Press Release
From Childhood Memories through Pangaea
Noah Jemisin
January 24th – March 1st, 2008
Skoto Gallery is pleased to present From Childhood Memories through Pangaea, an exhibition of recent paintings, prints, drawing and sculpture by Noah Jemisin. This will be his first solo show at the gallery since the early 1990s. The reception is Thursday, January 24th, 6-8pm and the artist will be present.
Noah Jemisin’s work exudes exuberant energy and vitality, compositional complexity and a high degree of originality that explore issues of identity through visual symbols and metaphors. He draws on a wide range of artistic inspirations including classical mythology, the African-American experience, as well as the culture of his surroundings. His work exploits figurative images for non-narrative purposes – they do not tell a story, nor do they provide a description of a situation, they are pictorial discoveries that often release associations in the observer through the power of their expressiveness. His extensive travels in Africa, Europe, Asia have helped him to develop an approach to life and art which enables him to synthesize into a distinct and dynamic whole the various components of his identity and create work that strive to make meaning of his personal history as well as the ambiguities and contradictions of contemporary culture.
Noah Jemisin is always engaged in investigation of new materials and techniques as an integral part of his search for a new visual language, in the process he makes images that are pure inventions and full of new meanings. Performance art, spectacle, theatre, music, dance and masquerade are influences and artistic manifestation that also run parallel to his creative vision as an artist. The fluid and improvisational qualities of the encaustic medium, which he has mastered for over 30 years, combined with an abiding feeling about the sanctity of artistic creation allow for a high degree of proficiency in his work – he applies the encaustic to the canvas by brushing, pouring and tilting, allowing the molten wax to run into desired and incidental configurations, enabling him to effect immediately, the desired density.
Included in this exhibition is Seven Hats: Monuments to Black Cowboys, 2007 – a large format picture that pays homage to the contributions of black cowboys who helped settle the West. As the American west opened up, it beckoned a “golden door” of opportunity to thousands of people craving a fresh start, and a chance for a future on their own. Many of these emigrants to the West, were of African-American, mixed blood descent. Some traced their citizenship/freedom to colonial times, some were freed by law or proclamation, while others “purchased” their freedom with their feet. Though, largely ignored by the popular media, their story is an enduring one, nurtured within the compass of history, and Noah Jemisin’s evocative picture alludes to evidence of memories, travels, and lived experiences. He exploits a wide range of the physical and emotive qualities of the line to create work that embodies individual creative distinctions as well as group configurations.
Noah Jemisin was born in Birmingham, AL and obtained an MFA degree from University of Iowa, in 1974. Exhibitions include Montclair Art Museum, Neuberger Museum of Art, New York, and Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. He is in several collections including the Metropolitan Museum, New York, Museum of Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM; Library of Congress, Washington DC.
Super-reality
by Nora. K. Jemisin
It’s human nature that we experience God most powerfully through imagination. This is of course not to suggest that sermons, sacred texts, and other external foci for the spirit are a waste, nor do I imply that atheists are creatively dead. It’s simply a statement of fact: one’s understanding of that which lies beyond the tangible — whether theoretical physics or chakras or, if you prefer, God — is heightened by inward contemplation.
I don’t remember the first time I realized this, myself. It was sometime in my childhood, possibly while accompanying my father on one of the trips he took to study or teach art in exotic locales like France and Iowa. Or maybe it was during one of the summer nights in New York that are burned into my memory — you know the kind, when the sky glows pale with light pollution and the brightest of stars, and the wind blows humid and thick with smells of sewage and spices. I became a writer to articulate that feeling, but before that, my father showed it to me in ten thousand ways.
Case in point: the first time I stood in front of Holland Tunnel, I contemplated evolution. I could pause here to talk about the spiraling, four-dimensional perspective of this work, and the colors which capture the kaleidoscope of sodium lamps and tail-lights and puddle-reflections… but I didn’t care about things like that at the time. I was twelve. What I knew was that looking at that painting made me understand moving on and moving through and doing what needs to be done to get where you want to go. My father drove taxi at the time, because we needed to eat and I needed to go to college. I was growing up, because the world was a harsh place and I needed to be a young woman to face it.
I certainly understood this in the super-real sense during the summer that we worked on a mural in the Lower East side called La Lucha Continua (The Struggle Continues). Dad had agreed to do the mural for an arts organization fighting the twin encroachments of drugs and gentrification on the neighborhood. Part of that struggle was lost. Yet as we spent that hard eighties summer hauling cans of paint to an old wall and transforming it to fit my father’s vision, I came to realize there is no such thing as inevitability. Any fate,
no matter how certain, can and must be fought. These were the years of the crack epidemic, when girls like me wondered whether there would be any boys like me left when we were ready to settle down. These were the years before apartheid’s slow, brutal death, when it looked as though the damned Afrikaaners would rather kill everyone than just do what was right.
Fight, said that mural. You are part of a purpose bigger than yourself. You owe that purpose your strength and persistence.
And I listened.
Sometime after this my father embraced new media — sculptures of driftwood and twine, bits of poetry worked into paint or watercolor, and [???] printing thanks to Bob Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop. There has always been an interstitial element to Dad’s work, but it became more explicit then. Among Dad’s early prints are scenes capturing the New York that I loved so well, and lands I had visited only in my mind’s eye. Rio, during Carnival. Harlem, “before we lose it”. But by far my favorites are the least exotic: a slightly-skanky bodega in Williamsburg, on a slow night. A burned out car In the block, courtesy of our friendly neighborhood chop shop. The Bridge Painter, encapsulating a single moment in the twenty-year restoration of the Williamsburg bridge. I love this print in the colors of sunset, blue and violet and green and endless shades of warmth. The bridge’s footpath had dangerous holes in it in those days. Sometimes I dreamt of slipping through one, bypassing the traffic and trains to fall sideways along the path of the river, drawn inexorably after the sinking sun.
This is not to say that the messages in my father’s work are always implicit. Some are a brick to the head, such as his Artist’s reaction to lynching and police brutality. Like Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” and Nina Simone’s “Four Women”; like the incidents themselves, beatings and casual dehumanization played over and over on 24-hour news channels; this is imagery no sane person can ignore, or forget. Still, there is more to see. I have no idea what others see in this image, but I saw ephemerally. How could I not? Here was this man, so starkly rendered, black like my father. Healthy and strong like my father. Murdered…
Like my father? It happens to artists and activists, especially black male ones, far too often in this world. It is impossible to look at a work like this and not feel the weight of centuries of murder: the middle passage, slavery, imperialistic meddling in Africa, the systematic incarceration and slaughter of black men, the rape of black women, the neglected-to-death minds of black children. All themes, which have been captured in paint or sculpture over the course of my father’s career.
Yet I also find reassurance from the Artist’s reaction image. The medium itself — just paper, just ink, not flesh and blood — reminds me of reality. It is the year 2008, and while Michael Donald and Vincent Chin and Sean Bell remind us all that racism-tinged violence is far from dead, some things have changed. The eerie, not-quite-real figures in the background of this work, who are preening and proud of their evil, are gone. They still exist today of course, in new guises and working more subtle evil, but the very fact that they’ve changed their modus operandi gives me hope for the future. As they grow more subtle, we get smarter and better-able to see through their tricks. (I just wish the latter would happen faster.)
There are these and other subtle messages of hope throughout my father’s body of work. There is the jazz series, honoring one of the most creative outgrowths of African-American life, olive farms in Italy; orchids in Brazil. There are sketches of daily life from parts of Africa undaunted by Western interference, such as the striking painted houses of the Ndebele people. A recent work in this hopeful vein is titled [Daaaaaaayum, baby!]??? Every woman knows what it’s like to feel beautiful, at least for one moment of her life. And when that moment comes, every woman feels the world-shaking power which underlies that beauty. She’s got it. Everybody knows it. Not even the spirits are immune, if they dare to watch. Oh, and they are watching. They’d be stupid not to. We are, after all, their finest creations. And I do mean fine, baby.
So many hidden narratives, so many loaded dreams. I grasp them best in quiet contemplation and private exaltation. Try it for yourself. I think you’ll enjoy Noah Jemisin’s works best that way too.
