Portfolio Quietly Making A Stand - African American artists

American Visions, August, 1999 by Valerie J. Mercer

American Visions reaches far and wide to bring its readers a sample of the best work being created in America today. This is our eighth year looking at artists headed toward the top of their profession.

PHEORIS WEST

Since the late 1970s, Pheoris West has regarded himself as an Afrocentric artist, because in his paintings he acknowledges Africa as the source for classical art traditions, and he relies upon his African and American cultural influences to inform his imagery. Traditional tales, mythologies and religion inspire the human characters he creates to symbolize universal messages.

His favorite subject is the black female, usually rendered as an idealized image rather than as a portrait of a specific individual. The role of the black woman is crucial in his art. "Her presence is symbolic," he says. "She is Mother Earth; she is, after all, Dinkanesh, the oldest evidence of human presence, recently discovered in Ethiopia. She is the icon representing the cradle of humanity."

In his recent work, the female image functions metaphorically, as a vessel of traditional Africa, which embodies the sacred. "The Garden" demonstrates how this effect is achieved through West's depiction of the biblical Eve as a beautiful black woman. The female figure and the composition that she inhabits are infused with a dynamism that suggests spiritual energy. The painting is constructed of layers of disjointed imagery that are stabilized by the balance between color and form.

West earned his master of fine arts degree from Yale University, and he has been teaching at Ohio State University for 23 years. His work can be seen in the current exhibition "To Conserve a Legacy: American Art from Historically Black Colleges and Universities," which is on a national tour. His paintings are in the collections of the Studio Museum in Harlem, Black Enterprise Inc. and Howard University.

FELIX EBOIGBE

Wood sculptor Felix Eboigbe is the eldest son of a Benin tribal chief in Nigeria. In his art he makes reference to characters associated with the Benin legends that he learned from his grandfather. He contends that by doing so, he contributes to the preservation of the cultural, religious and tribal history of his people.

Preferring to sculpt his subjects to a large scale, he uses his abstract approach mainly to create human heads or animals, which are characterized by simple shapes with concave areas. He reserves his realistic approach for his detailed depictions of historical figures.

Eboigbe intuits his approach and subject from the size, shape, color and grain of the wood. His essential tools are handmade ebony mallets, chisels and an axe. He sculpts mostly in walnut, cherry and ebony and occasionally in Indiana cedar.

As a youngster back in Lagos, his talent was developed through his three-year apprenticeship with the Nigerian sculptor Ben Aye. In 1967 Eboigbe opened his first art studio in Lagos and was soon invited by the Lagos University art department to teach a sculpture class. In 1970 he was invited by Indiana University at Bloomington to teach and be an artist-in-residence. Since 1983 he has lived in Cincinnati.

Eboigbe lectures and exhibits nationally and internationally. Collectors of his sculpture include Bill Cosby and major corporations, such as Texaco and Cincinnati Bell.

JOHN ROZELLE

By the late 1980s, John Rozelle's expertise in combining colorful layers of acrylic paint and collage to create a distinct form of nonrepresentational mixed-media art had earned him critical acclaim in The New York Times and the New Art Examiner.

The technique he employs is inspired by his African heritage and "reflects the appropriation of textural surfaces one encounters with sacred objects that have been consecrated with sacrificial offerings," he says. Occasionally, he includes meaningful objects to enhance an artwork's overall significance. Nevertheless, his technique is always about the tension between the tangibility of his materials and the illusion of space and image.

A native of St. Louis, Rozelle is currently a tenured associate professor in the drawing and painting department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He received his bachelor of fine arts degree from Washington University, St. Louis, and his master of fine arts from Fontbonne College, also in St. Louis.

Over the years, he has garnered numerous awards, among which are a 1988-89 artist-in-residence fellowship at the Studio Museum in Harlem and a 1990 National Endowment for the Arts Minority Fellowship Award for printmaking. More recently, he received a commission from the St. Louis Fair for a major installation focusing on the Middle Passage.

Rozelle's work is exhibited nationally and can be found in the collections of museums (including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the California Afro-American Museum in Los Angeles, and the African American History and Cultural Museum in Philadelphia) and corporations (including AT&T, Ralston Purina Group and Citibank).

TARRENCE CORBIN

"My work does not deal with a didactic projection of social issues," says Tarrence Corbin about his monumental geometric abstract paintings of the past few years. "It's about my love of light and form."