Herbert Gentry - Expressionist Paintings

"Artist Herbert Gentry (1919-2003) made vibrant expressionist paintings of figures and faces, mixing global influences and African American experience. Referring to his childhood during the Harlem Renaissance, Gentry asserted “Harlem prepared me for Paris.” After completing military service in World War II, Herb Gentry returned to Paris for art school - and found himself in the heart of the expatriate American community in Montparnasse. Gentry moved to Scandinavia in 1959, but always kept a studio in Paris. In 1969, he returned to New York and became a resident of the famous Chelsea Hotel. At home on both continents, Herbert Gentry resided, painted and exhibited on both sides of the Atlantic. His work is represented in important national and international museum collections."(herbertgentry.com)
   “I paint what I experience, who I am, in the Black world, especially in America, there’s a thing that you can’t forget where you came from, you paint from your experiences, who you are”
"Although Gentry may not be as well-known as some of his contemporaries, his influence on artists and musicians of his time spans continents. However, because he spent so much time traveling, he never established a firm enough reputation in any one place. He painted in a semi-figural abstract style, suggesting images of humans, masks, animals and objects caught in a web of circular brush strokes, encompassed by flat, bright color. He has suggested that his works are uncalculated- coming from his subconscious- painting what he feels as he feels it. Gentry’s striking images are the product of his exposure to exotic people and places throughout his lifetime.   "It’s the magic that does the painting, and the magic is within. I can’t see having substance without having magic in the painting. I use hands, fingers, I’ll use anything at that point, it depends. ... I believe sometimes you use the thing nearest if it’s possible. ... The main thing is to get that idea over quickly. Because that feeling, that thought is a very short thought, as an artist it doesn’t last a long time. If you can get it down right away, work with it technically later on. For example, you see a form...should I...shouldn’t I...PUT IT DOWN! Then technically, if it doesn’t fit or you didn’t do it right, you can work with it. But that feeling, that idea, that spiritual thing, you just put it down right then!" (-Herbert Gentry, Oral history interview with Herbert Gentry, 1991 May 23, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.)"(spaniermanmodern.com)

Noah Purifoy - Outdoor Desert Art Museum

Noah S. Purifoy (August 17, 1917 – March 5, 2004) was an African-American visual artist and sculptor, co-founder of the Watts Towers Art Center, and creator of the Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Art Museum.He lived and worked most of his life in Los Angeles and Joshua Tree, California. Purifoy was the first African American to enroll in Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts) as a full-time student and earned his BFA in 1956, just before his fortieth birthday. He is best known for his assemblage sculpture, including a body of work made from charred debris and wreckage collected after the Watts Riots of August 1965.Wikipedia
"His earliest body of sculpture, constructed out of charred debris from the 1965 Watts rebellion, was the basis for 66 Signs of Neon, the landmark 1966 group exhibition on the Watts riots that traveled throughout the country. As a founding director of the Watts Towers Art Center, Purifoy knew the community intimately. His 66 Signs of Neon, in line with the postwar period’s fascination with the street and its objects, constituted a Duchampian approach to the fire-molded alleys of Watts. This strategy profoundly impacted artists such as David Hammons, John Outterbridge and Senga Nengudi. For the 20 years that followed the rebellion, Purifoy dedicated himself to the found object, and to using art as a tool for social change. In the late 1980s, after 11 years of public policy work for the California Arts Council, where Purifoy initiated programs such as Artists in Social Institutions, which brought art into the state prison system, Purifoy moved his practice out to the Mojave desert. He lived for the last 15 years of his life creating ten acres full of large-scale sculpture on the desert floor. Constructed entirely from junked materials, this otherworldly environment is one of California’s great art historical wonders."(.noahpurifoy.com)

Jeff Donaldson - AfriCOBRA

Jeff Donaldson (1932 – 2004) was a visual artist whose work helped define the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Donaldson, co-founder of AfriCOBRA and contributor to the momentous Wall of Respect, was a pioneer in African-American personal and academic achievement. His art work is known for creating alternative black iconography connected to Africa and rooted in struggle, in order to replace the history of demeaning stereotypes found in mainstream white culture.
In the midst of the racial and cultural turmoil of the 1960s, a group of African-American artists endeavored to relate its artwork to the black masses. Aiming to use art for social impact, artists such as Donaldson strived to create an "art for the people"—an art form that was recognizable by and directed toward the common black folk, rather than a group of well-educated elite.Within his works and collaborative efforts, Donaldson essentially became the father of a new, uniting aesthetic—transAfricanism.
Within AfriCOBRA, it was Donaldson’s idea to synthesize an all-encompassing transnational aesthetic—to, in effect, collaborate internationally to unify the then-fragmented concept of black art. The result of such unification would usher in a deeper understanding on the behalf of the African diasporic masses concerning its identity as a people. Having been displaced from their native lands and transplanted into foreign locations, members of the African diaspora grasped onto the only thing that remained of their lost identity—the fact that they descended from Africa, and that they were removed thence. Thus, ironically, the very factor which disowned the African diasporic peoples of their past identities became the fabric of their new self-concepts. The uniting efforts of Donaldson and AfriCOBRA not only furthered this sense of transnational identity among the diaspora, but gave it visibility, making it "official", in a way. As Donaldson described, "One rarely sees a black human-interest story [in the newspaper]” and of television, “not a single one of the new programs celebrates the beauty and dignity of black life style." Thus, he endeavored to put the true nature of blacks into the forefront—to give it an up-front face and therefore a recognized existence. Wikipedia

Sam Middleton - mixed-media artist

Sam Middleton (April 2, 1927 – July 19, 2015) was a mixed-media artist from New York, NY. He travelled all over the world with the US Merchant Marine, lived in Mexico and Sweden and eventually settled down in the Netherlands where he "was part of the considerable contingency of expatriate African American artists". Settling in Holland in 1961, he established himself as one of The Netherlands' premier artists.
Middleton was born in New York City but grew up in Harlem, NY. Known for his personal style, Middleton liked to use abstract expressionism in his work, basing his color, lines, and compositions around sound and harmony. Middleton specialized in working with collage.As a young boy growing up in Harlem, Middleton often visited the nearby Savoy Ballroom and music-jazz and classical-became important inspirations for his artistic endeavors. Working at the Savoy, Middleton designed costumes, and painted record and book covers.Wikipedia

 

Eugene James Martin

Eugene James Martin (Washington, D.C., July 24, 1938 – Lafayette, Louisiana, January 1, 2005) was an African-American visual artist.
Eugene J. Martin's art is best known for his imaginative, complex mixed media collages on paper, his often gently humorous pencil and pen and ink drawings, and his paintings on paper and canvas that may incorporate whimsical allusions to animal, machine and structural imagery among areas of "pure", constructed, biomorphic, or disciplined lyrical abstraction. Martin called many of his works straddling both abstraction and representation "satirical abstracts".He did not create sculptures.

 Eugene James Martin was born on Capitol Hill. His parents were Margaret Helen Dove and James Walter Martin, an itinerant Jazz musician. After his mother died in 1942 giving birth to Jerry Martin, the two brothers were placed in foster care in Washington DC. As a child, Eugene ran away on several occasions, was placed in reform school at six years of age, and eventually spent the remainder of his childhood on a farm in Clarksburg, Maryland where his foster parents were Franie and Madessa Snowdon.On the farm he drew realistic portraits and nature scenes, and also played upright bass, thunder bass, and slide trombone in the local rhythm & blues band The Nu-tones. After attending Clarksburg Elementary, and Lincoln High and Carver High in Rockville, Maryland, Martin pondered whether to become a full-time musician or visual artist. He briefly attended the Navy for the opportunity to receive an art education, but instead was honorably discharged.

 After attending the Corcoran School of Art from 1960–1963, Eugene James Martin became a professional fine arts painter, considering artistic integrity his only guide. He did not adhere to any particular school or art movement, remaining an individualist throughout his life. His art defies categorization.
While spending most of his life in Washington DC, Martin briefly lived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, from 1990–1994, returned to Washington DC, and in 1996 moved to Lafayette, Louisiana with his wife, Suzanne Fredericq, a biologist, whom he married in 1988. In December 2001 he suffered simultaneously a brain hemorrhage and stroke while in Belgium. After undergoing physical therapy in Lafayette, he resumed painting and continued creating art until his death.Wikipedia