African American Museum To Reopen

Renowned and emerging artists featured

                                                 “Roots” by John T. Ridley, Jr.

   The California African American Museum will re-open Saturday, March 22, following an 18-month renovation, with three major new exhibitions.
   Now billed as “keepers of the flame,” the museum has developed new programming and educational initiatives “to address the changing needs of society,” including the addition of African American entertainment, film and recordings to its collections of African American history, culture and literature.
   The three opening exhibits are: “Grafton Tyler Brown: Visualizing California and Pacific Northwest;” a retrospective of the works of the late John T. Riddle, Jr.; and “Urban Aesthetics,” a multimedia installation created specifically for the museum by five young artists, and their mentor.
   In April, a fourth exhibit, “The African American Journey West,” spotlighting recent additions to the Permanent Collection, as well as new artifacts from the late Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, Bill Spiller and slave documents, will open.
   “Grafton Tyler Brown: Visualizing California and the Pacific Northwest” examines the works and life of San Francisco cartographer, lithographer and painter, Grafton Tyler Brown (1841-1918).
   As a young lithographer, Brown was one of many black Americans who migrated west during the Gold Rush in search of freedom and economic opportunity.
   Initially, he worked for lithographer C.C. Kuchel. On Kuchel’s death, Brown founded his own company, G.T. Brown & Company, which printed stock certificates for clients, such as the Wells Fargo Mining Company. His largest and most celebrated lithography project was “The Illustrated History of San Mateo County,” which contained seventy-two views of ranches and towns in San Mateo County that emphasized the taming of the wilderness and ordering of the landscape through architecture and enclosures.
   In 1882, Brown left San Francisco for Canada with the Amos Bowman geological survey party in the Cariboo country, as, with the influx of European immigrants, black businessmen found it increasingly difficult to find work.
   Subsequently, Brown opened a studio in Victoria, British Columbia and became a landscape painter, while continuing to secure contracts for his lithography business in San Francisco.
   Unlike his San Mateo lithographs, Brown’s landscapes portrayed a West that had not yet been sold or subdivided, and was still unspoiled.
   The exhibition contains 51 paintings and lithographs, and was made possible by contributions from the National Endowment for the Arts, Bank of America and Wells Fargo Bank.
   “A Tribute to John T. Riddle, Jr.” includes metal sculptures, paintings, assemblages and serigraphs. Riddle, a sculptor, painter and printmaker, has been described as “a keeper, a voice and a modern griot, to chronicle this history and experience of African Americans” in his role as Program Manager of Visual Arts for the California African American Museum from 1999 through his untimely death in March of 2002.
   “We are proud to open with this exhibition on John Riddle,” said David Crippens, Interim Executive Director of the California African American Museum. “John was committed to his community. It is important for us to pay homage to his legacy here at the Museum.”
   Riddle responded to the turbulent Civil Rights era of the 1960s, specifically, the 1965 Watts riots, by creating an aesthetic he believed was rooted in African American consciousness.
   His early figurative paintings were rendered in a flat painted style reminiscent of the works of Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden. But, finding painting too passive, he began exploring the streets in South Central Los Angeles. collecting rusted metal, discarded machines and other debris to use in his assemblages.
   Born in Los Angeles on March 18, 1933, Riddle attended local public schools and Los Angeles City College before joining the United States Air Force in 1953. He later earned both a Bachelor’s degree (1966) in Art Education and a Master’s degree (1973) in Fine Art from California State College (now University), Los Angeles, and taught art at Los Angeles High School and Beverly Hills High School before moving to Atlanta, Georgia in 1984 to teach at Spelman College. He returned to returned to Los Angeles in 1999 to work at the museum.
   For “Urban Aesthetics, California Artists 2003,” five young California artists and their mentor were invited to create new multimedia works for the Museum’s reopening.
   Sandra E. Rowe, curator of the exhibition, said, “Edgar Arceneaux, Charles Gaines, Kira Lynn Harris, Rodney McMillian, Adia Millet and William Raines … have studied similar philosophers, discuss their work with each other and their mentor, Charles Gaines, and have developed individual paths that continue to unfold in different ways.”
   Charles Gaines, a faculty member at Cal Arts and CSU Fresno, has been a mentor to the artists in this installation. His own work draws the viewer into dialogues about fear, life, death, politics, knowledge, emotions and ambiguity.
   He has exhibited at Los Angeles County Museum and the Whitney Museum in New York, as well as in the Caribbean and in Europe.
   Edgar Arcenaux is a Los Angeles-based artist who has exhibited at museums and galleries such as the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Kunstverein Ulm, Germany, and Gallery 101, Canada. In previous installations, he has combined personal and social memory, fragments of his father’s memory of familiar places and stories of family members from a fractured genealogy. The installation he created at the Studio Museum of Harlem changed three times during the exhibition, as Arceneaux continuously traced, withdrew, refined, added, covered, and shifted his images. The time-based project had no pre-determined end.
   Kira Lynn Harris attended Cal Arts in Valencia and was an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. In the exhibition “Ironic/Iconic” there, Harris investigated light through photography, audio, video and installation, highlighting sounds that reflect everyday life on Harlem’s 125th Street.
   With an MFA from Cal Arts, Rodney McMillian lives and works in Los Angeles. His work for this exhibition will incorporate text, magazines, maps and books of his own on a desk for the viewer to read and thumb through.
   Adia Millet has also lived and worked in Los Angeles and was also an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum.
   She uses found materials and constructs places “that you can walk through and others that you can only peer into with voyeuristic intent.” Her doll size/full size apartment buildings furnished with miniature bassinets and bedside pistols imply that the American dream and disaster, home and the world, are separated by the thinnest of walls. For this exhibition, her new work will continue to explore spaces and cast-off materials of today’s world.
   William Raines lives in Fresno and has exhibited extensively at several museums and galleries in California and abroad. His interest in microscopic life forms led him to examine minuscule fragments from African American classic paintings, which he reproduces in large-scale works. He then places plexiglass on the wet painting and uses his body weight to blur the paint and change the shapes, until he removes all references to the original slide.
   “We are delighted to host this exciting and unique exhibition, particularly as we move towards developing more cutting edge programming and exhibits upon the reopening,” interim director Crippens said.
   Chartered by the State of California in 1977 and founded in 1981, the museum is part of the State and Consumer Agency. It’s located at 600 State Drive in Exposition Park. Admission is free. Parking is $6. For more information, please call (213) 744-7432 or visit the website: www.caam.ca.gov.