David Driskell @ High Museum of Art, Atlanta - Icons of Nature and History

David Driskell: Icons of Nature and History 

High Museum of Art, Atlanta 

Through 9 May 2021 

DAVID C. DRISKELL (American, 1931–2020) 

Self-Portrait, 1953 

Oil on board 

Collection of the Estate of David C. Driskell, Maryland 

© Estate of David C. Driskell. 

Courtesy DC Moore Gallery, New York 

Photograph by Luc Demers 

The High Museum of Art presents the exhibition “David Driskell: Icons of Nature and History,” celebrating the breadth of the renowned American artist’s oeuvre and marking the first major survey of his work since his death in April 2020. David C. Driskell (1931-2020) is recognized for his painting and printmaking practices, often characterized by the use of collage, which combined the Black American experience with his keen observations of the American landscape and the imagery and aesthetic innovations of the African diaspora. In partnership with Portland Museum of Art, Maine, the exhibition brings approximately 60 artworks together to present highlights of David C. Driskell’s career. After the High (Feb. 6-May 9, 2021) the exhibition will travel to the Portland Museum of Art (June 19-Sept. 12, 2021) and The Phillips Collection (Oct. 6, 2021-Jan. 9, 2022).

“Beyond David’s prolific career as an international artist and scholar, he was a dear friend of the Museum, in fact a life trustee.  Without question, his work, as well as his generosity of spirit and intellect, have been transformational for the field,” said Rand Suffolk, the High’s Nancy and Holcombe T. Green, Jr., director. “We are honored to celebrate his incredible legacy through this exhibition.” Mark Bessire, the Judy and Leonard Lauder director of the Portland Museum of Art, added, “This exhibition is a unique opportunity to gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of David’s widespread influence. The contemporary significance of subjects that David explored throughout his career are more salient than ever, and we are looking forward to highlighting this remarkable American artist.”

The High has a long history of collaboration with David C. Driskell, who in addition to his work as an artist was one of the world’s leading authorities on the history of African American art. In 1977, the High hosted Driskell’s landmark exhibition “Two Centuries of Black American Art.” In 2005, the Museum established the David C. Driskell Prize, the first national award to honor and celebrate contributions to the field of African American art, including distinctions for both artists and scholars. The most recent recipient is artist Jamal Cyrus, with past honorees including Amy Sherald, Naima J. Keith, Mark Bradford, Andrea Barnwell Brownlee, Rashid Johnson and Valerie Cassel Oliver. Funds raised through the prize’s annual dinner have supported the acquisition of 48 works by African American artists for the High’s collection.

“What remains steadfast in Driskell’s work is a commitment to his ‘icons,’ which elevate the mind and the spirit above that which exists in the physical world,” said guest curator Julie McGee, associate professor of Africana studies and art history at the University of Delaware. “Among the many gifts Driskell bequeaths to us is the delight of seeing the world through his eyes, and it is a journey of immeasurable beauty and grace.”

Added Michael Rooks, the High’s Wieland Family curator of modern and contemporary art, “Driskell’s command of vibrant color and line, and his attentiveness to what he called ‘the symbolic presence of form,’ endowed his subjects with a kind of frisson like that of an electrical charge, which made his work esthetically vigorous, bold and spirited.”

“Icons of Nature and History” is the first posthumous survey of Driskell’s work, spanning seven decades of his artistry, from the 1950s to the 2000s, with works drawn from museums, private collections and the artist’s estate. The exhibition includes key works from the High’s collection, including one of Driskell’s self-portraits. In addition, the exhibition follows the course of his career, from Howard University and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture to Talladega College and his studio in Falmouth, Maine, and features recurring motifs such as still lifes, pine trees, aspects of the natural world, African masks, and iconographies drawn from his Christian and Southern roots and the Black experience. Works in the exhibition, including paintings, drawings and prints, will reveal Driskell’s mastery of materials and his indefatigable spirit of invention, which led to the development of a hybrid technique he called “collage-painting.”

DAVID C. DRISKELL (1931-2020)

A Georgia native, David C. Driskell graduated from Howard University in 1955 and received a Master of Fine Arts from The Catholic University of America in 1962. In 1953, he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. A lifelong educator, Driskell honed his teaching repertoire at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) between 1955 and 1976, teaching at Talladega College, Howard University and Fisk University. From 1977 through 1998, he taught at the University of Maryland, College Park, which is now the home of the David C. Driskell Center, an exhibition space and research institute that houses Driskell’s archive. In addition to a growing collection of African American art, it serves as a study center for the history of African American art and art of the African diaspora. While Driskell built a distinguished career as a scholar, he simultaneously maintained an active and distinguished artistic practice, regularly presenting his work in both solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries including the High, the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, The Phillips Collection, Tate Modern (London), DC Moore Gallery and Kunsthal KAde (Amsterdam).

Exhibition Catalogue

“David Driskell: Icons of Nature and History” is accompanied by an expansive and fully illustrated catalog of approximately 224 pages, published by Rizzoli Skira. The book will feature a lead essay by Julie L. McGee with contributions by Renée Maurer, Sarah Workneh and Katie Sonnenborn, Shaun Leonardo, Keith Morrison, Jessica May, Thelma Golden, Lowery Stokes Sims, Richard Powell, and Michael Rooks. It also includes a selection of David Driskell's writings, edited by Richard Powell, and a timeline assembled by Monet Timmons.

HIGH MUSEUM OF ART

1280 Peachtree Street, N.E., Atlanta, GA 30309

www.high.org

David Driskell @ DC Moore Gallery, NYC - Resonance, Paintings 1965 - 2002

David Driskell: Resonance, Paintings 1965 - 2002
DC Moore Gallery, New York
Through June 8, 2019

DAVID DRISKELL

Ghetto Wall #2, 1970

Oil, acrylic and collage on linen

60 x 50 inches
© David Driskell, Courtesy DC Moore Gallery, New York

DC Moore Gallery presents David Driskell: Resonance, Paintings 1965-2002. David Driskell, soon to be 88, is a legendary African American artist and art historian. As an artist, scholar, and curator, he has made substantial contributions to these fields that have changed the way we think about American art. His paintings and collages unite a strong modernist impulse with his personal vision and memory. Marked by the artist’s abiding color sensibilities, his work bears the imprint of a turbulent era, a return to nature, and David Driskell’s synthesis of the European, American, and African art forms he knew firsthand.

The years between the March on Washington in 1963 and the end of the Vietnam War in 1973, galvanized by the Civil Rights Movement and often called the “turbulent decade,” represent a lived experience for David Driskell. Many of David Driskell’s works of the late 1960s through the 1970s clearly reflect the era of the Black Arts Movement and the Afrocentric impulses it advanced. But they are first and foremost individualized, personal responses by an artist of the era, not one constrained by it. In 1966, James Porter described David Driskell’s aesthetic responses as having the effect “of prayer and of emotional release instead of despair,” noting that, “such paintings are directional signals to action for those who…understand their symbolic language.” Equally important to his iconography were the first trips taken to the African continent, between 1969 and 1972. David Driskell returned with a deep appreciation and respect for African artistic traditions and iconography which began appearing in his work “as sites of memory rather than intrinsic forms,” as art historian Julie McGee has noted. David Driskell absorbs, distills, and recycles iconic African art forms into honorific personal visions – flattened, decorated, and resurfaced in his signature style, color and calligraphy. Yoruba Forms #5 (1969) exemplifies this response: an iconic, Christ-like figure, framed by a celestial orb, is universal and particular in its meaning. The conceptualization recalls David Driskell’s Behold Thy Son (1965, Collection of the National Museum of African American History and Culture), a tribute to Emmett Till, and Black Crucifixion (1964). A commanding image Shango (1972) reimagines a Yoruba ritual object, a carved dance wand (oshe shango) as a medieval or byzantine period icon, syncretic in meaning as well as form.

While works with overt protest are rare in David Driskell’s oeuvre, he found compelling reasons to initiate several works of sociopolitical commentary during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Important compositions in this vein include Ghetto Wall #2 (1970). David Driskell imagines a painting-within-a-painting: a mural that covers an inner-city brick wall, a distinctly American phenomenon that arose with the Civil Rights movement, as a community effort to counter blight in stressed neighborhoods. The form of the X appears, a mark symbolic in this work of Civil Rights leader Malcolm X, as David Driskell himself has noted. He also alludes to the American flag, its stripes appearing in two places on the canvas, and which also prefigure the African ribbon forms he would soon incorporate into other works.

DAVID DRISKELL

Current Forms: Yoruba Circle, 1969

Acrylic on canvas

44 1/4 x 34 inches
© David Driskell, Courtesy DC Moore Gallery, New York

The Black Arts Movement fostered a powerful trajectory toward Afrocentric subject matter in American art at the time. Not all artists followed this stream, but it was one David Driskell found absorbing. During his years teaching at Fisk University, expressive Blackness was in vogue, and David Driskell was fully at home in this arena, using African and African American themes seamlessly and often syncretically. He shared with Romare Bearden, whom he invited to Fisk in 1973, a mutual devotion to an iconography that was expressive of Black culture and fundamentally classic, as timeless and reusable as any within the art historical canon. Both artists created distinctive iconographies that drew upon African and American history, myth, and experience. Collage paintings by Driskell such as Jazz Singer (Lady of Leisure, Fox), from a 1970s series centered on Black womanhood, expand the representational scope of American art.

David Driskell was influenced by natural landscapes as well as urban landscapes. It was in 1980 that David Driskell completed a Yaddo residency which was particularly regenerative as it afforded him a chance to now harness the expressive, enduring spirituality that could be found in abstraction. These later works reveal David Driskell’s longtime affinity to textured collage elements and calligraphic mark making. Now, through layered cloth or torn paper strips and vibrant colors, he conveys multiple cultural and natural allusions, such as Bahian masking traditions. Bahian performers wear layers of colored cloth strips to convey prestige, wealth, and power as they dramatically oscillate along with the dancer’s dramatic movements. The bold, frenetic brushwork and dynamic color in Bahian Ribbons (1987) is a prime example of his later work echoing that tradition. The cloth strips are also meant to emulate the verticality of trees, which he views as symbols of shared histories. In the artist’s words, “Trees by their very nature connect past with present and bear witness to multiple histories and generations.” While the works appear as an aesthetic departure from earlier pieces, they are rather a reinvigoration of his established use of color, pattern, design, and collage, while maintaining his love of nature and African iconography.

DAVID DRISKELL

Ancient Alphabets, 1990

Encaustics and collage on paper

17 1/2 x 22 inches
© David Driskell, Courtesy DC Moore Gallery, New York

Through the 1980s to the present, David Driskell’s paintings and collages continued to move increasingly towards abstraction and a personal synthesis of place, memory, and spirit, incorporating his many interests including nature, music, and spirituality. The surfaces of these multi-layered works are heavily tactile with expressive mark making, pattern, and vibrant color. Two of the largest works in this exhibition, Linear Waves (1989) and In Search of My Mother’s Art II (1992), use abstract forms and markings to conjure up deep respect for his mother’s work with cloth, quilts, and sewing.

Born in 1931 in Eatonton, Georgia, DAVID DRISKELL received his BA in Fine Art from Howard University and MFA from Catholic University, both in Washington, D.C. He attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine in 1953, and has retained a lifelong relationship with the school, serving as visiting faculty, lecturer, and board member. His pioneering scholarship underpins the current field of African American art history. In 1977, after having taught at Howard and Fisk Universities, David Driskell joined the Department of Art at the University of Maryland where he remained until his retirement in 1998.

His numerous awards and honors include the prestigious National Humanities Medal in 2000. The University of Maryland opened The David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora in 2001 to celebrate his legacy as an artist and art historian. In 2005, the High Museum, in Atlanta, established an annual award in his honor, The David C. Driskell Prize, given to an African American artist or scholar. In 2016, the artist received the Skowhegan Lifetime Legacy Award. His work can be found in many museum collections including The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; The Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; The Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, NH; Colby College Museum of Art, ME; The Portland Museum of Art, ME; and The Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington D.C.

David Driskell lives and works in Hyattsville, Maryland and Falmouth, Maine.

DC MOORE GALLERY
535 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
www.dcmooregallery.com