Broken Time Sculpture by Martin Payton

Copyright © 2017 Louisiana State University Museum of Art. All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2017 Louisiana State University Museum of Art. All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2017 Louisiana State University Museum of Art. SCULPTURE BY MARTIN PAYTON All rights reserved.

BROKEN TIME

Generous support for this publication provided by Robert T. and Linda H. Bowsher and Louisiana CAT. Annual Exhibition Fund support provided by The Imo N. Brown Memorial Fund in memory of Heidel Brown and Mary Ann Brown, Louisiana CAT, and the L. Cary Saurage II Fund.

Published by Louisiana State University Museum of Art. Copyright © 2017 Louisiana State University Museum of Art. All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2017 Louisiana State University Museum of Art. All rights reserved.

Louisiana State University Museum of Art Shaw Center for the Arts, Fifth Floor 100 Lafayette Street Baton Rouge, LA 70801 www.lsumoa.org ISBN: 978-0-692-94538-4

This book is published by Louisiana State University Museum of Art in conjunction with the exhibition Broken Time: Sculpture by Martin Payton, October 19, 2017–February 11, 2018 at Louisiana State University Museum of Art, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Artwork by Martin Payton Curated by Courtney Taylor

Design: Brandi Simmons Photography: David Humphreys Printing: Baton Rouge Printing

ILLUSTRATIONS: All artwork by Martin Payton unless otherwise specified. COVER, PAGE ii–iii: Night Trane (detail), 2004, welded steel, 43 x 16 x 36 inches; PAGE viii: Arpeggio for Louis (detail), 2009, welded steel, 31 x 23 x 18 inches; PAGE 6: Mali Andante (detail), 2009, welded steel, 35 x 16 x 16 inches; PAGE 10: Praise Song (detail), 2015, welded steel, 88 x 32 x 34 inches; PAGE 14: Griot (detail), 1997, welded steel, 92 x 23 x 16 inches; PAGE 21: Untitled (installation, detail), 2017, found steel fragments

CONTENTS vii PREFACE

Daniel E. Stetson, Executive Director, LSU Museum of Art

1 BROKEN TIME

Copyright © 2017 Louisiana State University Museum of Art. All rights reserved.

Courtney Taylor, Curator, LSU Museum of Art

7 COMING FULL CIRCLE Eloise E. Johnson, Ph.D.

11 RITUAL DANCE AND DIALOGUE Joyce M. Jackson, Ph.D.

15 MAN MASTERING METAL Kalamu ya Salaam

20 WORKS

52 CURRICULUM VITAE 54 PLAYLIST 55 CONTRIBUTORS

Copyright © 2017 Louisiana State University Museum of Art. All rights reserved.

T

he LSU Museum of Art is honored to present this exhibition of recent works by sculptor Martin Payton. Payton is a master artist and visual poet; he is a composer in steel. Payton’s works mine the modernist idea, first seen in the sculptures of Pablo Picasso and Julio González, of using iron to draw in space. His vigorous artistic style renders his vision and expression in three-dimensional form as realized through a direct welding technique. Steel elements are composed into shapes where figures, faces, and masks become visible. Walking around the works and experiencing them from every angle is a revelation as shapes, lines, and shadows interact to form images.

Copyright © 2017 Louisiana State University Museum of Art. All rights reserved.

When I first visited Payton’s studio, I was astounded to see so many finished works. Payton is a local Baton Rouge artist, and a Louisiana artist, but his work should be broadly celebrated and widely known for its accomplishment and import. He is a prolific talent, a visual inventor, and a sculptural master.

When you view these sculptures, you can begin to see, and then nearly hear, jazz improvisations in the lines and curves of Payton’s works. These sculptures remind me of a composition by Miles Davis in which he explores improvisational notes, running through sounds and taking you places with the experience. This strain of modernist sculptural language emanates from artists like Picasso, González, David Smith, and Alexander Calder, and it continues to be explored in these important works. Payton’s imagery often has roots in African symbolism, but he makes it his own and of this time. His postmodern cultural consciousness echoes throughout the work, foregrounding his identity and experiences.

We are thankful for Payton’s bigheartedness and the ready access to his studio and work that he granted in preparation for this project. He has shown unstinting willingness to work with LSU students, schoolchildren, and the larger community throughout the run of this important exhibition. This active engagement helps us realize our educational mission for many audiences.

PREFACE DANIEL E. STETSON

I want to thank our Annual Exhibition Fund supporters—the Imo N. Brown Memorial Fund in memory of Heidel Brown and Mary Ann Brown, Louisiana CAT, and the L. Cary Saurage II Fund—for helping to make all our exhibitions possible. I especially want to thank Louisiana CAT, Emalie Boyce, and Linda and Robert Bowsher for their support of this catalog, which will forever help to document Payton’s accomplishments in steel. And finally, to each of our authors who expand the scholarship on Payton’s work, and to the dedicated staff of the LSU Museum of Art, I give my heartfelt thanks and appreciation. Without each of you—sponsors, authors, curator, staff, and especially the artist—this project would not have been realized.

Enjoy the exhibition and the thoughtful discussion of Payton’s work found in this catalog.

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Copyright © 2017 Louisiana State University Museum of Art. BROKEN TIME All rights reserved.

D

ense with reference and made with heavy, found metal scraps, Martin Payton’s work manages to stay open and light: the unified, balanced forms of his sculptures move— sometimes literally—with the progression of time, representing a range of experiences and ideas. Although time and space seem broken, distancing Payton temporally or physically from African heritage and early African American experiences, these experiences remain present. His work is situated in a progression of his own practice, artistic traditions, and a larger history. Payton sees himself in conversation with a history of makers stretching from the “caves to today.”1 He asserts, “I claim all of it… there is not a specific place I want to sit. I want to be free to range across it.” For Payton, part of postmodern practice is being able to use any medium or method of “attack.”

Copyright © 2017 Louisiana State University Museum of Art. All rights reserved.

BROKEN TIME: IRREGULAR, SHIFTING, IMPROVISED MOVEMENTS AND RHYTHMS; PLAYING WITHOUT AN EXPLICITLY STATED BEAT.

COURTNEY TAYLOR

Composing discarded fragments into new forms, Payton fuses seemingly disparate times, spaces, and ideas. His works draw power from their openness, allowing for “and/both” interpretations that are decidedly postmodern in a Western sense and that also recall the duality of traditional African symbolic and representational methods. The beat is not explicitly stated. Characterized by lines, circles, and irregular slants, his improvised sculptural compositions use metal scrap as it was found. Thus Payton retains the history of these objects, whose bends, wear, and rust evidence a life in service to something larger—a history of use, disuse, and discarding.

Born to parents native to New Orleans, Payton spent his entire childhood uptown on Coliseum Street, within walking distance of Magazine Street and St. Charles Avenue. Payton’s roots in Louisiana and the American South go back at least to the mid-nineteenth century. The family history he recalls is representative of many New Orleans family stories. His maternal great-grandfather was a Reconstruction-era sheriff in Pointe Coupée, a French-speaking area, who relocated the family to New Orleans after “a run-in” with a white man. His grandmother learned to speak English in the streets, according to Payton. Both his grandmothers conspired to arrange a marriage between his devoutly Catholic mother and his less-than-devout father. His paternal grandparents lived in the shotgun house next door to his childhood home.

Martin was the first child born to his parents, though his father had a son, Walter, from a previous relationship. Payton’s birth was followed by the birth of three sisters—Ann, Faith, and Eglah. His father was a postal worker and later a truck driver. His mother worked as a seamstress in local sweatshops.

His mother strongly encouraged the family’s education. Payton recalls that she “pushed all of us to deal with our minds.”

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Payton remembers always drawing and constructing: “I drew just because that was my way of communicating—that was my favorite way of communicating.”

He never grew out of this childhood interest and suggests he is still drawing in space. But a path toward the arts was not clear for Payton, who saw himself becoming an athlete. A high school requirement to apply to college, in addition to his parents’ refusal to support his underage desire to join the navy, landed Payton at Xavier University in New Orleans.

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There, friends encouraged an unsure Payton to pursue art formally. Upon visiting the Art Department, he encountered John T. Scott, and “that was it.” Scott mentored a generation of New Orleans artists, but he became more than a mentor for Payton. With time, they became colleagues, collaborators, and friends. Payton focused on painting and drawing at Xavier. He finished his undergraduate studies in 1972, but not before marrying his college sweetheart, Lorraine Thomas, and being drafted into the army in 1970. Misplaced or lost paperwork (along with his mother’s prayers, Payton suggests) kept him from shipping off with his training cohort, and he narrowly avoided serving in Vietnam.

He was sent to Germany as an MP and was discharged five months early to finish his undergraduate studies at Xavier.

Payton conceives of “diving into the pile” as being in conversation with other makers: “When I’m in the studio, I’m in conversation with everyone who ever made an image that I saw, so when I went back to the pile, I started rummaging to find what my voice was supposed to be.” Reenter John T. Scott.

In 1975 Scott invited Payton to return to Xavier to teach. Now colleagues, Scott asked Payton to help him collect scrap metal for one of Scott’s sculptural works. Payton recalls, “I get there and see these I-beams and I’m like ‘wow,’ that’s a piece of charcoal this big around that you could make a drawing in real space with.” Scott taught Payton to weld with oxyacetylene, which was good for cutting, but Payton wanted to fuse large, muscular steel I-beams (fig. 1). He took an industrial arc welding course in 1980.

Copyright © 2017 Louisiana State University Museum of Art. All rights reserved.

John T. Scott persuaded Payton to pursue graduate study. Inspired by Images of Dignity: The Drawings of Charles White, Payton moved to Los Angeles to attend the Otis Art Institute (now Otis College of Art and Design), where White taught. Payton had focused on documenting African American life and culture through figurative work at Xavier, but when he met White, he realized that this had been done—and done “powerfully.” Payton also realized that it was from White’s intense personality that his powerful imagery emerged. He recognized that this was not his personality and understood he would have to find his own voice. So, as he described it, he “dove back into the pile.” At Otis, Payton continued drawing and painting, employing a hard-edge style with implied three-dimensionality in his painting. As he experimented with finding his artistic voice, he broke apart his paintings’ construction in an effort to bring color into the third dimension.

ABOVE: Fig. 1: Compass for Harriet, 2003, welded steel, 71 x 69 x 48 inches

After five years of teaching and a discouraging year of administrative work as chair of Xavier’s Art Department, Payton considered abandoning teaching to work in Louisiana’s shipyards and carve out more studio time. Instead, he found himself teaching kindergarten through sixth grade talented arts classes for Jefferson and Orleans parish public schools from 1981 to 1985. Making welded steel sculpture became the primary focus of his studio practice. Payton finished what he considers his first fully realized steel sculpture, Bamboula, in 1980.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Payton dedicated himself to teaching and raising a family. His daughter Marissa had been born in 1972, and his son Jabari was born in 1981. Payton moved back into university teaching in 1986, taking a position at Florida A&M in Tallahassee.

In 1990, eager to move back to Louisiana, he took a position opened by the death of Frank Hayden at Southern University in Baton Rouge, where he taught until his retirement in 2011. During his tenure at Southern, Payton moved to and from several studios in New Orleans until Hurricane Katrina pushed him to settle in Baton Rouge, where he currently lives and works. He married ceramic sculptor MaPo Kinnord in 2000. At Southern University, Payton served as coordinator for the Art Department for fifteen years and became the department chair in 2005 when it achieved accreditation. Payton spent his

entire university teaching career at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).

He notes that he “couldn’t possibly be on one of those campuses without understanding that he was standing on some shoulders.” He hoped to give back in proportion to what he had received.

In addition to continuing his own studio practice, Payton has completed several public commissions. He created a site-specific piece for New Orleans’ Contemporary Arts Center in 1990 and a series of relief panels at the Martin Luther King School for Science and Technology in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward in 2004. Payton retained a close friendship with Scott, and the two completed the public sculpture Spirit House in New Orleans’ Gentilly neighborhood in 2002. Still, Payton was careful to guard his own studio voice. Speaking reverently of his dear friend, Payton recalls that Scott had “all the power of a black hole—he did everything and he did everything massively well.” While Scott’s work was very elaborate—with cutouts, for example—Payton consciously avoided similar practices.

Copyright © 2017 Louisiana State University Museum of Art. All rights reserved.

Payton’s earlier, more muscular sculptural practice of the 1980s to the mid 1990s is characterized by his use of I-beams, cut shapes, color, and motion. In this period, Payton attempted to capture everything—movement, dance, color, direct symbolism. By the mid- to late 1990s, one can see a definitive shift in Payton’s work: he abandons color.

Realizing the disconnect from the beauty he experienced in his studio practice dealing with raw scrap metal—the color variations of rusted, worn fragments—Payton stopped painting his sculptures. He wanted to share what he himself experienced in the studio—that unpainted fragments were more honest, less plastic, and more direct.

Payton also made an important shift away from a fabricative to an intuitive, improvisational process around this time. He gave up cutting, bending, and shaping the steel fragments (fig. 2), committing to working with the fragments as they were found. This shift represented a heightened form of improvisation and an integral part of the progression of his sculpture.

Conceiving of his work in musical terms, Payton compares his early work to Ray Charles and his recent compositions to Miles Davis. In jazz, he explains, each musician improvises to find space for their instrument’s voice within the composition. Payton seeks to pick up each fragment—each with its own voice, its own story of use—and arrange it, or weld it, rather, into a larger composition. “That’s improvisation,” he says.

Ever a progression, Payton’s work in the last twenty years has reached a new level of sophistication as decades of working with steel have resulted in a refinement of his intuition and improvisational skills. Payton looks back on a visit to Xavier University by Yoruba sculptor Lamidi Olonade Fakeye as a seminal moment of inspiration: “Seeing Fakeye carve that piece with no drawings, no prep that I could see, was just magic to me…it knocked me out

Fig. 2: Jack of Diamonds includes the I-beams and fabricated cut shapes that characterized Payton’s earlier practice.

Jack of Diamonds, 2000, welded steel, 83 x 36.5 x 31 inches

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because I hadn’t been exposed to anything like that in art history.” Payton’s reaction to Fakeye’s method echoes the potency modernists saw in African art—an appreciation for simplified representation (abstraction) and direct and immediate action. These were liberating concepts for Westerners constrained by centuries of overrefinement and illusionism.2 Payton speaks of the feeling of immediacy and directness of Fakeye: “Welding gave me that…you could be direct; you could go right at it and shape these things.” Recalling this story, Payton slapped his hands to underscore the power of directness—a rare expression of passion for the reserved Payton, who does no preparatory drawings for his improvised welded compositions.

The modernist shift toward taille directe (direct carving), and later direct welding, was understood as immediate and thus more potent, while also more true to the medium. This shift was integral to the emergence of the welded steel sculpture first completed by Julio González in collaboration with Picasso in the mid-1920s (fig. 3).

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Copyright © 2017 Louisiana State University Museum of Art. All rights reserved.

González’s sculpture soon inspired American sculptor David Smith to adopt welded sculpture in 1933. Smith used discarded and broken fragments. His sparse, linear sculptures, like the majority of Payton’s works, lack volumetric elements. Smith considered himself to be drawing in space, asserting that drawing and sculpture could exist in one work.3 Smith, working in the context of constructivism and surrealism, also asserted that abstract forms could be filled with meaning. Payton sees his work in conversation with that of González and Smith as well as other prominent sculptors welding found metal, such Anthony Caro, John Chamberlain, and Melvin Edwards.

Fig 3: Julio González’s Maternity’s open welded sculptural form is representative of his idea of “drawing in space.”

Maternity, 1934, Julio González (1876–1942). © Tate, London 2017

Payton counts the oeuvre of Melvin Edwards (b. 1937) as an important influence, and their work has much in common. Edwards came to prominence in the 1960s with his tightly constructed Lynch Fragments series (fig. 4) as well as more minimalist works such as 1963’s Chaino (fig. 5), which features a dense, welded metal sculpture suspended in an open metal frame. Edwards’ work often viscerally confronts African Americans’ history of brutal oppression.

While they share much in terms of content, material, and process, Edwards and Payton diverge in their composition and expressionist qualities. Content related to the African American experience is most readily evident in the titles of Payton’s works. Titles such as Magnolia for Emmett and Sengbe reference concerns similar to those of Edwards’ work yet lack the tightness, tension, and violence with which Edwards’ sculpture deals with these issues. Not unexpectedly, Payton’s voice is different—as powerful, but less confrontational; less didactic, more intuitive.

Payton deftly balances the conceptual with the formal. For Payton, beauty inheres “all in the form”: he aspires to make every component of the sculpture count, even the negative space, so that the viewer does not isolate fragment from fragment or see one piece as holding another in place. His compositions are so adeptly made that strong diagonals and heavy metal fragments seem to defy gravity; the tension yields to an overall sense of delicate yet controlled balance. The negative space supports the positive form. Payton draws comparisons with black holes—“all the gravity of the physical stuff wouldn’t be enough to hold it together—what’s actually holding it together is the dark matter”—in this instance, the negative space.

Martin Payton adheres to the long-standing Xavier concept of making art as learning to speak a language. While Payton abandoned painting because he felt he could not rival the figurative “power” and “dignity” he saw in Charles White’s work, his voice has reached a level of bold yet restrained power in the third dimension. Over almost forty years of welding steel, Payton has become a master of his chosen language: it is what he says and what he does not say, what is present and what is absent, that unify his compositions and content—his drawings in space and time.

Copyright © 2017 Louisiana State University Museum of Art. All rights reserved.

AT TOP RIGHT: Fig. 5: Melvin Edwards (b. 1937), Chaino, 1964, welded steel and chains, 62h x 102w x 26d in, Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York, © 2017 Melvin Edwards/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

AT BOTTOM RIGHT: Fig. 4: Melvin Edwards (b. 1937), Some Bright Morning, 1963, welded steel, 14.50h x 9.30w x 5d in, Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York, © 2017 Melvin Edwards/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

All quotations derive from conversations between Martin Payton and Courtney Taylor, May–June 2017

1

Albert E. Elsen, Origins of Modern Sculpture: Pioneers and Premises (New York: George Braziller, 1974), 18.

2

3

Joan Pachner, David Smith (London: Phaidon Press, 2013), 40.

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COMING Copyright © 2017 FULL CIRCLE

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M

artin Payton is both the recipient and a purveyor of the brilliance of an African American sculptural tradition that has a long history. Slaves who survived the voyage to America carried with them not only praise songs, dance, and religious customs but also a rich tradition of metal working, pottery making, basketry, weaving, and wood carving from various regions of Africa.

IN A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY, ART SHOULD BE THE LOCATION WHERE EVERYONE CAN WITNESS THE JOY, PLEASURE, AND POWER THAT EMERGES WHEN THERE IS FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION…

Copyright © 2017 Louisiana State University Museum of Art. All rights reserved. bell hooks, Art on My Mind1

Sculpture in African American art reflects three separate paths that converge in the twenty-first century.

The first path comprises slaves or freedmen who were either self-taught or worked as tradesmen under the tutelage of master craftsmen; the second includes artists who were influenced by the forms of the dominant culture of the nineteenth century. The third, in the twenty-first century, saw African American artists involved in the various movements of art, but using their own cultural experiences to explore their racial identities in their artwork. Another component of this third path is the rural “outsider” artist, who was never trained but created works that reflected rural traditions and African roots.

Martin Payton’s work is informed by and connected to these different pathways, drawing on all three for inspiration. Although Payton uses some of the techniques and expressions of modernism, his work continues toward a postmodernist ideology, creating another narrative for our time.

Payton started his artistic career by painting in a two-dimensional format. Dissatisfied, he experimented with work that gradually projected from the wall, finding three-dimensional art more appealing: “I never found my voice as a painter because I think I overintellectualized painting. [With] every mark I made I saw somebody else…I realized that the flatness was not what I wanted. I wanted to be out in real space.”2 A course in industrial welding provided a “whole new beginning” for Payton. His sculptures are improvisational in technique. He employs a deliberately hands-off approach to found material, depending greatly on pieces of discarded steel that he randomly selects from various sources. He aligns himself with postmodernism by deconstructing some tenets of modernism while riffing in a jazz-like way on others.

ELOISE E. JOHNSON, PH.D.

Improvisation in African American culture is frequently a result of a “lack of.” Innovation occurs when limits are transgressed, resulting in an African American codified expression of “making do.” This “making do” has created unique dishes, music, dance, and style in black culture. Spirituals and blues existentially cried into the void that resulted from a lack of freedom, giving birth to a unique musical style. Dishes christened “soul food” were invented from discarded leftovers and substandard food given to slaves. Textiles such as quilts were created from cast-off and recycled clothing. Improvisation permeates African culture like jazz;

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always creating and innovating outside of the melody. Payton embraces this phenomenon and is in good company with such artists as Sam Gilliam, who abandons the formal canvas and drapes his paintings on the wall like quilts, and Barbara Chase-Riboud, whose use of materials like ropes and feathers in her sculptural pieces defies convention.

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Payton makes do by scouring the city, looking for discarded pieces of steel without a preset notion of what he will create. He takes what is given, and the creative process begins without a preconceived design or concept. He states that ideas come to him just by manipulating the material. Early in his career he painted his sculptures, but he became dissatisfied with the “prettiness” and realized that “the gravitas is gone.” The realization that with steel “you have to be truthful, to be honest” to the material was an epiphanic moment for him. Now, Payton uses a dark patina to protect the forms from rust, but the effect is stark, increasing the power of their presence. The artist decries being boxed into a category. He muses: “People talk about abstraction versus realism; versus this, versus that. I said it’s all art, and all of these things are part of the language of art. They are not antithetical to each other.

You can combine realism and what is called abstraction and what is called non-objectivity…take down the fences.”

student of African and African American history, Payton is aware of this fact.

Works such as Arpeggio for Louis, Night Trane, Juju Totem in D Minor, and Praise Song show his appreciation for a variety of musical forms. Ibeji, Griot, Oshun, and Shango confirm his keen knowledge of Egyptian and African history. Magnolia for Emmett, Sojourner, and Fannie pay homage to African American history. In some instances, Payton uses the “bottle tree” motif, a product of the rural South, where slaves decorated trees to catch the spirit of the dead, a tradition that had its roots in Africa.

One of the centerpieces of this exhibition is an untitled installation (fig. 1). It epitomizes the African American tradition of signifying—spitting out verbal and visual “in your face” symbolism or shade equal to that of any modern rapper today.

Words have consequences and power.

Written on the side of this installation piece are the names of the orishas, the emissaries of Olodumare, or God Almighty in Yoruba culture, that rule over the forces of nature and human activity.

This unusual piece suggests an evolution of the artist’s formal techniques and conceptual practices.

Copyright © 2017 Louisiana State University Museum of Art. All rights reserved.

Payton’s idea of “truthfulness” to the material goes a bit further in explaining his sculptural pieces: “This is realism because nothing here is a reference to another object. I mean, these things are just what they are, they don’t pretend to be anything else. And the stuff that they call realism is actually what is abstract.”

New Orleans is a city steeped in African American traditions, culture, and history. Its historical specificity abides in its music in particular. As a scholar and ABOVE: Fig. 1: Untitled (installation), 2017, found steel fragments

Payton’s sculptures occupy space in a confrontational style; there is always tension between the viewer and the immovable steel pieces. This installation crawls, moves, and spills out on the floor like liquid. It creates a visceral experience—a mélange of mismatched objects strung out on the floor like possessions that have been destroyed in a flood and washed ashore. Perhaps this space conjures up echoes of Hurricane Katrina or Africans during the transatlantic voyage. The shape of the African continent is outlined by a large chain suggestive of slavery. A centerpiece has a pole with an object on top that references the iconic headdress of the Oba, the ruler of the Yoruba tribe in Africa. The divine gaze of a Yoruba king is deadly to his subjects. Therefore, the face of the king

is covered during ceremonies by a beaded veil, the iboju, attached to the rim of the crown.

This vertical element provides a stabilizing force that brings order to the chaotic scene. Within the boundary of the surrounding chain is an array of various items, including shovels and agricultural machine parts. These items represent the power of African slave labor in shaping the economy of this country, while also symbolizing the reclamation of African Americans’ place in American history.

The closed circle appears numerous times in Martin Payton’s sculptures (fig. 2). In ancient cultures, the circle carried many connotations, representing the power of the female, infinity, or the completeness of the whole. The old adage of “coming full circle” might apply to this body of work. Payton has come full circle and fulfilled the promise of an African American cultural connection. In a postmodernist sense, a paradigmatic shift has occurred in his art that upsets the modernist ethos. Some view historical phenomena diachronically, in linear time; others see history as synchronic—broken up, occurring without antecedents. But African American history may be seen as moving in a circuitous pattern; and, like the sankofa bird motif, looking back may signify a need to move forward. Recently, U.S. Senator Maxine Waters’ authoritative voice cast a rallying cry for the urgency of moving forward with her assertion “reclaiming my time,” which resonates beyond the tense congressional hearing setting. Artists must get on with the business of moving forward, by continuing to improvise and innovate in their unique roles as purveyors of their own cultural history in art.

Copyright © 2017 Louisiana State University Museum of Art. All rights reserved.

Now more than ever, our experiences must be reclaimed and revisited by artists of color.

Payton’s work reflects this priority. By reexamining modernist tenets of the self-referential, the negation of personality, the denial of history and the narrative, he moves forward. Yes, there is a story to be told in the African American artistic tradition, and it must have its own griots to narrate it, even in abstract sculpture. By being his own narrator, Payton references the many elements of his own story in his art. Maybe painting was never truly his “thing,” but he certainly found his voice in sculpture, and it comes right on time.

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Fig. 2: Griot (detail), 1997, welded steel, 92 x 23 x 16 inches

1

bell hooks, Art on my Mind: Visual Politics, (New York: New Press, 1995), 138.

2

All quotations derive from conversations between Martin Payton and Dr. Eloise E. Johnson, June 2017.

Copyright © 2017 Louisiana State University RITUAL Museum of Art. All rights reserved.

DANCE AND

DIALOGUE

M

uch of the strong domestic and transatlantic flavor of Martin Payton’s work comes from his studies and travel, but much, too, comes from his deliberate juxtaposition of familiar ideas and sensibilities. The rhythmical motion and the abrupt changes in his sweeping curves suggest a ritualized approach to his work and his dance in the studio. His vigorous thematic works and bone-like motifs evoke the fertility rituals of the Bamana ethnic group in Mali, West Africa. His use of space and technology results in works that are contemporary, incorporating both ancient rituals and modern jazz sensibilities.

Copyright © 2017 Louisiana State University Museum of Art. All rights reserved.

YOU HAVE TO TRUST YOURSELF ENOUGH IN A STUDIO TO TURN IT LOOSE...

John T. Scott on improvisation1

Payton’s early work in metal was influenced by artist-educators John T. Scott, Sister M. Lurana, and the Nigerian sculptor Lamidi Olonade Fakeye. Fakeye, who descended from a line of Yoruba sculptors, visited Xavier University when Payton was a student.

I just thought what he did was so powerful…here was this black man standing in the middle of this room with this piece of wood with a crooked branch from a tree that he had attached a blade to that he made and sharpened himself. He has no drawing or nothing. He is just hacking away at this piece of wood and I am watching it become something. I was home because here was improvisation, here was intuitiveness, here was going right at the materials directly, here was I don’t need an art supply store. It was all of this stuff coming at me and I am like, wow! The seed was planted!2

Payton’s first sculptural piece, Bamboula (1980), was about Congo Square in New Orleans. With a strong transatlantic flavor, Bamboula moved and had sound. Perhaps, to eyes unfamiliar with African cultural sensibilities, the piece would seem abstract and meaningless. Payton asserts his work is “not didactic” and requires intrinsic cultural sensibilities to fully understand and appreciate. Another piece, Memphis (1980), symbolically depicts the strategic position of the Egyptian capital city at the mouth of the Nile during the Old Kingdom. For Payton, this was the seat of power and civilization, and he wanted to engage it.

JOYCE M. JACKSON, PH.D.

Payton’s early steel works were painted. He felt his work had to be “made pretty” to be “acceptable to a wider audience,” and painting also protected the steel and prevented rust. L’Amistad (1983) depicts the historical slave ship of that name, complete with oppressive chains as well as Cinqué (also known as Sengbe), the protagonist who led the Amistad revolt. While doing this piece, Payton realized that painting steel was not being true to his artistic self. Similarly, Kilimanjaro (fig. 1), which lacks color, is a free

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association with the highest mountain in Africa. It is poetry with shape and space, not necessarily pretty and not directly representational.

One of the major African themes in Payton’s works is representation of the chi wara of the Dogon ethnic group in Mali. There are many cultural variations on this theme; for example, the Bamana people believed that an antelope brought them knowledge of agriculture. Payton sees this analogy as “sublime,” asking, “When you think about it, the antelope burrows into the ground to retrieve its food, so what is a better analogy for agriculture?” His imagery often includes depictions of animals who dig into the earth seeking nourishment; with these he creates mythical chi wara figures whose powers are greater than those of ordinary beasts. His sculptures are fitting representations of the supernatural beings that the Bamana connect with agriculture and, by extension, fertility. The highlight of seasonal work among the Bamana is a huge ritual celebration presenting the chi wara masqueraders, involving intense master drumming and vigorous dancing. It is a significant life cycle musical rite that sets the stage for the community’s agricultural season and fuses sacred oneness with nature. The chi wara is most directly represented in works such as Fannie, Juju Totem in D Minor, and Sorcerer.

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Copyright © 2017 Louisiana State University Museum of Art. All rights reserved.

Payton engages African themes directly in his untitled installation of scrap-metal fragments that form the African continent (pg. 8). He sees this installation as a “dense pack that references the human and mineral resources from Africa that allowed the development of the American Dream” via the cotton, rice, and sugar industries. On the side of the installation Payton lists a pantheon of ten Yoruba orishas, or nature deities, positioned to symbolically protect the African continent; they also guard the exhibition (pg. 21). Two sculptures give special attention to two of the most powerful orishas—Oshun, orisha of the river, and Shango, orisha of thunder. It is interesting that he does not include a representation of Ogun, the orisha of iron and thus of ironworkers. In addition to referencing orishas, it is notable that Payton honors powerful women in African history in his sculptures Nzinga and Nefertiti. Nzinga of Angola led forty years of warfare against Portuguese colonization, and Nefertiti, Queen of Egypt, was not merely a pedestal queen, but ruled beside her husband, Pharaoh Akhenaten.

Fig. 1: Kilamanjaro, 1999, welded steel, Because Payton sees musicians as the ultimate resisters of hegemonic colonial as well as 64 x 32 x 20 inches

postcolonial powers, while simultaneously being the core registrars of culture in Africa and the Diaspora, his focus on musical themes deepens other concepts. He argues that while writers, visual artists, and theatrical practitioners often invoked Eurocentric models of artistic expression, musicians held on to “the chants, hollers and the polyrhythmic structures” of their African heritage.

He suggests that musicians led writers and visual artists, who began to see these retentions and

made efforts to catch up in their own artistic spheres. As a member of one of New Orleans’ esteemed musical families, including Walter and Nicholas Payton, Martin Payton listens to music, mostly jazz, while working. As an amateur saxophonist, he sees a point of convergence between musical formations, especially African American musical creations, and his art.

While some jazz musicians compose before they play, many simply allow the music to come into existence—flowing intuitively and improvisationally.

Sculptures in the series Wes, Jarrett, and Ammons pay homage to jazz musicians through their titles and Payton’s own jazz-inspired improvisational process. Still, Payton insists they are not portraits. Wes Montgomery played strings; Keith Jarrett plays piano; Gene Ammons played saxophone. Payton composes the series with similar found objects but represents their different modes of performance. Another sculptural homage to a jazz musician, Rahsaan, began with a fabricated base but became purely improvisational in the complex composition beyond the base. The improvisational nature of these works is especially evocative and meaningful in Payton’s homages to jazz musicians.

The deformations demonstrate a stressor, and that character is preserved as he connects it with other pieces. He pulls out pieces that “call” him, which he refers to as “triggers.” Initially, he has no idea what he is going to do with them and does not try to explain the process because “that might kill it, because a butterfly under glass is not a butterfly.” He becomes intimate with the material, he questions it, it speaks back to him, and so a dialogue emerges.

He sees this process as part of the ancestral memory, not really knowing what he is reaching for, but recognizing it once he gets there. Payton feels successful if he can make a piece without manipulating the elements. Additionally, the use of discarded steel, or “drops,” allows Payton to internally connect with one of the African American artistic traditions of the lived reality of creating beauty out of refuse.

Copyright © 2017 Louisiana State University Museum of Art. All rights reserved.

Payton creates a spiritual space in his studio and admits to dancing sometimes while working and doing a ritual. He admits, “Yes, ritual is very much an aspect of what I do. That too comes out of John Scott’s teaching.

Ritual is something, being black and of Catholic heritage—how do you get away from ritual?”

Payton often improvises by manipulating the circle, the core shape that permeates his work. A circle prominently surrounds the chi wara antelope horn in Juju Totem in D Minor, another sculptural combination of jazz and African ritual. Payton claims, “The circle is everything,” while pointing to areas of his work that allude to the traditional cosmogram and its representation of birth, life, death, and rebirth—circles, he suggests, are the same thing.

In exploring the folklore of American slaves through a cross-cultural Pan-African lens, Sterling Stuckey, a leading historian, establishes what he refers to as the “black ethos in slavery.” His seminal work substantiates the centrality of an African (West and Central) ancestral ritual—the Circle Dance— to the black religious and artistic experience. There is evidence for the importance of moving in a ring during rituals honoring ancestors that contributed disproportionately to the centrality of the circle during slavery. It was a motif so consistent that one could argue that “it was what gave form and meaning to black religion and art.”3 Payton situates his work within the organic, intuitive artistic tradition. He is, perhaps, an organic intellectual in the most Gramscian sense, striving always to develop an alternative artistic hegemony.4 In the beginning, he fabricated pieces, but now he tries to find steel that has been smashed or bent.

Daniel Piersol, “Interview with John T. Scott,” in Circle Dance: The Art of John T. Scott (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi and New Orleans Museum of Art, 2005), 16.

1

All quotations derive from conversations between Martin Payton and Dr. Joyce M. Jackson, June 2017.

2

Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

3

The reference here is to Antonio Gramsci, political theorist, who wrote extensively on notions of hegemony and the organic intellectual.

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Copyright © 2017 Louisiana State University MAN Museum of Art. All rights MASTERING reserved.

METAL

A

rt is more than decoration, deeper than entertainment. Martin Payton is an artist, a man who confronts life through mastering metal. Physically wrestling hard, inert matter into fluid forms reflecting the human spirit of transformation, i.e. the real alchemy of changing “what is” into a creatively imagined “what could be”; what we, in the temporal twentieth and twenty-first centuries of our human existence, make to say—we were here.

Martin Payton is a blacksmith. Literally. A black man who wrestles with metal and, in so doing, not only reflects the ethos of his black southern time and condition, but projects the human heart cry: I am.

Copyright © 2017 Louisiana State University Museum of Art. All rights reserved.

Moreover, his art exceeds sociology. Far beyond the assumed haughtiness of abstract intellectual theory or the cash-register ring of raw commerce. Far beyond. His is a spirit-given form that we can touch and be informed by, just by viewing his sculpture, merely being in its presence. His work exemplifies the essence of black life in America: we were born here as commercial objects but have transformed our captivity into a liberation of the spirit and an elevation of our environment. Always. Always. Embodying our ancestral essence: regardless of conditions, make life better. Prettier.

Payton educates and elevates us; his art encourages us to strive to achieve our cravings as well as accept the challenge to be our better selves. Spiritual metallurgy is what Payton has done. Continues to do. He forces us who view his work—who see how he has composed metal—to imagine that we could be more than whatever we are. That is, after all, the secret wish of every individual: we desire to be more than we are.

Even when we are not fully cognizant of our own thoughts and feelings—indeed, especially then—great art ennobles us. Payton’s work frees us to take flight even as we and the work remain rooted to the ground.

What great paradox Payton achieves: his heavy steel sculptures enlighten us. Standing before his art, we imagine wings. He makes us feel like flying. Or, at the very least, feel that we are witnessing the work of someone who has flown to the heart of the sun and returned with knowledge far beyond ordinary knowing (fig. 1). Such is the magic of his art: he gives wings to our thoughts and imaginations.

KALAMU YA SALAAM

What we think is important, but what and how we do—how we actualize our thoughts—that is the critical process. As they mature, great artists make what they do seem almost effortless. We sometimes lose sight of the hard work required. One does not become a master without an outlay of time and effort. As our folk wisdom counsels, “You can see a man’s fall but not know his struggles.” The reality is that master artists have spent decades wrestling with their chosen craft to reach the point where articulating their ideas no longer requires physically or mentally waging war with their materials. Once one becomes expert, one

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can simply do without thinking about doing. Often, over time, the resulting work becomes more condensed, compact, less showy, diminutive rather than immense or ostentatious. Masters are always pithy in their articulation even as they are profound in their meaning—the complex is elegantly reduced to a simple, albeit not simplistic, profundity.

In the African American tradition, mastery was often a survival skill camouflaged to avoid detection and destruction. But beyond mere survival, we advocated an approach to life that emphasized being cool, a quality integral to the DNA of an African way of being.

During the North American sojourn, in particular, Africans were prohibited from producing a lasting materiality. Our artwork was illegal. In conscious contradistinction to the prohibitions of ancestral slavery and twentieth-century segregation, Africans in the New World conjured a vibrant spiritual and material culture. It is a major mistake to think of the artists who carried on this tradition as naïve, unschooled folk artists, as if they were not great thinkers—self-aware artisans.

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Artists such as Martin Payton are more than gifted prodigies and natural savants. They labor at developing their skills, often committing a lifetime to the arts. Payton has spent nearly forty years welding. No one can work that long continually without thoughtfully doing. Even if he seems to be simply placing found objects in a circle, what we are actually witnessing is a hard-earned intuition—a projection of the human spirit through a profound mise-en-scène constructed from available elements in a given circumstance.

Fig. 1: Icarus Africanus, 2003, welded steel, 22 x 22 x 18 inches

When our elders talk about “making do,” their thesis is an appropriate emphasis on action rather than reflection, or, as they are wont to preach: “It ain’t what you do but the way that you do it.” In a counterintuitive sense, an African sensibility goes beyond this basic formulation that substance is more important than style—that what a thing “is” is more important than what it looks like. That seemingly obvious formulation is turned on its head by African artists such as Martin Payton. His work suggests another worldview.

For Payton, art is the vector that renders the process of stylization significant, more significant even than the material that is being acted upon. Payton sees scrap metal, and when he is finished, we see gods and spirits rising. The energy of art moves inert matter into the spiritual realm. Artistic stylization animates mute matter into something more than itself. Much like Einstein’s relativity, Payton’s artwork is at once simple in its existence but masterful in its formulation. Implicit in sculpture is the axiom: how you be “is” (or becomes) what you be. Or, in more abstract terms: being is doing. In human terms, what we do with the world within which we live defines our humanity.

Once I was giving a Ghanaian cultural official a tour of New Orleans when he suddenly exclaimed, “Sankofa! Sankofa!” Mystified, I repeated the strange word and asked what he

Copyright © 2017 Louisiana State University Museum of Art. All rights reserved.

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meant. I saw only a house with an iron railing on the front porch. He explained that the design in the metal was an adinkra symbol for going back and fetching what one has lost, one’s past, one’s ancestral patrimony.

Over a decade later, I visited Ghana and learned of Ghana’s cultural double consciousness. Their artwork was twined with designs that had both a representational and a symbolic expression. That mysterious sankofa word could be evidenced as a bird or as a curved, heart-like outline. Moreover, these symbols were philosophical tenets. A bird, a heart—they meant much more than what one saw.

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Historian and cultural theorist Cheikh Anta Diop posits an outlook that connects the far-flung Diaspora and is grounded in a fundamental difference between African and European cultural realities and expressions.1 As Diop indicates, those who were removed from the motherland continue nevertheless to exemplify a connective philosophy. The Brazilians call this nexus saudade— a nostalgia, a longing for that which was lost. When Payton affixes titles such as Nzinga, Toussaint, Fannie, Oshun, Sojourner, Tyner, Dolphy, Chucho, Icarus Africanus, and Kilimanjaro to his work, he is announcing a Pan-African approach that, beyond the obvious political and social meanings, explicitly celebrates the commonality of an immense and diverse body of human realities. Payton’s artwork is reflective of personalities and conditions shared

by African people in both the Old and New Worlds, from precolonial times to the twenty-first century.

MARTIN PAYTON IS A BLACKSMITH. LITERALLY. A BLACK MAN WHO WRESTLES WITH METAL, AND IN SO DOING REFLECTS NOT JUST THE ETHOS OF HIS BLACK SOUTHERN TIME AND CONDITION, HE PROJECTS THE HUMAN HEART CRY: I AM.

Copyright © 2017 Louisiana State University Museum of Art. All rights reserved.

Whether considering nail-infused Nkisi spirit statues from the Congo area, the exquisite majesty of Benin bronzes out of Nigeria, the intricately entwined Makonde figures in Tanzania, or the sensual Shona soapstone carvings from Zimbabwe, not to mention the example of ancient Egyptian funeral artifacts, African American artists inevitably are influenced by the immense totality of African art. As a result of these wide-ranging influences, artists such as Martin Payton subconsciously, or consciously, are de facto aesthetic Pan Africanists. Even when these artists have no specific political focus, they are attracted to and advocates of what is sometimes called an African aesthetic, which is diverse in its details while at the same time unified in its essence.

The fact that some are unaware of the connection, and that the majority of African American artists have not actually been to Africa or worked with continental African artists or communities, does not negate their authentic Africanity. While there is no denying the disruption between the Diaspora and the ancestral homeland, a basic emotional and expressive unity has been maintained. Yes, there are distinctive differences between African Americans and continental Africans. Yes, African Americans have physical and cultural attributes that continentals don’t have, but the differences are ones of detail and not essence. Payton’s artwork exemplifies and celebrates this cultural essentiality even as his sculptural output is reflective of the particulars of his time and place within the New World.

African retentions are real. And what is retained is a “deeptitude,” an African way of knowing, light-years beyond primal human expressions and strivings.

Western society proposes the progressive model of human development: each era is thought of as more knowledgeable than the previous. After all, electricity is hipper than firelight.

But what our African ancestry teaches us is that regardless of what we learn, we are still human beings utilizing our abilities to facilitate being alive and struggling with whatever conditions we find ourselves in.

Moreover, what we know is not enough to ensure survival. Thought alone is not our highest expression. Thought must be mated with feelings, and our individuality must be merged into and immersed within a specific human society. The precision of our artwork is not craft alone but is also the demi-divine material expression of human emotions.

I remember touching one of Payton’s massive steel sculptures in childlike wonder. Built atop gigantic springs, the heavy metal structure rocked. Swayed would be a more accurate way to describe its movement. Danced would be an even more telling description. Payton created sculpture that dances.

Suddenly I understood—really understood, deeply understood—Mardi Gras

Indians dancing in all their feathered finery. African masks worn by humans in ritual movement. In this context and that of traditional African ritual, consider the miracle of black artists who deal with the hard art of sculpture.

Payton is an artistic gandy dancer harkening back to his twentieth-century ancestors who labored at laying railroad tracks. They didn’t simply toil as manual laborers; they whistled and danced as they worked. Making music was integral to how they stepped through life. Payton is of their lineage.

Even filled with diagonals, Payton’s work stands upright. He’s got what in the vernacular is called a “gangsta lean,” which is simply the negroidal penchant for the asymmetrical. Or, as Léopold Senghor presciently noted: the negro abhors the straight line. Even a quick glance at Payton’s sculpture will evidence how he uses repetition to create rhythm. Add to that the New World insistence of jazzy improvisation in how he approaches the use of negative space—his sculptures are as much about what is not there as they are about what is present. Every piece has open spaces, upward thrusts, and an off-center balance that make the work seem to simultaneously be rising and falling. This art is a virtual philosophical encyclopedia of postmodern style and substance.

Copyright © 2017 Louisiana State University Museum of Art. All rights reserved.

Our art is no accident. The miracle of jazz was born of the baseness of captivity. We all recognize the grandeur of the music, embrace the cultural majesty of the food, but we should also get hip to the achievements of architecture and the plastic arts, which include an innovative use of rhythm and color in shaping the lived environment. And beyond literally shaping the way we live in the world, more importantly, we actually shape the world itself. That’s it: beyond merely being born into this world, by making art we actually co-create our birth space.

Payton makes art that defiantly proclaims the beauty of his individual being, his people’s hopes, and, indeed, the shared history of African humanity. Above all, his sculpture exemplifies the immense beauty of the human spirit. Payton declares that we can be artful. Filled with beauty. The metal of our living can be forged into both a testimony of ancestral spirit and a guide and gift to progeny yet to come.

Cheikh Anta Diop, The Cultural Unity of Black Africa: The Domains of Patriarchy and of Matriarchy in Classical Antiquity (London: Karnak House, 1989).

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WORKS

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SOJOURNER 2005 welded steel 62 x 56 x 30 inches

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SHANGO 2015 welded steel 100 x 49 x 24 inches

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MAGNOLIA FOR EMMETT 1997 welded steel, glass bottles 60 x 53 x 16 inches

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DOLPHY

2007 welded steel 48 x 20 x 27 inches

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SORCEROR 2010 welded steel 80 x 37 x 28 inches

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OSHUN

1998 welded steel, glass bottles 93 x 44 x 38 inches

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TOUSSAINT 1998 welded steel 55 x 34 x 12 inches

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GRIOT

1997 welded steel 92 x 23 x 16 inches

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IBEJI 2004 welded steel 60 x 22 x 20 inches (2)

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JUJU TOTEM IN D MINOR 2016 welded steel 70 x 29 x 18 inches

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NZINGA

2004 welded steel, glass bottles 45 x 35 x 33 inches

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PRAISE SONG 2015 welded steel 88 x 32 x 34 inches

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BASTROP BAMANA 2017 welded steel 71 x 30 x 24 inches

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SENGBE 2013 welded steel 86 x 42 x 30 inches

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CAKE WALK 2009 welded steel 26 x 18 x 20 inches

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FANNIE 2017 welded steel 86 x 27 x 28 inches

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STITT 2004 welded steel 42 x 23 x 13 inches

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WALKIN’ 2016 welded steel 80 x 28 x 26 inches

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UNTITLED 2004 welded steel 48 x 28 x 22 inches

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NEFERTITI 2006 welded steel 42 x 36 x 29 inches

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TYNER 2001 welded steel 72 x 40 x 14 inches

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RAHSAAN 2004 welded steel 68 x 54 x 56 inches

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NIGHT TRANE 2004 welded steel 43 x 16 x 36 inches

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T-BAR GIGA 2009 welded steel 21 x 18 x 14 inches

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MALI ANDANTE 2009 welded steel 35 x 16 x 16 inches

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ARPEGGIO FOR LOUIS 2009 welded steel 31 x 23 x 18 inches

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48

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WES 2004 welded steel 55 x 48 x 28 inches

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JARRETT 2004 welded steel 52 x 42 x 20 inches

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AMMONS 2004 welded steel 42 x 42 x 27 inches

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CHUCHO 2008 welded steel 64 x 26 x 30 inches

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CURRICULUM VITAE 1973 1975

BFA, Xavier University, New Orleans, LA MFA, Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles, CA

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2015–2016 2012 2009

2007 2004

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2002 2001 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 1993 1990 1989

1988

Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art, Biloxi, MS; Rhythm & Movement: Sculpture by Martin Payton Heriard-Cimino Gallery, New Orleans, LA; Minor Keys Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA; Louisiana Masters: Martin Payton Heriard-Cimino Gallery, New Orleans, LA; Second Line Hooks-Epstein Gallery, Houston, TX; Steel Rhythms

Heriard-Cimino Gallery, New Orleans, LA; Icons Heriard-Cimino Gallery, New Orleans, LA; New Sculpture University Museum, University of Louisiana in Lafayette Masur Museum of Art, Monroe, LA Heriard-Cimino Gallery, New Orleans, LA; Martin Payton: Recent Sculpture Amistad Research Center and Ashé Cultural Center, New Orleans, LA; Martin Payton: 20 Years of Sculpture Heriard-Cimino Gallery, New Orleans, LA; Bambara Suite LSU Sculpture Park, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, LA Heriard-Cimino Gallery, New Orleans, LA Southern University at New Orleans, New Orleans, LA Sylvia Schmidt Gallery, New Orleans, LA Simms Fine Art, New Orleans, LA 628, Tallahassee, FL; Martin Payton, Yvonne Tucker, Ken Falana Pensacola Junior College, Warrington Gallery, Pensacola, FL; Painted Steel Simms Fine Art, New Orleans, LA LeMoyne Art Foundation, Inc., Tallahassee, FL; New Stars A ‘Rising

2012 2011 2008 2007 2006 2004 2003 2000

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1999 1998 1997

1996 1994 1993 1990

1989 1987 1981

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2016

African-American Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Mahalia Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, LA; Then and Now Epcot Center, Orlando, FL; Echoes of Africa Hooks-Epstein Gallery, Houston, TX; 31 Artists, 31 Works Shaw Center Sculpture Garden, Baton Rouge, LA; Our Neighbors to the East, Fifteen Artists from Louisiana Alexandria Museum of Art, Alexandria, LA; Southern Journeys LSU Sculpture Park, Baton Rouge, LA African American Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; American Vision: African American Sculptors19th Century–21st Century Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, LA; Calder and Beyond Ogden Museum of Southern Art, The Michael Brown and Linda Green Collection, New Orleans, LA Heriard-Cimino Gallery, New Orleans, LA; September Preview 99 William King Regional Arts Center, Abingdon, VA; Blurring the Lines Baton Rouge, LA; A Different Image: African American Art in Louisiana Collections Horne-Marshal Gallery, Meridian, MS National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, TN; African Influences/ Contemporary Artists Florida State University Gallery, Tallahassee, FL; Illusion/Allusion: Contemporary Sculpture New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival New Orleans, LA Spelman College, Rockefeller Fine Arts Building, Atlanta, GA; Size & Substance, Small Works in Sculpture Florida State University Gallery and Museum, Tallahassee, FL; The Florida National Competition 1990 Spelman College, Healy Building, Research into Southern Atlanta, Georgia Comfort Florida State University Gallery, Center for Professional Development, Tallahassee, FL Canal Place Group Installation, New Orleans, LA Sculpture Center, Marilyn Brown, Catalog, New York, NY; 11 New Orleans Sculptors in New York New Museum, New York, NY; Fashion Moda Museum School, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; 9 Louisiana Sculptors Gallerie DeVille, New Orleans, LA; UMU NNA ETO

Stella Jones, New Orleans, LA; INspired: 20 Years of African American Art

1979

1978 1977

1975

Loyola University, New Orleans, LA; Survey: Black Artists in New Orleans Presentation of the Public Broadcasting System, New Orleans, LA; A Heritage Sustained Nexus Gallery, New Orleans, LA; A New Orleans Legacy University of New Orleans, New Orleans, LA; New Orleans Universities—Art Faculty Exhibit Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles, CA; Six Black Artists at Otis Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles, CA; Payton/Abuan

COMMISSIONS/AWARDS Silver Circle Artist, Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, LA DeSaix Circle Commission, Awarded Percent for Art Public Sculpture Commission, Collaboration with John Scott, Arts Council, New Orleans, LA Purchase Award, William King Regional Arts Center Sculpture Competition, Abingdon, VA Martin Luther King School, Commissioned by the Arts Council of New Orleans, New Orleans, LA Honorable Mention: Florida National Competition, Tallahassee, FL Architectural Collaboration on the Redevelopment and Redesign of the Contemporary Arts Center (designed covering for a two-story spiral ramp), New Orleans, LA Runnymede Sculpture Garden Woodside, California

Copyright © 2017 Louisiana State University Museum of Art. All rights reserved.

2002 2002–2001

1998 1995 1990 1989

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PLAYLIST

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LOUIS ARMSTRONG “Stardust”

CHARLES MINGUS “Flamingo”

LOUIS ARMSTRONG “West End Blues”

SARAH VAUGHAN “Cherokee”

MARY LOU WILLIAMS “The Blues”

CHARLIE PARKER “Parker’s Mood”

THELONIOUS MONK “Blue Monk”

CHARLIE PARKER “Summertime”

THELONIOUS MONK “Well, You Need’nt”

JOHN COLTRANE “Equinox”

MILES DAVIS “All Blues”

JOHN COLTRANE “Naima”

MILES DAVIS “Freddie Freeloader”

DUKE ELLINGTON “In A Sentimental Mood”

DEXTER GORDON “Cheese Cake”

BEN WEBSTER “Over The Rainbow”

LIONEL HAMPTON “On Green Dolphin Street”

ART TATUM “Someone To Watch Over Me”

NICHOLAS PAYTON “The Backward Step”

KEITH JARRETT “All The Things You Are“

NICHOLAS PAYTON “The African Tinge”

WES MONTGOMERY “D-Natural Blues“

HANK CRAWFORD “The Sun Died”

GENE AMMONS “Blue Ammons“

Copyright © 2017 Louisiana State University Museum of Art. All rights reserved.

To listen, visit http://bit.ly/martinpayton

CONTRIBUTORS COURTNEY TAYLOR

Courtney Taylor is curator at the LSU Museum of Art. Taylor earned an MA in Museum Studies with a focus on visual art from the University of Tulsa and a BA in history and art history from Hendrix College. Taylor has worked in curatorial departments at the Arts & Science Center for Southeast Arkansas; Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville; Philbrook Museum; and Gilcrease Museum.

Taylor’s exhibition and catalogue projects include When the Water Rises: Recent Paintings by Julie Heffernan; Here. African American Art from the Permanent Collection of the Arts & Science Center for Southeast Arkansas; Organic Matters: Arkansas Women to Watch 2016; and I Come From Women Who Could Fly: New Work from Delita Martin.

JOYCE M. JACKSON, PH.D.

Joyce M. Jackson is a professor in the Department of Geography & Anthropology and former director of African & African American Studies at Louisiana State University. She earned her Ph.D. from Indiana University, Bloomington in folklore and ethnomusicology and her core research centers on African and African Diaspora performance-centered studies, sacred and secular rituals, and cultural and community sustainability. She has authored many scholarly works, including Life in the Village: A Cultural Memory of the Fazendeville Community, curated numerous exhibitions, and produced a documentary film titled Easter Rock.

Copyright Š 2017 Louisiana State University Museum of Art. All rights reserved.

ELOISE E. JOHNSON, PH.D.

Eloise E. Johnson holds a BA in Fine Arts from Southern University in Baton Rouge, a MA in Art History from Louisiana State University and a Ph.D. from Florida State University in African American Art, art theory and contemporary art. Dr. Johnson served as a professor of art history and architectural history and curator of the Southern University Museum of Art in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

She served as an adjunct professor in the Museum Studies Program at Southern University in New Orleans (SUNO). She is author of the book Rediscovering the Harlem Renaissance: The Politics of Exclusion, originally published by Garland Publishing Company, 1997. Dr. Johnson has curated numerous exhibitions including a traveling show Southern Journeys and has been a guest writer for the Stella Jones Gallery in New Orleans for over twenty years. She is now retired.

KALAMU YA SALAAM

Born on March 24, 1947 in New Orleans, Louisiana, Kalamu ya Salaam is a professional editor/writer, movie maker, educator, producer, and arts administrator. His latest book is The Magic of JuJu: An Appreciation of the Black Arts Movement (Third World Press, 2016). New Orleans Griot: A Tom Dent Reader is forthcoming from University of New Orleans Press.

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