Romare Bearden @ Cincinnati Art Museum - Something Over Something Else

Something Over Something Else: Romare Bearden’s Profile Series
Cincinnati Art Museum
February 28 – May 24, 2020

The Cincinnati Art Museum will present “Something Over Something Else”: Romare Bearden’s Profile Series, an exhibition that brings together more than 30 works from Romare Bearden’s trailblazing series for the first time since its debut nearly 40 years ago.

The Cincinnati Art Museum is one of only two museums to display the exhibition, which opened at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta on September 14, 2019 and will be on view until February 2, 2020.

The pieces in Something Over Something Else appear in a chronological sequence, each accompanied by a title and short text written by Romare Bearden for the original exhibitions of this series, which were presented in New York in 1978 and 1981. These poetic and poignant narratives, written in collaboration with his friend, the writer Albert Murray, and shown in tandem with the collages, help lead viewers through Romare Bearden’s story as he wished to share it.

The development of the exhibition was inspired by a key acquisition by the High Museum of Art: Profile/Part II, The Thirties: Artist with Painting & Model (1981), the culminating work in the series and one of Romare Bearden’s only known self-portraits. The Cincinnati Art Museum presents the exhibition as the owner of another collage from the series, Profile/Part I, The Twenties: Pittsburgh Memories, Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket (1978).

Romare Bearden began this series after the publication of a feature-length biography published about him in 1977 by Calvin Tomkins as part of The New Yorker magazine’s “Profiles” series. The piece brought national attention to Bearden, who had experienced growing acclaim in the art world since the late 1960s. To Romare Bearden, the experience was so profound that it gave rise to this autobiographical body of work exploring the intricacies of memory and the way a life unfolds in history.

“Something Over Something Else” is sequenced in two parts. “Part I, The Twenties” plumbs memories from the artist’s youth in rural North Carolina and in industrial Pittsburgh. “Part II, The Thirties” celebrates his early adult life and artistic growth in New York City, surrounded by the vibrancy and innovation of the Harlem Renaissance. It also tells the story of a life bridging disparate experiences: rural and urban, rustic and metropolitan, North and South. Romare Bearden interweaves his own biography with the experiences of African Americans of the time, when many were following the path of the Great Migration, enduring and driving tremendous cultural transition. The collages explore the nature of memory and the passage of time, moving beyond autobiography to explore American history, cultural identity and human experience.

“To see this stunning historic series brought together is an opportunity not to be missed,” says Julie Aronson, Cincinnati Art Museum’s Curator of American Paintings, Sculpture and Drawings. “Bearden’s work defies easy categorization—he moved gracefully between abstraction and figuration with exceptional creativity and drew upon so many different traditions. Walking through this exhibition, with its combination of poetic images and words, is like having the artist whispering in your ear. It is an extraordinarily moving experience.”

The exhibition title, “Something Over Something Else,” is a phrase Romare Bearden used to describe his own creative process. “You put something down. Then you put something else with it, and then you see how that works, and maybe you try something else and so on, and the picture grows in that way,” said Romare Bearden. This description of the nature of his work with collage, painting and mixed media also echoes the improvisational nature of jazz, the music that Bearden so greatly admired.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a variety of public programming starting with a lecture by exhibition curators Stephanie Heydt, the High Museum of Art’s Margaret and Terry Stent Curator of American Art, and Robert G. O’Meally, Columbia University’s Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature, on Thursday, February 27 at 7 p.m. The museum will host an Art After Dark celebration of the exhibition on February 28, 5–9 p.m. A Staged Reading of "Joe Turner’s Come and Gone" by August Wilson in collaboration with Playhouse in the Park will take place on April 16 at 7 p.m. Additional programs will be posted on the museum’s website.

This exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support is provided by the Andrew Wyeth Foundation for American Art. Cincinnati’s presentation is sponsored by LPK and support was provided by Eric & Jan-Michele Kearney.

Cincinnati Art Museum
953 Eden Park Drive | Cincinnati, OH 45202
cincinnatiartmuseum.org

John Dowell @ Laurence Miller Gallery, NYC - Cotton: Symbol Of The Forgotten

John Dowell, Cotton: Symbol Of The Forgotten
Laurence Miller Gallery, New York
December 5, 2019 – January 25, 2020

Laurence Miller Gallery presents the New York City debut of John Dowell’s COTTON: Symbol of the Forgotten. John Dowell blends a unique mixture of spiritualism, historical awareness, racial angst and deft technique to create photographic works that inspire the viewer to recognize the injustices imposed upon the black community, especially in New York, over the past 400 years.

Throughout the exhibition, featuring more than two dozen photographic works made between 2016 and 2018, John Dowell weaves together – both literally and figuratively –complex historical threads addressing issues of slavery, community, and memory, all intertwined with cotton.  Several of the works are large panoramas, reinforcing the idea of the vastness of cotton across the southern American landscape, as well as the long-term cultural and financial impact that cotton had on the African-Americans who harvested it for their white masters.

In All Angels Church of Seneca, John Dowell utilizes diverse digital techniques to situate one of the early churches in New York City’s Seneca Village, a once thriving African-American community founded in 1825, within view of the modern apartment buildings that today form the western border of Central Park. Seneca Village was razed in 1857 by eminent domain to make way for that Park.

In his installation Lost in Cotton, the centerpiece of the exhibit, John Dowell has constructed a labyrinth of floor-to-ceiling fabric panels, covered with photographic images of cotton plants, to echo his grandmother’s frightening childhood recollection of getting lost in the tall fields of cotton, a thorn-filled maze ripping into her skin and with no apparent way to escape.

Cotton was at the heart of the burgeoning New York garment industry and economy, and in Bursting Out and The Long Road, John Dowell overwhelms Wall Street, site of an historic slave market, with cotton. In Sending the Message, John Dowell shows the spiritual side of cotton, with cotton balls ascending from the church altar like rising angels in Renaissance paintings.

"Cotton is our symbol," John Dowell says. "That's black people in this country. You just mention cotton, you know what I mean, and for those of us who are a little aware, all the torture, all of that stuff — it's there. And it makes you stop and think. That's why I'm doing the cotton. I couldn't think of a better symbol."

In February 2018, the African American Museum in Philadelphia presented John Dowell’s Cotton: The Soft, Dangerous Beauty of the Past with extensive critical response. In HYPERALLERGIC, Megan Voeller wrote “Dowell’s images don’t recount stories as much as serve as vivid signposts of the stories’ hidden presence.”

John Dowell is a Philadelphia native and Professor Emeritus of Printmaking at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. He has worked as an artist for over four decades, and his prints, paintings and photographs have been featured in 50 one-person exhibitions. His artwork is represented in the permanent collections of 70 museum and public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; the Houston Museum of Fine Arts; the Fogg Museum of Harvard University; the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design; and the Lehigh University Museum.

LAURENCE MILLER GALLERY
521 West 26th Street 5th floor, New York City 10001
www.laurencemillergallery.com