MONTBELLO IN THE NEWS
Shade: Clyfford Still/Mark Bradford
at A+P includes an educational program that provides support services including access to housing, individualized education, and employment support as well as job training to foster youth living in LA County. The A+P concept is very much like concepts being discussed in the Montbello neighborhood around the Kresge Foundation’s FreshLo Placemaking grant awarded to the Montbello Organizing Committee. The purpose of the project is to bring the neighborhood - youth and adults together to create a plan for a cultural hub in Montbello. Input from the community suggests a desire for the cultural hub to include access to fresh food, the arts, and other quality of life needs currently lacking in the community. Bradford’s exhibit and the Montbello neighborhood are also connected through Bradford’s commitment to work with a student muralist at DCIS charter school at the Montbello campus. This unique opportunity comes under the auspices of the school program at the DAM and Mr. Bradford’s desire to reach out to the area’s African-American community. A special meeting with the student muralist and other DCIS students is scheduled for late May. Back to Shade. Every piece is stunning, but two pieces stood out for me: Mississippi Gottdam and Rebels on the Plantation. Mississippi Gottdam is comprised of debris Bradford collected in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. This piece represents his visual critique of recovery efforts in lowincome neighborhoods. The work is implanted with paper and other materials he found there. The embedded pieces evoke memories of the flotsam and refuse covering the neighborhoods after the floods. Bradford borrowed the title of this work from Nina Simone’s 1964 song Mississippi Goddam, which was an anthem for urgent social change and racial equality. Continuing with the theme of social justice, Bradford’s Rebels on the Plantation conjured deep emotions as I stood exploring it for quite some time. Images of ancestors toiling in the dirt, dying where they stood, existing in a parched, dry, dark place filled my senses. Nearby a video of the artist talking about his life and work plays across the room from a wall filled with newspaper clippings from the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till. Maybe the unexpected rawness of the exhibit in this place, the Denver Art Museum, took me by surprise. It never occurred to me that DAM would have the courage to feature the brash honesty of an African American artist’s work in such an impressive display. Then again, it could have been the sheer scale, the hugeness of each of the paintings and the sense of light that shown through all the blackness in his work that reduced me to tears. I am confident that what our community creates in Montbello, our own cultural hub, will provide a place and opportunities for our community’s own bold, bright multi-cultural artists to create, practice, perform and share their work for all to experience. It will be a place where our folks will see themselves represented on the walls and on the stage. One of Denver’s African American philanthropists and patron of the arts, Tina Walls, contributed to bringing Bradford’s works here. She has said, “The arts help to interweave all of us together in the American mosaic.” That is one of the many things Montbello embodies – all of us interwoven into the mosaic that proudly is Montbello. Go take this journey. Shade continues at the Denver Art Museum and the Clyfford Still Museum through July 16. Y
By Khadija Haynes
Mark Bradford puts
all of himself (and a lot of our collective American and human) experiences into his artwork. Literally. He has included leftover residue, trash, fine minerals, recyclables, and the very core of earth itself in the layers of his magnificent pieces. What makes these pieces so compelling is the fact that unless you know what you are looking at, you don’t see it, you don’t know that it is there. Once you become aware of the “secret ingredients” present in his works, the level of awe you have experienced by seeing these splendid pieces grows exponentially. I was recently ‘voluntold’ to write an article for the MUSE about the new gallery exhibit being jointly presented at the Denver Art Museum (DAM) and the Clyfford Still Museum entitled Shade. Initially I thought I had been assigned a quick “UP assignment” - you know: showup at the event, chat-up the people involved, and write-up a quick article then move on down the road; mission accomplished. Instead what I experienced was an amazing, emotion-filled journey that reminded that while life is brief; it should certainly not be quick, and spending time in experiencing splendor is a must! Shade: Clyfford Still/Mark Bradford features the works of Mark Bradford at the Mississippi Gottdam Denver Art Museum and Clyfford Still’s work at the Clyfford Still Museum, next door to DAM. Bradford, a world renowned African American contemporary visual artist tributes Still’s work as inspiring his own art. Both men have created very large scale works, so large that most require an entire gallery wall each. Both infuse artifacts and pieces from their 3D lives into their 2D paintings. Although, because these entwined bits lift off the canvass, they, too, are arguably 3D in some respects - they have a physical presence. Both artists explore the use of the shade Black as a primary feature in their paintings. Bradford is quoted as saying, “Black is like Voldemort. It has fears and possibilities. Black is the most difficult color to work with; it will cause you to fail.” He goes on the describe his process, “My paintings are made up of tearing. To me it represents a process that is more of a reality than laying down perfect lines of paint. It’s raw and violent but it still comes together.” Born in South LA, Bradford has a deep sense of community. Having witnessed how a lack of educational and social resources can affect a community, Bradford collaborated with neighborhood activist Allan Dicastro and philanthropist Eileen Harris Norton to establish Art+Practice (A+P) in the Leimert Park neighborhood of LA. This community cultural hub, an arts and education facility, occupies a nearly 20,000 square-foot campus, where it directs programs and activities. Public Programs include individual artists’ talks, panels, film screenings, and live performances along with moderated art lectures, discussions, and performances. The Art programming at A+P seeks to reignite conversations about the social value and positive influence of contemporary art in the Leimert Park neighborhood. The Practice programming
Editor’s note: Khadija Haynes is a co-founder of the Colorado Black Arts Movement (CBAM), a partner organization with the Montbello Organizing Committee’s FreshLo grant from the Kresge Foundation. For more information regarding Montbello’s Cultural Hub contact montbellonews@gmail.com.
MUSE - Montbello Urban Spectrum Edition - May/June 2017
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