Applause
Applause 2320
Season 23 Episode 15 | 26m 46sVideo has Closed Captions
Painter Wadsworth Jarrell joins us about his new book Afri-COBRA.
painter Wadsworth Jarrell joins us about his new book Afri-COBRA, an organization he helped start in the 60s to address issues of equality and civil rights. And we’ll look at the work of one of one of the co-founders, Jeff Donaldson. Plus an artist envisions the gardens of his favorite composers.
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Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
Applause is a local public television program presented by Ideastream
Applause
Applause 2320
Season 23 Episode 15 | 26m 46sVideo has Closed Captions
painter Wadsworth Jarrell joins us about his new book Afri-COBRA, an organization he helped start in the 60s to address issues of equality and civil rights. And we’ll look at the work of one of one of the co-founders, Jeff Donaldson. Plus an artist envisions the gardens of his favorite composers.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship- [David] On the next Applause, painter Wadsworth Jarrell tells us about his new book, AfriCOBRA.
About an organization he helped start in the 1960s to address issues of equality and civil rights.
And we'll take a look at the work of one of the co-founders, Jeff Donaldson.
Plus an artist who envisions the gardens of his favorite composers.
All this and more on the next round of Applause.
- [Announcer] Production of Applause on WVIZ/PBS, is made possible by grants from, The John P. Murphy Foundation, The Kulas Foundation, The Stroud Family Trust, The Kelvin & Eleanor Smith Foundation, and by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.
(upbeat music) - [David] Hello, I'm David C. Barnett.
Welcome to Northeast Ohio's Arts and Culture show, Applause.
Cleveland artist, Wadsworth and Jae Jarrell have spent their lives creating images of black power and beauty.
The Jarrell's work as individual artists and as members of AfriCOBRA, a collective established in 1968 to create art addressing issues of equality and civil rights.
Wadsworth's new book, AfriCOBRA documents the group's history, origins and its mission.
(upbeat music) Art brought Jae and Wadsworth together in the 1960s, they both studied at the art Institute of Chicago and began dating.
Jae studying Fashion Design and Wadsworth Painting.
- She was designing fashion when I met her.
So and she had a business, painted at night and on the weekends.
And Chicago was very important in this movement in our art.
Art had in the past, all been basically created especially in movements, not in a city like Chicago, it was New York city and things like that.
So what we ended up doing was making Chicago a major city where art came out of.
- [David] The '60s were a tumultuous time in US history, the beginning of the Black Power Movement and the call for civil rights.
Inspired by the movement, in 1965, black poets, musicians, writers, and artists in the New York, Newark area, started the Black Arts Movement, to create black art for black people.
It soon spread to major cities around the country.
In Chicago, Wadsworth and other African-American artists collaborated on a large outdoor mural called The Wall of Respect.
It was the first of its kind in the country.
- The first thing happened in Chicago was the Wall of Respect that went viral, not just nationally but internationally.
And this was the first visual art during the Black Power Movement, New York opened up the black repertory theater without any visual arts.
So what I'm saying is Chicago was the first one to put digitalized during the Black Power Movement that went viral was the Wall of respect.
- [David] With the success of the Wall of Respect in 1968, Wadsworth and Jae Jarrell, and three other Chicago artists launched AfriCOBRA, the African commune of bad relevant artists.
As visual artists, they were at the forefront of the Black Arts Movement.
- We formed a collective that we named COBRA in the beginning, we added some Afri to it to make it AfriCOBRA, African Cobra was that it was five founding members.
Who was Jeff Donaldson, Jae Jarrell, Wadsworth Jarrell, Barbara Jones-Hogu and Gerald Williams.
- [David] Themes within the art included African designs and positive messages of unity.
The group embraced the use of lettering, straight lines and bright vivid colors known as Kool-Aid colors to create a black aesthetic.
- Kool-Aid colors of variegation of bright, intense colors with a sense of building harmony.
Kool-Aid color was representative of what black people was wearing, clothing they was wearing in the '60s, real bright colored clothing.
So we chose that as one, that was the first principle we chose.
And we had frontal images, which is inspired by African sculpture, which is always a frontal view never three quarter view, which represents strength and directness.
And we wanted to use positive images.
That's another principle - [David] AfriCOBRA held its first major exhibit Ten in Search of a Nation, at the studio museum in Harlem in 1970.
Its purpose was to educate the public and empower the black community.
Wadsworth remained a member of AfriCOBRA until 1998 eventually finding his way to Cleveland his wife Jae's hometown.
Over the decades, he began to see a retelling, a revision of the history of AfriCOBRA and sought to set the record straight.
- I wrote the book basically to correct all of the improper information was out, was online and everything.
Everything put out about it in writing basically was not right.
Even a member of the group, the guy that was basically the spokesman for the group, he started writing false things about the group, like, you know, dropping two members, adding a member that did not exist, did not join the group.
So that's why I wrote the book.
- [David] Some 60 years later, the work of AfriCOBRA artists is being recognized.
In 2017, The Cleveland Museum of Art purchased a painting by Wadsworth Jarrell for more than $97,000.
In addition, the history ideas and paintings found between the pages of the book AfriCOBRA are being taught in art classes around the country.
- Thus AfriCOBRA is far more about than just making art.
You will read that, you know, we had a political slant with an aesthetic that's about politics, life, it's our art history book.
Arts initiative, not just African-American art history, it's art history period.
- [David] Standing shoulder to shoulder with Wadsworth Jarrell during the Black Arts Movement, was his friend Jeff Donaldson.
He was a founding member of AfriCOBRA, the African commune of bad relevant artists.
Donaldson worked on the Wall of Respect and adopted the visual language of the group into his own work.
In 2018 the Akron Art Museum hosted an exhibit of his work called Dig, take a look.
- Jeff Donaldson is originally from Pine Bluff, Arkansas.
He studied art at the University of Arkansas, Pine Bluff and then moved to Chicago where he earned both a master's degree in Art and also a PhD in African and African-American Art History at Northwestern university.
He's a practicing artist and also, or he was I'm sorry.
He passed away in 2004 and was also a founding member of AfriCOBRA, AfriCOBRA started in 1968.
- AfriCOBRA is the African commune of bad relevant artists and bad being very overt and kind of, I think maybe antagonistic to what defines good.
So it was a way to bring people together to kind of define a unifying aesthetic and then to help those artists kind of present their work in different ways.
Being in Chicago in the '60s, he was very active in the political scene and he was very conscious of social issues at the time.
He studied, he was very close with the Harlem Renaissance and worked with kind of WPA muralist.
So the connection between art and activism, has always run through Donaldson's life and work.
He was using art as a vehicle, kind of using art as a message machine to talk about race relations in America.
Kool-Aid colors was one of the, you know, kind of unifying principles.
For AfriCOBRA, it was kind of about beauty in action.
So it was about artwork that was meant to be legible and readable and accessible to people.
They were very interested in kind of mass producing images so that they were kind of easily understood and that they were kind of acting as art and propaganda at the same time.
So kind of an adjunct prop kind of philosophy.
- He outlined a lot of the principles that kind of aesthetically grouped these artists together.
Those include a number of things like expressive awesomeness, this idea of shine and Jeff Donaldson meant that literally in the sense of shine, if you look at his work, he has quite a bit of metallic paint and surfaces, but he also means it in a sense of shine and attractiveness and well-polished things, and well put together things.
He's also interested in rhythm.
He's interested in repetition, he's interested in bright Kool-Aid colors.
And those are just a few of the things that he outlines in this essay.
They all we're interested in finding a shared aesthetic that they could use to promote their message and to create work that appealed to African-Americans and also told their story and was something that could be appreciated just by looking at it for its pure aesthetic quality.
And you didn't have to have a PhD in Art History like Donaldson did in order to appreciate the work.
They thought of themselves as a family.
They thought of themselves as a United group, but they also had their own individual identities and their own individual practices.
Jeff Donaldson, in particular, when he talks about this, he talks about the art that was being made by black artists around the time of before the formation of AfriCOBRA not having the same kind of aesthetic rigor that AfriCOBRA members wanted to put into their work.
And that was really important to him that all the members have a certain quality.
They held themselves to certain standards, aesthetically.
- It is really kind of heady material, but it plays out in the realm of every day.
In his grassroots activism laid the foundation for that.
So he's a very smart man, but he also understood what it meant to communicate to the masses, to communicate to people who weren't as well educated as he was.
So as he was looking at kind of the influence of western art on the development of American art, he was also trying to insert a pan African aesthetic into the work at the same time.
He was trying to say, trying to really develop a more encompassing iconography of American art and his work was definitely with the intent that it would be for a populist audience.
Art for the people, art for the masses is kind of, you know one of kind of Donald's mantras, you know and all art is political, whether you know it or not.
Whether the artist knows that or not, I think is the quote that Donaldson said.
So even if you're not intending the message to be political, it's political.
And so that was kind of Donaldson central tenets.
- [David] Coming up on the next Applause, We explore how art from the past intersects with our current pandemic in a new exhibit from the Cleveland museum of art.
And we'll see how we local art instructor took matters into her own hands when COVID 19 threatened to shut down her growing business.
- This program that we're using, the StreamYard allows us to bring people into the program to show their artwork, which they love, so it makes it interactive.
- [David] Plus molding a hobby into a passion.
- I'd never knew I could sculpt.
It was like, I'd looked at sculptures before and I was like, "How are those even made?"
And then I started doing it, and it's a completely weird experience.
- [Narrator] All this and more, on the next round of Applause.
Artist, Barry Leibman of St. Louis, Missouri finds inspiration for his work through musicians and composers like Charlie Parker, and Gustav Mahler.
He expresses the personality of each composer through his painting.
- I decided to do this series of paintings on composers and what might have been their gardens if they had gardens.
So it really became imaginary gardens.
How their music inspired me to create a garden based on that music.
I got interested in music as a subject matter.
I was listening to a Mozart clarinet concerto and all of a sudden I felt, "Oh my goodness, this is it.
"This is something really moving," while I was painting.
So I closed my eyes and just let my hand move.
And it was really a wonderful feeling.
And so that's when I realized that music itself was the subject matter not just the background.
The idea was in my head from both wanting to do something musical and wanting to do something with something floral.
- Well, I've known Barry for over 25 years now.
And I followed his work for probably about 15 to 20 years.
I love the original approach he has to paintings, the exuberance, the meaning, the content.
I think he has a nice control of color and the materials that he use are right up our alley.
We like material based work.
And I love the collages and I love to look at the work and actually see something or feel a content there.
And I actually approached the work before I even knew it was about music and saw something there that really appealed to me and really drove me to find out more about the material and about what he was doing.
So it was really interesting when he told me it was about imaginary gardens and about music and it was all connected.
- For me, it's the layers of meaning in each painting.
Because thinking about myself and what's important to me, it seems that we are all much more complex, much more evolved and involved with life than it appears just from the surface.
So that as I started to sort of understand what I was attracted to in art, which was different layers of material, I seem to like, that's what I always would go to that drew me.
And I thought, "Well, this is what I'm interested in."
The paintings don't represent my life.
They're a conversation with me and me.
The difference between having a conversation with you, is picking up the clues of what your facial expression is, what you're saying back to me and so forth.
With a painting, it's just me and the painting, having a conversation.
Once I sort of feel that there's enough meaning there, then I start to feel really satisfied with the painting.
Do you know what I'm saying?
It was sort of a solitary experience that I really enjoy.
(soft music) Abstract art offers us another opening to intellectual and emotional pursuits and feelings.
And, but you have to get, it takes a while to be attuned to it, I think.
The paintings for me are both emotionally driven and intellectually motivating and stimulating.
And I seem to need both.
Sometimes the intellectual gets in the way when you stand back and you examine it too much, can start to really, you know, change the emotional impact of it.
I need both the emotional and the intellectual.
It's the same thing I feel about the literature that I read.
It's not just, just the content, it's also the style.
All the paintings are first done, either with oil paint oil sticks as a base.
And then materials such as fabric, canvas board, I've used pieces of wood, I've used string, it's sort of depends on what I have around and what I wanna work on.
But it's definitely materials based which is part of what I feel is the layering of experience.
So it's all sort of tied in.
(soft piano music) Over the past 20 years of doing this, I've realized that the paintings really come from an internal place that I need as I know more about myself and understanding of complexities of life.
The paintings have more meaning to me and the things that I want to work on, have more depth.
- [David] Rochester, New York artist, Heather Swenson uses advanced screen printing techniques to create beautiful works of art.
We joined the artist in her studio for a look at her creative process.
- My name is Heather Swenson, I'm an artist.
I do Screen printing and painting and collage.
And I have a studio in the Hungerford Building.
All of the things that I work on are just like hand drawn.
(upbeat music) To create a screen print, first you wanna come up with an image that you want to be the basis of your print.
You wanna decide how many colors it's gonna have and you make the drawing.
Usually what I'll do is pick a palette.
Like I'll just kind of sketch out the colors on the side you know, thinking that I want like five colors, maybe.
So then for every color you need to have a corresponding sheet of tracing paper or a clear acetate film.
And you basically lay it over the drawing and then trace that area.
You know, like the plant is gonna be green and then that's one layer and then maybe the pot is red and then that's a separate layer.
So you'll eventually have five pieces of tracing paper that are your films.
And then a screen is coated with a light sensitive emulsion.
And then you take the films and the screen and put them on a light table together.
And then basically all of the emulsion in the areas that aren't your drawing have hardened and won't let ink through and the other place softens and basically just melts away to just the mesh.
So then that allows the ink to go through.
(soft music) I think cause I like collage a lot, it's for me a shape based process because when I make a drawing, then I separate that drawing into several layers.
(soft music) I'm able to kind of get other colors with colors, overlapping.
(soft music) Like I get so excited when I'm printing.
Cause I lay down a layer and then seeing the next layer on top of it, it's like, "Oh man, that's great."
And then like 20 of them sitting there.
So I think the multiples aspect to that, it's still a handmade object and it is hand pulled.
It's not like a digital print where I can just print you know, like as many of them as I want.
So I like that it is still has a handmade aspect to it but there are multiples so I can, you know give some to people or like I like that it has like a kind of a collectible aspect.
(soft music) I think a lot of my work is based on observations or things that I notice from just pretty much my daily life.
So little things that I kind of notice every day end up being kind of moments in my prints.
I tend to focus a lot on composition with the screen prints particularly.
And I think because it's such a shape based process, like cause I'm thinking, you know, a blue layer and a red layer and things like that, it definitely relates to collage for me too.
So I think even though I'm working on an image I'm also focusing on like just the composition and the shapes and the color of the print, especially as I'm seeing it build up one layer after another.
(soft music) - [David] That wraps it up for today's show.
You'll find more stories online at arts.ideastream.org.
Thanks for watching I'm Idea Streams' David C. Barnett, hope to catch you next week for another round of applause.
(soft piano music) - [Announcer] Production of Applause, on WVIZ/PBS is made possible by grants from, the John P. Murphy Foundation, The Kulas Foundation, The Stroud Family Trust, The Kelvin & Eleanor Smith Foundation and by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.


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