declaration of love and freedom—a culture where love is the ritual, and the ritual is always open.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tess Wei is a Philadelphia-based artist, curator, and writer. They are currently the exhibitions manager and assistant curator at the List Gallery, Swarthmore College.

NOTES

1 Bernard Soulié, Japanese Erotism, trans. Evelyn Rossiter (New York: Crescent Books, 1981).

2 Naomi Nelson, “Dark Gods in the Gardens,” unpublished poem.

Jasmine Gardens, 1980 (Collection of the artist)

BARBARA BULLOCK: FEARLESS VISION 81

Jasmine Gardens, 1980 (Collection of the artist)

The Inspiration of Barbara Bullock Elbrite Brown

THE INSPIRATION OF BARBARA BULLOCK

ELBRITE BROWN

I was first introduced to the work of Barbara Bullock at the African American Museum in Philadelphia in the 1990s, when I was a recent college graduate. Walking through the galleries, I was met by The Stiltwalker, a large-scale, colorful painting that I immediately connected with because of my early fascination with the stilt walkers at Philadelphia’s Odunde Festival. I approached a curator to ask a question, and he proudly described the power of the artist who had made it.

Over the years that followed, I frequently heard about Barbara from other visual artists I admired. But it wasn’t until the early 2000s when I had the honor of meeting her and calling her my teacher. I enrolled in her collage class at Rutgers University’s American Talent Initiative for three consecutive summer sessions and later took independent workshops with her at her studio.

As a trained professional artist and visual arts teacher for more than twenty years, I am still inspired by Barbara and her work. She has given me many tools that I incorporate into my life as a creative person and into my classroom in the Camden City School System, where I am employed. She encouraged me to transform materials in ways that I would have not considered. Before meeting Barbara, if I had seen rusted bottle caps on the ground, I would have left them there. But now I look at them in another way: how could those bottle caps be used in a work of art? In my classroom this new way of seeing encompasses shapes, colors, textures, patterns and references to African art. She also inspired me to introduce my students to

artists that I might not have in the past: Wangechi Mutu, Kerry James Marshall, Nick Cave, Jean-Michel Basquiat. Barbara always says, “Paper has memory.” I have always had a love for paper. Barbara has made me more curious about ways to work with paper, whether it be 2D or 3D, painted, folded, or scratched. In my classroom, paper is not just a tool to be drawn on.

Barbara’s works are dear to me. I value them because they have been learning tools for me and my students. What I have learned from Barbara, I hope to pass on to the next generation.

Animal Mask, 2018, by Imani Bennett, as a sophomore Visual Arts major at Creative Arts Morgan Village Academy, Camden, New Jersey.

BARBARA BULLOCK: FEARLESS VISION 85

Fan, date unknown (Collection of the artist)

Selected Chronology

Panther (detail), 2014, from the series Bitches Brew (Collection of the artist)

SELECTED CHRONOLOGY

This exhibition focuses on the intersection of Barbara Bullock’s artistic career and teaching. For this reason, this selected chronology lists the teaching workshops and residencies led by the artist. A more extensive chronology that includes the artist’s group and solo exhibitions can be found in Barbara Bullock: Chasing After Spirits (La Salle University Art Museum, 2016), edited by Klare Scarborough.

EDUCATION

1938

Born in North Philadelphia, the youngest of three siblings, sister Delores and brother Jack

1956

Graduates from Germantown High School, Philadelphia

1956–58

Takes classes at Fleisher Art Memorial, Philadelphia

1963–66

Takes classes at Hussian School of Art, Philadelphia

ARTIST RESIDENCIES, WORKSHOPS, AND COMMUNITY ART PROJECTS

1966–71

Teaching activity in North Philadelphia and Germantown

Barbara Bullock, 2023 for Pandora’s BoxX Project, by Grace Roselli © 2023 Grace Roselli / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

1971–75

Director, Art Department, Model Cities Cultural Arts Programs, Ile Ife Black Humanitarian Center, Philadelphia

1977–79

Art teacher, Brandywine Graphics, Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) program, Visual Artists in Public Schools Project, Philadelphia through the PA Council on the Arts

1980

Artist residency, Brandywine Graphics, Philadelphia

Storyteller and children’s mural project, Girls’ Club of Nicetown/Tioga, Philadelphia , through the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts

1980–88

Associate artist, Germantown Workshop, Prints in Progress, Philadelphia

1988–93

Head artist, Germantown Workshop, Prints in Progress, Philadelphia

ABOVE: Bullock (at right) and her friend Joanne, 1948. Courtesy of Barbara Bullock. RIGHT: Bullock with students from the Ile-Ife Black Humanitarian Center visiting the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, mid 1970s. Courtesy of Barbara Bullock.

1989

Artist residency, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts: Valley Forge Intermediate School, Wayne, Pennsylvania

Artist residency, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts: Shippensburg School System, Shippensburg

Artist residency, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts: Pennsylvania Prison Society, Philadelphia

1990

Artist residency, Delaware State Arts Council: Richardson Park Learning Center, Wilmington

Artist residency, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts: Muhlenberg Primary School, Laureldale, Pennsylvania

1992

PATHS/PRISM Learning Thru the Arts Program, Philadelphia

1993

Artist residency, Delaware State Arts Council: William Henry Middle School, Dover, Delaware

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: Bullock, her parents Trudy and Jack Bullock, an unidentified couple, Bullock’s sister Delores (in plaid), and singer and performer Lola Falana (Bullock’s childhood friend) at the Latin Casino, Philadelphia, 1959. Courtesy of Barbara Bullock.

1994

Artist residency, Delaware State Arts Council: Maple Lane Elementary School, Claymont, Delaware

Artist residency, Village of the Arts and Humanities, Philadelphia

1995

Artist residency, Davis Elementary School, Camden

Artist residency, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts: Pollack Elementary School, Philadelphia

Artist residency, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts: Cayuga Elementary School, Philadelphia

Artist residency, Perkins Center for the Arts, Moorestown, New Jersey

Artist residency, Roberts School, Moorestown, New Jersey

Artist residency, Village of the Arts and Humanities, Philadelphia

1996

Artist residency, Davis Elementary School, Camden

Artist residency, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts: Wayne Elementary School, Wayne, Pennsylvania

Artist residency, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts: Farrell Elementary School, Philadelphia

Niger River journey, 1999. Courtesy of Barbara Bullock.

Watermelon, 2008/2009 (Private collection)

Artist residency, Perkins Center for the Arts, Moorestown, New Jersey

Artist residency, Roberts School, Moorestown, New Jersey

Artist residency, Village of the Arts and Humanities, Philadelphia

1997

Artist residency, Center in the Park for Older Adults, Philadelphia

Artist residency, Pastorius Elementary School, Philadelphia

Learning through Art, Guggenheim Museum

Children’s Program, New York

Hunt Art Futures Program, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Artist residency, Perkins Center for the Arts, Moorestown, New Jersey

Artist residency, Village of the Arts and Humanities, Philadelphia

Artist residency, William Penn High School, New Castle, Delaware

1998

Artist residency, Center in the Park for Older Adults, Philadelphia

Artist residency, Pastorius Elementary School, Philadelphia

Artist residency, Davis Elementary School, Camden

Artist residency, Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, Camden

Artist residency, Oak Valley Elementary School, Wenonah, New Jersey

Artist residency, Roberts Elementary School, Moorestown, New Jersey

Artist residency, Simon Gratz High School, Philadelphia

Hunt Art Futures Program, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Artist residency, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts: Center in the Park for Older Adults, Philadelphia

Artist residency, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts: Powel Elementary School, Philadelphia

Artist residency, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts: Strawberry Mansion, Philadelphia

Artist residency, Perkins Center for the Arts, Moorestown, New Jersey

Artist residency, Village of the Arts and Humanities, Philadelphia

1999

Bullock with her sister Delores and brother Jack at Four Artists of Distinction: Martina Johnson-Allen, Barbara Bullock, Charles Burwell, and James Dupree, African American Museum in Philadelphia, 2002. Courtesy of Barbara Bullock.

Artist residency, Central High School, Philadelphia

Artist residency, Delaware State Arts Council: Our Lady of Fatimah, New Castle

Artist residency, Family Alliance Charter School, Willingboro, New Jersey

Artist residency, Parkway School, Mount Laurel, New Jersey

Artist residency, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts: Center in the Park for Older Adults, Philadelphia

2000

Artist residency, Arts Horizons, Rutgers University, Camden

Artist residency, Williams Center for the Arts, Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania

Artist residency, Roebling Elementary School, Roebling, New Jersey

Artist residency, Southwest Community Enrichment Art Center, Philadelphia

2001

Artist residency, Arts Horizons, Rutgers University, Camden

Artist residency, Black Family Reunion Cultural Center, Philadelphia

Teaching fellowship, Hunt Art Futures Program, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Artist residency, Perkins Center for the Arts, Moorestown, New Jersey

2002

Artist residency, Arts Horizons, Rutgers University, Camden

Artist residency, Dobson School, Philadelphia

Artist residency, Leap Charter School, Camden

Artist residency, Perkins Center for the Arts, Moorestown, New Jersey

Arts and humanities teacher workshop, Perkins Center for the Arts, Moorestown, New Jersey

Artist residency, Noyes Museum of Art, Oceanville, New Jersey

Artist residency, Saint Cecilia School, Camden

2003

Artist residency, Arts Horizons, Rutgers University, Camden

Artist residency, Benjamin Franklin Middle School, Ridgewood, New Jersey

Artist residency, Lanning Square School, Camden

Artist residency, Perkins Center for the Arts, Moorestown, New Jersey

Artist residency, Noyes Museum of Art, Oceanville, New Jersey

Bullock and her friend Frances Turner in Senegal, traveling through the Educators for Africa program. Turner organized the Kenya Project, raising funding to build two classroom buildings for the Esibembe School where she taught, 1996. Courtesy of Barbara Bullock.

2004

Artist residency, Arts Horizons, Rutgers University, Camden

Artist residency, Perkins Center for the Arts, Moorestown, New Jersey

2005

Artist residency, Arts Horizons, Rutgers University, Camden

Artist residency, Cultural Quilt Project, William Meredith School, Fleisher Art Memorial, Philadelphia

Artist residency, InterGeneration Art Program, Maple Wood Manor, Philadelphia

Artist residency, Parents as Advocates, Counselors, and Teachers (PACT) Program, Wilmington

Artist residency, Perkins Center for the Arts, Moorestown, New Jersey

Artist residency, Winter Poetry and Prose Getaway, Murphy Writing Seminars, Cape May, New Jersey

2006

Artist residency, Arts Horizons, Rutgers University, Camden

Artist residency, Perkins Center for the Arts, Moorestown, New Jersey

Artist residency, Swarthmore Rutledge School, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania

Artist residency, Winter Poetry and Prose Getaway, Murphy Writing Seminars, Cape May, New Jersey

BARBARA BULLOCK: FEARLESS VISION

TOP: Altar, 2007 (Collection of the artist) BOTTOM: Detail of Altar seat. These are photographs of the installation of Ubiquitous Presence: Selected Works by Barbara Bullock at List Gallery, Swarthmore College, September 15–October 30, Photograph by Joe Painter

Bullock and artist/ architect Gary Smalls at the Odunde Festival, 2013. Courtesy of Barbara Bullock.

Bullock and artist Nannette Acker Clark, at Bullock’s first retrospective exhibition, Spirit Rain at the African American Museum in Philadelphia 1988. Courtesy of Barbara Bullock.

Artist residency, Young Audiences, Florence Township, New Jersey; Maurice River Township, New Jersey; and Woodland County Day School, Bridgeton, New Jersey

2007

Artist residency, Arts Horizons, Rutgers University, Camden

Artist residency, Capital Area School for the Arts, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

Artist residency, Perkins Center for the Arts, Moorestown, New Jersey

2008

Artist residency, Arts Horizons, Rutgers University, Camden

Artist residency, New Jersey State Council on the Arts: Trenton Community Charter School, Trenton

Mask Making Workshop, Zing Family Festival, Woodmere Art Museum

2009

Artist residency, Arts Horizons, Rutgers University, Camden

Artist residency, New Jersey State Council on the Arts: Trenton Community Chart School, Trenton

2010

Artist residency, Arts Horizons, Rutgers University, Camden

PUBLIC ART PROJECTS AND COMMISSIONS

1990

Releasing the Energies, Balances the Spirits, an installation at the Philadelphia International Airport, Terminal B

1993

Vacant lot design for Jazz Park, a community-based arts pilot program in North Philadelphia

2001

Semi-finalist for the City of Philadelphia’s Percent for Art Program, Kimmel Center for the Arts

2004

Oshun, a painting created for ODUNDE, Inc. to celebrate the organization’s thirtieth anniversary.

2008

El Dancers, an installation on the Market-Frankford Line, 46th Street Station for SEPTA’s Art in Transit Program

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

African American Museum, Philadelphia

Howard University, Washington, DC

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia

Petrucci Foundation, New Jersey

Philadelphia International Airport, Philadelphia

SEPTA Art in Transit, Philadelphia

Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia

Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Detroit

Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick

TRAVEL 1982

Torremolinos, Spain

1981

Haiti 1982

Negril, Jamaica

1983

Salvador da Bahia Brazil; Negril, Jamaica

1984

Mexico 1985

Acapulco, Mexico

1996

Senegal 1987

Marrakesh, Morocco

1989

Egypt: Cairo, Valley of the Kings, Nubia, Luxor; Nile River

1995

Accra, Ghana; Côte d’Ivoire

1996

Mali: Bamako, Mopti, Ségou, Djenne, Timbuktu

1997

South Africa: Capetown, Johannesburg, Ndebele

1998

Ethiopia: Omo Valley, Addis Ababa, Lalibella

1999

Niger: Sahara Desert, Agadez

2003

Mali: Timbuktu, Bamako, Ségou, Djenne, Mopti, Dogon Country; Niger River

BARBARA BULLOCK: FEARLESS VISION 99

The Origin of Ola, 2022 (Collection of the artist)

Works in the Exhibition

WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION

All works are by Barbara Bullock (American, born 1938), unless otherwise indicated.

Figurative Forms, c. 1978

Fabric, beads, and shells, 12 x 6 x 3 in. and 8 x 4 x 2 1/2 in.

Collection of the artist

Jasmine Gardens, 1980

Ink on papyrus, 18 x 24 in.

Collection of the artist

Jasmine Gardens, 1980

Pen and ink on paper, 18 1/8 x 24 5/8 in.

Collection of the artist

Jasmine Gardens, 1980

Pen and ink on papyrus 24 x 18 in.

Jasmine Gardens, 1980

Pen and ink on watercolor paper, 13 3/4 x 10 3/4 in.

Collection of the artist

Remembrance, 1985

Acrylic on canvas, 74 x 40 in.

From the series Initiation

Woodmere Art Museum: Partial gift of the artist and museum purchase with funds generously provided by Robert Kohler, Osagie Imasogie, and Jim Nixon, 2020

The Whirling Dance, 1985

Gouache and gold leaf on watercolor paper, 49 x 68 1/2 in.

From the series Chasing After Spirits

Alligator Puppet, c. 1980–83

Gouache on paper, 26 1/2 x 13 in.

Private collection

African Garden Pop-Up Book, 1990

Gouache on paper, 11 1/2 x 22 x 9 in. (open); 12 x 11 1/2 x 1/2 in. (closed)

Private collection

Studies of Dancers, for Releasing the Energies, Balances the Spirits, 1990

Terminal B Public Art Process Commission, Philadelphia International Airport

BARBARA BULLOCK: FEARLESS VISION 103

Transformation II, 2019 (Collection of the artist)

Black Madonna, 2004 (Private collection)

Leopard study, 1990s Ink and wash on paper, 8 1/4 x 10 1/2 in.

Collection of the artist

Leopard study, 1990s Ink on paper, 8 1/4 x 10 1/2 in.

Collection of the artist

Healer, 1994

Gouache and matte medium on watercolor paper, 63 1/2 x 28 in.

From the series Healer

Promised gift of Elaine Finkelstein

Healing Altar, 1994

Gouache on watercolor paper, 72 x 36 in.

From the series Healer

Collection of the artist

I Go There All the Time (Spirit House 3), 1995

Gouache on paper, 51 3/4 x 31 3/4 x 5 1/2 in. (framed)

Collection of Lewis Tanner Moore

Water Bearers, 1996

Watercolor on paper, 31 1/4 x 22 3/4 in.

From the series Journey

Collection of Lewis Tanner Moore

Child in the Land of the Spirits, 1997

Gouache collage on heavy watercolor paper, 33 1/2 x 15 1/2 in.

From the series Child in the Land of the Spirits

Collection of the artist

Lizard Spirit, 1997

Gouache collage on heavy watercolor paper, 51 x 23 in.

From the series Child in the Land of the Spirits

Museum purchase with funding generously provided by Robert and Frances Kohler, 2023

Snake, 1997

Gouache on paper on Plexiglas, 53 x 4 x 1/2 in.

from the series Child in the Land of the Spirits

Collection of Judith Heggestad

Water Spirit for Yemaja, 1997

Gouache collage on heavy watercolor paper, 28 x 49 in.

Collection of Lewis Tanner Moore

Healing Feeling, 1998

Acrylic paint, matte medium, and gold leaf on watercolor paper, 50 x 41 in.

Woodmere Art Museum: Museum purchase with funds generously provided by Frances and Robert Kohler, 2020

Untitled (Ethiopia), 1998

Watercolor and ink on paper, 10 3/8 x 10 1/2 in.

Collection of the artist

Mirror, c. 2000

Mixed media, 14 1/2 x 13 1/4 x 1 3/4 in.

Collection of the artist

BARBARA BULLOCK: FEARLESS VISION 105

Healing Altar, 1994, From the series Healer (Collection of the artist)

The Boy in the Market, Mali, West Africa, 2003

Digital print, 11 x 14 in.

Collection of the artist

Black Madonna, 2004

Gouache on paper on board, 24 x 23 x 1 in.

Private collection

Egyptian Board Game, 2005

Acrylic and beads on wood, 9 1/4 x 11 3/4 x 3/4 in. (board); 4 x 4 x 2 in. (game pieces box)

Private collection

Time Capsule project, 2005, for Art Horizons Residency, Teacher Workshop, Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey

Gouache on watercolor paper, 50 x 10 x 7 in.

Collection of the artist

Altar for Yemaja, c. 2005

Mixed media and wood, 33 x 27 x 4 in. (open)

Collection of the artist

Child Dreams of Snakes in the Grass, c. 2005

Gouache collage on heavy watercolor paper, 39 x 20 in.

Woodmere Art Museum: Museum purchase with funding generously provided by Robert and Frances Kohler, 2023

Altar, 2007

Mixed media, 80 x 68 x 39 1/2 in.

Collection of the artist

Box project, 2007

Acrylic paint on wood, 12 1/4 x 14 1/2 x 11 in.

Collection of the artist

Male (portrait #8), 2022 (Collection of the artist)

Magic Theater 2: New Orleans Magic, 2007

Acrylic paint on matte medium on watercolor paper, mixed media, 28 x 23 x 14 in.

From the series Katrina

Collection of the artist

Soldier Fan, 2007

Acrylic paint, watercolor paper, transparency, wood, mixed media, 13 x 22 in. (frame)

From the series Chasing After Spirits

Collection of the artist

Used Furniture, 2007

Acrylic paint and matte medium on watercolor paper, 51 x 46 1/2 in. (framed)

From the series Katrina

Woodmere Art Museum: Museum purchase with funding generously provided by Robert and Frances Kohler, 2023

Study for El Dancers, installation at SEPTA 46th Street El station, 2008

Gouache on watercolor paper, 36 x 144 in. (approx.)

Collection of Lewis Tanner Moore

Watermelon, 2008/2009

Gouache on paper, collage, 6 7/8 x 20 in.

Private collection

Watermelon Café Pop-Up Book, 2009

Gouache on paper, 16 x 21 3/4 x 2 1/2 in. (open); 15 1/4 x 11 1/2 x 1/4 in. (closed)

Private collection

Game Board and Pieces, 2010

Acrylic paint, wood, and mixed media, 25 x 20 x 1 in.

Collection of the artist

BARBARA BULLOCK: FEARLESS VISION 107

Jasmine Gardens, 1980 (Collection of the artist)

WOODMERE ART MUSEUM

Chasing After Spirits 2, 2011

(Collection of the artist)

BARBARA BULLOCK: FEARLESS VISION 109

Straight Water Blues, 2014–22, From the series Straight Water Blues (Collection of the artist)

Healer, 1994, from the series Healer (Promised gift of Elaine Finkelstein)

Bitches Brew, 2014

Chasing After Spirits 1, 2011

Acrylic paint and matte medium on watercolor paper, 80 x 93 x 13 in.

Collection of the artist

Chasing After Spirits 2, 2011

Acrylic paint and matte medium on watercolor paper, 74 x 34 x 12 in.

Collection of the artist

Stories My Grandmother Told Me, 2012

Mixed media, 72 x 54 in.

Courtesy of the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art

Trayvon Martin, Most Precious Blood, 2013–14

Acrylic paint and matte medium on watercolor paper, 62 x 41 x 14 in.

Woodmere Art Museum: Museum purchase, 2014

Acrylic paint and matte medium on watercolor paper, 48 x 72 in. (framed)

From the series Bitches Brew

Woodmere Art Museum: Gift of the Nixon family on the behalf of James V. Nixon, Jr. in honor of Barbara Bullock, 2023

Panther study, 2014

Ink on paper, 11 x 7 1/2 in.

From the series Bitches Brew

Collection of the artist

Panther, 2014

Gouache on heavy watercolor paper, 40 x 56 in.

From the series Bitches Brew

Collection of the artist

Straight Water Blues, 2014–22

Acrylic paint and matte medium on watercolor paper, 35 x 21 x 7 in.

From the series Straight Water Blues

Collection of the artist

Transformation II, 2019

Acrylic paint and matte medium on watercolor paper, 62 x 57 x 19 in.

Collection of the artist

Young Girl, 2021

Ink on paper, 18 x 15 in. (framed)

Collection of Klare and William Scarborough

George Floyd (portrait #7), 2022

Acrylic paint and matte medium on watercolor paper, 22 x 19 1/2 x 1/2 in.

Collection of the artist

BARBARA BULLOCK: FEARLESS VISION 111

Soldier Fan, 2007, from the series Chasing After Spirits (Collection of the artist)

The Boy in the Market, Mali, West Africa, 2003, by Barbara Bullock (Collection of the artist)

Spirit Rain 1988, from the series Initiation (Collection of the African American Museum in Philadelphia)

WOODMERE ART MUSEUM

Male (portrait #8), 2022

Acrylic paint and matte medium on watercolor paper, 22 x 15 3/4 x 1 in.

Collection of the artist

The Origin of Ola, 2022

Acrylic paint and matte medium on watercolor paper, 28 1/4 x 17 1/2 x 1 3/4 in.

Collection of the artist

The Origin of Regina (portrait #12), 2022

Acrylic paint and matte medium on watercolor paper, 17 1/2 x 21 1/2 in.

Collection of the artist

Otherworldly 1 (portrait #13), 2022

Acrylic paint and matte medium on watercolor paper, 23 x 16 1/4 x 1/4 in.

Woodmere Art Museum: Museum purchase with funding generously provided by Robert and Frances Kohler, 2023

Saturn, for Sun Ra and His Magic Musicians (portrait #4), 2022

Acrylic paint and matte medium on watercolor paper, 26 x 26 x 5 in.

Collection of the artist

Untitled (portrait #6), 2022

Acrylic paint and matte medium on watercolor paper, 25 7/8 x 19 7/8 x 2 in.

Collection of the artist

Fan, date unknown

Gouache on paper, paint stir stick, 20 x 5 1/2 in.

Collection of the artist

Mask, date unknown Mixed media, 43 x 5 1/2 x 4 in.

Private collection

BARBARA BULLOCK: FEARLESS VISION 113

WORKS PRODUCED AT ILE IFE BLACK HUMANITARIAN CENTER

These works were made in the Ile Ife classrooms by Barbara Bullock, Charles Searles, other instructors, and students. All are from Bullock’s collection.

Portrait of Student at Ile-Ife, c. 1973 (Collection of the artist)

BARBARA BULLOCK: FEARLESS VISION 115

Clarence Morgan, faculty member (Woodmere Art Museum: Gift of Barbara Bullock, 2023)

Student work (Woodmere Art Museum: Gift of Barbara Bullock, 2023)

Charles Searles, faculty member, 1971, Dedicated to Barbara Bullock (Collection of Barbara Bullock)

WOODMERE ART MUSEUM

Barbara Bullock: Fearless Vision opening day at Woodmere, September 23, 2023. Photograph by Darryl Moran

BARBARA BULLOCK: FEARLESS VISION 117

©2023 Woodmere Art Museum. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher.

Catalogue designed by Barb Barnett and Kelly Edwards, and edited by Gretchen Dykstra, with assistance from Irene Elias.

Photography by Jack Ramsdale unless otherwise noted.

Front cover: Transformation II (detail), 2019 (Collection of the artist)

WOODMERE ART MUSEUM

Woodmere Art Museum receives state arts funding support through a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Bullock’s cats Kush (at left) and Mali (at right). Courtesy of the artist