to work successfully as a professional artist and teacher, enjoying more than four decades of influential teaching posts, artist residencies and workshops, exhibitions, public art commissions, and awards for her art practice that she continues to maintain. Bullock has broadened her practice: some of her more recent work investigates world cultures beyond Africa, or socially and emotionally powerful topics such as the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and the murder of Trayvon Martin. As William Valerio describes, Bullock’s abstracted depiction of the body of this innocent victim in Trayvon Martin, Most Precious Blood (2013–14) “represents all bodies that have come before, including the generations of slaves on whose backs this country was built, the men and women who were lynched and torched in the era of Jim Crow, and those individuals like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, the nine members of Charleston’s Emanuel A.M.E. Church, Sandra Bland, and others whose deaths came as the result of institutionalized brutality or overt racism.”42 Charles Searles, too, Fig. 50. Trayvon Martin, Most Precious Blood, 2013–14, by Barbara Bullock (Woodmere Art Museum: Museum purchase, 2014) Photograph by Rick Echelmeyer
was poised for a successful career after his tenure at Ile-Ife, establishing a studio in New York while also teaching at Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts) and a number of other
Pressures of maintaining both his dance ensemble
art academies, and remaining prolific in his practice
and the community center in this challenging
until his death in 2004.
climate began to weigh on Hall by the late 1980s. Hall departed the desperation of the city, ultimately relocating his Yoruba-inspired dance practice to Maine. The legacy of Ile-Ife, however, did not disappear along with Hall. As a muchneeded welcoming community within the harsh environment of the city, Ile-Ife had provided a space for artists to thrive. After her foundational experiences there, Barbara Bullock continued
Twins Seven-Seven, however, would feel the effect of Philadelphia’s punishing social conditions more sharply. After his early successes, Twins’s career was abruptly diminished when difficult financial circumstances left him unable to maintain the production and sale of his art and meet his expenses. It was when he was close to eviction that Twins first met George Jevremović, owner of Material Culture imports retailer, who offered him a place to stay and work as the organization’s first
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WOODMERE ART MUSEUM