Jon Onye Lockard
Jon Onye Lockard, a working artist and educator, whose career spans more than forty years, has exhibited and lectured both nationally and internationally. He is a senior lecturer of University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Jon Onye Lockard harmoniously blends visual reflections of our dynamic cultures into work spaces and living environments. The use of colors, shapes and forms are used to heal, inspire, and restfully replenish people in a spiritual and personal way. His art is designed to aid and augment outgrowth of the African American cultural aesthetic into a spiritual and visual environment. His art reinforces and encourages spirituality, beauty, comfort, history and diversity in personal and professional environments. He emphasizes visual and spatial rejuvenation. Lockard’s mission is to provide stimulating cultural inspiration and to enhance each person’s personal surroundings with meaningful images reflective of various cultures. The environments that we share and the visual art we learn to appreciate can become a source of motivation and inspiration in the workplace and in the home.
Mary McLeod Bethune by Jon Onye Lockard
22
Rosenthal Gallery Series
Artist Jon Onye Lockard was a vital part of the coordinating team that worked with sculptor Lei Yi Xin on the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Project. The King Memorial in Washington, D.C. it opened in the fall of 2011. A past president of The National Conference of Artists, Lockard is currently Associate Director of The Society for the Study of African American Culture and Aesthetics. He hosted and co-produced The Society’s biweekly journal of cultural affairs, Sankofa, previously aired on Barden Cable Television of Detroit. He founded his company Visions of Destiny to share his art with the world. “The art of Jon Onye Lockard amplifies the often quoted folk wisdom of elderly African Americans who remind us: “You don’t know where you’re going, if you don’t know where you’ve been.” That heritage and destiny are inextricably linked as a perspective not only indigenous to the African American community, but ultimately traceable to prototypical philosophical traditions in Africa.
Among the Akan of Ghana, for example, Sankofa--the image of a bird with a “back-turned” head, symbolically alludes to the supreme wisdom of learning from the yesterdays of culture history in building the bright tomorrow of the future. Lockard’s art transports us across time and space. Without question, his subjects are diverse. But when placed in juxtaposition, the images reveal facets of a complex and continuing saga. Our ability to comprehend and appreciate Lockard’s art is a fundamental test of our own cultural literacy. His oeuvre offers didactic views on a past filled with glorious moments, a present shaped by victories over victimization, and visions of a destiny yet to be achieved.”