New exhibit celebrates Black History Month Visual

By Lydia Finkelstein
Feb 26,2001 Bloomington, IN

Nikki Giovanni, August Wilson, Toni Morrison and John Edgar Wideman are four of the 20 poster-like images by artist Gilbert Fletcher from his suite of oil paintings, “Painted Voices,” on exhibit at the SoFA Gallery at Indiana University through March 9.

Installed to honor black History Month, Fletcher’s paintings are creative interpretations of each writer’s art and individuality, as well as their portraits. Each 30 -by 40 inch painting contains visuals clues linking the writer to their particular concerns. and influences.

Alice Walker, the author of The Color Purple, as well as poetry, essays, and other novels, is depicted with her arms raised up and over her head. within a tropical flowered frame. Her persona is quiet and sensual. I spoke with Walker several times once during my work with a private foundation in Washington, D.C., and her voice was exactly like Fletcher’s painting, soft and gentle.

No black American writer, perhaps stand taller than the poet Langston Hughes. He was honored in his lifetime as a significant member of the Harlem renaissance of the 1920s, and his poetry has never really lost its appeal since then. Hughes was a sophisticated and serious man, and a great talent. Fletcher’s profile portrait, with the words “125th Street,” “Harlem Blues” and “Africa,” graphically integrated into the overall black brown, and blue (a little Duke Ellington, here, for the cognoscenti) image is one of the most dramatic in the exhibition.

Each of the portraits labels carry quotes by the writer about their art, how they became writers, and what sustained them. this handsome exhibition puts all the street corner rhetoric by today;s rappes in perspective. It also vividly demonstrates the ability of art to teach, inform, and to inspire our young people, even the larger public.

All of us book lovers have our own way of paying homage to the works of writers who have helped make us who we are. Some memorize favorite lines and are ready to recite them on demand. Others clip, frame and post beloved passages. Still, others reread tagged pages of old volumes until they are thumbed and fragile. Many journal their impressions, recording unforgettable lines in their own script. Gilbert Fletcher's way is to paint.

His self-published work Painted Voices: An Artist's Journey Into the World of Black Writers is the highly personal notebook of an avid, demanding reader expressing how the works of 28 black authors have affected him. Because Fletcher is a gifted painter, his notebook is a visual feast for those of us who share his love for these writers (complete listing at right). All are portraits, often spilling off the canvas. Fletcher's paintings are truly voices pictured on canvas. In rendering the faces of these authors, he has captured much more of their messages and portrayed those essences visually.

The book is a painted anthology of Fletcher's favorite black authors. Any important anthology hangs together as a whole, yet presents a variety that the reader, on his own, would never consume together. Painted Voices succeeds because each work is rendered in a graphic style determined by the writer's oeuvre. The color, tone, line and composition vary widely from portrait to portrait, and still comprise a satisfying whole because of Fletcher's gifts. His heavy, slathering brush stroke is a consistent signature from canvas to canvas, and brings a sensuous unity to the diverse literary assemblage. As we turn the pages we "read" these favorite writers in a fresh way.

Painted Voices is a book version of an exhibit by the same name that has toured to nearly a dozen dries since 1998, and been featured at several writer's conferences. The exhibit previously spawned a poster and cards (See BIBR, March-April 2000) and is served well, although not lavishly, by the book. Those who share Fletcher's passion for any of these writers will want to make Painted Voices part of their library.

It was "an exercise in defiance," "a radical changing of the subject of conversation," "a disruption of all sorts of boundaries," "a celebration of multiple voices," "a reading of worlds." These were but a few of the expressions used by participants attempting to describe the conference "African Americans and the Bible" held at Union Theological Seminary April 8-11, 1999. Featuring more than 65 scholarly presentations from a wide range of disciplines and the arts, the conference was the culminating event of a three-year research project directed by Vincent L. Wimbush, professor of New Testament and Christian Origins, and funded by the Lilly Endowment and the Ford Foundation. The more than 300 registrants represented 134 different organizations or institutions from throughout the U.S. and abroad.

Serious debate, cultural celebration, and creativity characterized the conference. James Memorial Chapel, decorated with hand-made quilts and provocative artwork, was the center of conference activity. The Francis Brown Social Hall was transformed into an art gallery featuring Gilbert Fletcher's striking depictions of 20 well-known African American writers.

Ishmael Reed, Terry McMillan, Walter Mosley and thirty other writers will join editors and rap artists in New York City on March 30 to discuss the contributions of black writers to American society. The Fifth National Black Writers Conference is sponsored by Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York.

In addition to providing a forum for debate, the conference offers new writers a chance to get support from a community of scholars, poets, and authors. Writers can also meet informally with publishing agents and the public at exhibitions, book fairs with local booksellers, and author readings. The Brooklyn Public Library, in conjunction with the Brooklyn Museum of Art, is hosting an exhibit of the artist Gilbert Fletcher and a reception to celebrate his work. The conference will be broadcast live on the Internet (www.blackwriters.net), and panelists' presentations will be published in book form.

The Neville Brothers along with fellow musician Deacon John will be among 11 individuals who will be presented the New Orleans Life Style Award on Saturday, Oct. 25.

Charles, Aaron, Art and Cyril Neville will receive the New Orleans Life Style Award along with the late Edwin P. Romain Jr. (classical music), Dr. Sybil Kein (literature and music), Gilbert Fletcher (art), Earl Barthe' (architecture), Dr. Norman Francis (education) and Wanda Lee Rouzan (music and art).

Passion. Struggle. Family. Survival. These are the qualities that Gilbert Fletcher found united the works of the black writers he admired most, and these were the qualities he wanted to capture in his own work, even as he sought to embody the writing life of his heroes. But Fletcher had set himself a hard task, for he is not a writer but a painter, and if translating these abstractions into plot or verse seems like a challenge, imagine trying to render them in light and dark, line and shape.

Fletcher found a way, as evidenced by the 28 splendid paintings in his new book, Painted Voices: An Artist's Journey into the World of Black Writers. The writers range from Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes to Toni Morrison and Henry Louis Gates Jr., and the styles vary accordingly, from the whitewashed pallor of a barely sketched Ralph Ellison to the riot of colorful images surrounding Calvin Hernton to the near-fantastical portraits of Toni Cade Bambara and Alice Walker. But the paintings have one thing in common: as Fletcher explains in the thoughtful text accompanying the paintings, they are meant "to move beyond traditional portraiture and capture the essence of the writing itself."

The project got its start in the early 1980s, when Fletcher was working as art director for Library Journal. A freelance assignment took him to the Black Writers Conference at CUNY's Medgar Evers College, where he met numerous writers and commenced a serious reading habit that stays with him to this day. Soon he was collecting notes and clippings about his favorites in several oversize notebooks, all the while contemplating the writing process and particularly the pain any writer must face when translating black life in America to the page. These musings led to a bold plan: he would come to understand these artists through his medium so that "their words became my colors, their stories my symbols, their sorrow turned into shadow, their inspirations became light."

From words to paint
Daringly, Fletcher proceeded to contact 100 authors, asking them to help him come up with a list of perhaps 50 candidates for the series he was planning. The response was overwhelming, and he set to work, propping his first 24 blank canvases in his studio and opening up his paints. At first, inspiration was slow in coming—"I had so much wonderful material on the writers but was not using it the right way." Then he began thinking how different writers worked differently, which gave him a key to the entire process, and in one exhilarating, all-night marathon he had his first work.

The paintings that followed form a remarkable group that has toured widely, from New Orleans's Dillard University (Fletcher's alma mater), to Indiana Unversity's SoFa Gallery, to the National Black Writers Conference at the Brooklyn Public Library in March 2000. Fletcher continues his work on the series—he now thinks that the portraits will total about 40—but in the last year he has devoted his efforts to putting together a book that both displays his initial works and documents their creation.

"At first, I thought I would have a few exhibits and then sell some paintings, but this project has really become much more," he explains. "It's taken on another form." He is particularly pleased that the Brooklyn Public Library upgraded its collection to include more works by the writers he had captured on canvas, and he proudly recalls overhearing a mother viewing the exhibit tell her son, "The man in this painting wrote all these books." Having spent time with black writers, however, Fletcher has become chary of the publishing process; he has seen too many black artists get burned by mainstream houses. He thus decided to take control of the book's production and distribution himself.

As viewers, we should be grateful that Hurricane Betsy hit New Orleans in 1965. Fletcher was at Dillard then, torn between his desire to paint (something he had started doing in elementary school) and an interest in science. Flooding from the hurricane destroyed his science equipment, but he did manage to salvage a junior high school painting of a Roman battle scene, and his course was set. Currently, he paints in an upstairs studio crowded with books, memorabilia, and found objects that serve as inspiration, but he paints mostly from memory: "If you want your work to be successful, you must pull something from your life," he reasons.

His encounters with black writers have obviously deepened his art, allowing him to explore new territory while strengthening his sense of what his medium can do—and words, perhaps, can't. "When you stand in front of a painting, you see shapes and colors that relay a message to you. They can give you a sense of fear or of serenity. When I paint, I am improvising pure feelings and energy." It's an energy that we see throughout his wondrous work.

From May 8 to June 10, at Cinque Gallery, 560 Broadway, “Painted Voices,”an exhibition of paintings by Gilbert Fletcher that has already traveled to several museums and university galleries around the country comes to Soho. (There will be an opening reception on May 11, from 5:30 to 8:30PM)

Subtitled “An Artist’s Journey into the World of Black Writers,” Fletcher’s exhibitions is especially interesting for the way he subtle alters his style to convey the personality of each individual author. Amiri Baraka, for example, is posed pensively with bearded chin resting on his palm and enveloped in hues that suggest the title of his well know book “Blues People”. Beautiful Alice Walker, on the other hand, takes on the poetic qualities of one of Gauguin’s Tahitian goddesses, with her bare arms above her head, surrounded by a pastoral motif of clouds and flowers. Richard Wright is rendered in sharp Cubist planes; Nikki Giovanni takes on a stylized Modigliani quality, poised against a red ground; Ralph Ellison is rendered in subtle, subdued tones that reflect the mellow eloquence of his masterful prose; Langston Hughes is seen in profile, his suit jacket deconstructed in lines forms that have improvised vitality of one of his jazz poems.

Gilbert Fletcher is a remarkably versatile painter. To suit the characteristics of each subject he moves easily between various modes of expression, from hard-edged color areas, to tactile impasto, to fluent painterly passages, to lively patterns, to vibrant chromatic contrasts, without sacrificing the strong signature style that makes his work immediately identifiable and consistently engaging.

No other painter seems more suited to he formable task of depicting the rich tapestry of African -American literature in all its lively diversity.