Edward Higgins, June 2014

Edward Higgins is a member of The Association Internationale Des Critiques d’Art.

Spiritual Strivings

       Spiritual Strivings: A Celebration of African American Works on Paper opening later this month is a major enterprise for the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. By reputation the artists and the works displayed will surely reach that goal.

        The project, named from a W.E.B. DuBois essay urging creativity, is comprised of two exhibitions, in two buildings, by two curators. It is nothing less than a survey of the 20th century work of black American artists into the 21st century.

        The first exhibit is “The Harmon and Harriet Kelley Collection of African American Art: Works on Paper” curated by Anna O. Marley, it will run through October 12. The second exhibit is “Eldzier Cortor: Theme and Variations” curated by Robert Cozzolino and it will run through August 31.

        The Kelley Collection, based in San Antonio, Texas, was assembled by the Kelleys in 1987 when they realized they knew far less about their artistic heritage than they should. The size, scope and quality of the collection has been praised as it was assembled in a relatively short period of time, at a time when the market was high, and they were located far from the major art centers. Nonetheless, they managed to collect such artists as William H. Johnson, Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Dox Thrash, Benny Andrews, and Jacob Lawrence. The show also includes two prints by Eldzier Cortor, the subject of the show across the alley.

        The exhibit has taken part of the collection and shows 70 works of drawings, lithographs, watercolors, pastels, acrylics, gouaches, linoleum, and color screenprints. There are also Philadelphia connections such as the four etchings by Henry O. Tanner, a one-time student at the Academy who spent much of his career in France; and Dox Thrash, a printmaker who spent most of his career in Philadelphia. Other area artists include Horace Pippen, Paul Keener, Samuel J. Brown, Allen Frelon, and Raymond Seth.

        Most of the work is from the 1930s and 40s, done under the auspice of the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. Much of the work has a social consciousness and many artists were assigned to teach art, an effort that is reflected today in a society keenly aware of style and taste. The earliest piece in the show is by Grafton Tyler Brown, born in Harrisburg in 1841. He was born a freeman and learned lithography in Philadelphia before moving to the West Coast and he is thought to be one of the first graphic artists working there.

        Eldzier Cortor is the subject of the second show assembled from a donation he made to the Academy recently. Although born in Richmond, VA, in 1916, Cortor spent muich of his life in Chicago where his family had moved to avoid Southern racism. He now lives in New York and is a active artist in his late 90s. His first name is traditional with his family.

        Cortor managed (against his father’s wish) to attend the school of the Art Institute of Chicago and later the Institute of Design. His teachers were Lazlo Maholy-Nagy and Kathleen Blackshear who gave him a distinctive compositional style and a feeling for African art, respectively. He spent hours in the Field Museum of Natural History with African sculpture, and as a result much of his later work reflected the elongated nature of the female nude.

        He worked in the WPA and earned a place in the Chicago Renaissance, a movement which rivaled the better known movement in Harlem. Like William H. Johnson, Cortor also found inspiration in cartoons, and for a time drew cartoons for the Chicago Defender.

        Cortor, over the course of his career, won several scholarships and grants such as a Guggenheim. He lived among people of the African Dispora including time teaching in Haiti. He also lived and traveled in the Sea Islands of Georgia, Jamaica, Cuba, and during the 50s when McCarthy reigned, he moved to Mexico. His work can be described as a combination of primitive and the geometric with Surrealistic overtones. Although he did work with oil on canvas, he was primarily a printmaker and this exhibition traces his development and working methods.

Late in his life his work drew more attention and while he did exhibit earlier, most recently he has had exhibitions at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Boston’s National Center of Afro-American Artists.

Shown: Alma Woodsey Thomas (1891-1978), Wind and Flowers, 1973. Watercolor on paper, 14 1/2 x 18 in. The Harmon and Harriet Kelley Collection of African American Art

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