17 Midwest artists offer a peek into Black Abstraction art in SooVAC exhibit

Sometimes an artist finds community, but at other times community finds the artist.

In the case of Twin Cities-based artist/curator Gregory J. Rose, he wanted to find other artists working in Black Abstraction, so he put out an open call for an exhibition that would focus on exactly that.

"Since the uprising and George Floyd, art has been at the forefront of protests and healing and communication and community," Rose said. "I wanted to find out who my peers were because I've lived here since 2001."

His answers came together in the group show "Change Is God — Take Root Among the Stars: Black Abstraction in the Midwest," now on view at Soo Visual Arts Center in Minneapolis. Seventeen artists who call the Midwest home — with one in Oklahoma who made a case for that state as part of the region — make up the mix of two- and three-dimensional work in this show, which includes painting, installation, quilt, video and sculpture.

Abstract power

Abstract art feels more like music in the sense that one will look and feel rather than immediately recognize faces and places and then assign meaning. In an academic study published in 2020 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers found that abstract art can help people understand things more conceptually instead of realistically, evoking "far away" feelings.

Eight of the artists in the show call the Twin Cities home. Stephanie A. Lindquist's four abstract photographs and lightboxes, arranged on the floor like a spawning organism, are actually representations of mold growing from Minnesota to West Africa.

Sarah White's dynamic installation is a hanging white canvas with electromagnetic lines squiggled across it and a faint video projection of a Black woman tying a rope around herself and then reclining on the ground.

It was inspired by "what it feels like to have my hands on a body and feel their grief and thinking about how the heart has electromagnetic waves that go out in 3 meters in each direction," White said in a video on SooVac's YouTube channel.

Recent Guggenheim fellowship winner Ta-coumba T. Aiken, who closed a solo exhibition at Dreamsong gallery in northeast Minneapolis last month, is also in the show. Aiken, whose circular acrylic on canvas works "Time to Face It! Tell the truth" and "KEyes on the Prize" are displayed, noted how abstraction is "not a new thing for African-American artists, to name ourselves as Black Abstract artists." He mentioned Alma Thomas, whose work is in the Whitney Museum of American Art, as an early Black female abstract artist.

"Then there's people like Norman Lewis, who was an abstract artist at the same time as Jackson Pollack, but the art critics didn't talk about him, probably because he was Black," Aiken said. "When I discovered his work, it was phenomenal."

Part of Rose's desire for the show was to move the conversation around Black abstraction beyond the most well-known Twin Cities artists working in it, such as Aiken, Seitu Jones and Clarence Morgan, whom he studied under in the University of Minnesota's Department of Art.

Artist Alex Beaumont began her body of work around a personal project exploring her Jamaican-ness.

"I have felt kind of tenuous at times or disconnected from having not had a deeper relationship with the island and some of my family," Beaumont said.

"In the work, I am reckoning with those feelings of loss and I feel that materially in the removing of threads from the work — this permeability of the work with the cut canvas — but I am also claiming my embodied experience in my Jamaican-ness."

She uses fabric made from the sorrel plant. Her textile pieces also visually reference the iron work on her family's home in Mandeville, Jamaica.

Beaumont grew up in South Carolina, but her dad is originally from Jamaica, and her mom is of German descent. She likens the way that Jamaican culture has spread to the blowing of a dandelion's seeds.

"It gave me a deep feeling of comfort that, you know, the things I'm feeling and experiencing as part of [a Jamaican] diaspora really does have this connective tissue to other people in this diaspora," she said. "It's been a beautiful experience, being part of this show."

***

Change Is God — Take Root Among the Stars: Black Abstraction in the Midwest

When: Ends Sat. July 30, with a reception and panel discussion from 5-8 p.m.

Where: Soo Visual Arts Center, 2909 Bryant Av. S., #101, Mpls.

Hours: 1-6 p.m. Wed.-Fri., 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sat.-Sun.

Info: 612-871-2263 or soovac.org.