A Lion Speaks
Creative Arts Workshop
New Haven
Through March 12
The two faces artist Adeyinka Ogunlowo paints for her work Iya Aabo (Protective Mother) draw the eye in fast, so we see the humans in the piece first: the mother, casual, open, but a little sly; the child, drowsy, but perhaps not quite asleep. The faces are rendered with such animation and detail that it takes a minute to see that our eyes have filled in the rest of their bodies with more detail than the artist has provided. Look again, and we see that the bodies are just outlines. Look a third time, and we see that the pattern in the background and in their clothing is unbroken. Ogunlowo has, in fact, painted them directly onto fabric. You could say they arise out of it, and at the same time, are still utterly of a piece with it.
Iya Aabo has something to say about what riches can be drawn from heritage, and it's just one piece in A Lion Speaks, running now through March 12 at Creative Arts Workshop.
Curated by Hamden-based artist and writer Shaunda Holloway for the eighth year of CAW's Made Visible series, "the exhibition centers on Black artists and artists of African descent reclaiming authorship of their own stories through visual art," an accompanying note states. The Made Visible series "reflects Creative Arts Workshop’s ongoing commitment to equity, representation, and amplifying underrepresented voices in the visual arts."
The show, featuring the work of over 20 artists across a variety of media and from across the state and beyond, is "inspired by the African proverb 'until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter,'" the note states. "A Lion Speaks highlights self-determined narratives, cultural memory, and creative resistance." The exhibition has its official opening reception on Thursday, Feb. 5, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. On Saturday, March 14, in conjunction with the show's closing, CAW will host a free mixed-media workshop in the gallery with acclaimed fiber artist Ed Johnetta Miller.
The works on the walls, however, have enough energy to be their own celebration, and source of contemplation. Rory D.L. Mooror's intense take on the American flag evokes the cover of Sly and the Family Stone's There's a Riot Goin' On with its replacing of the traditional stars with more playfully ambivalent iconography. Look a little closer and there's writing in the stripes, concepts jumbling together. One run reads "friends, sex, art, music, science, education"; another reads "war, abortion, death, hate, greed, rape." All of the above swirls around in the American zeitgeist. How do we make sense of it? Or do we just try to survive it?
Some pieces evoke raw cries of pain, like Linda Mickens's Veil of Silence. The figures make the subject all too clear, that it's about the killing of human beings before their time, the implication that they're almost sacrificial offerings, made to some horrible deity at a cost that's way too high. The shoes only add power. They are the craggy hill the figures climb, but they also connote a sense of the nameless dead in a long struggle, with a casualty list mounting faster than we can keep track of.
Arvia Walker's Solace, however, might tell the most complex story. It's a street scene, a gathering of some kind that suggests the people in it are occupying a space that's usually empty, as they might at a protest, a concert, a religious gathering. But what is to be made of the expressions on those gathered people's faces? A host of complicated emotions play across their brows: absorption, concern, maybe even a little disdain from one corner. What are they all looking at? And what about the person in the middle of the image, their eyes cast downward, hands out, as if in meditation or prayer. They've moved on to somewhere else, beyond the worry around them. Are they avoiding the problem or transcending it. And if all the hunted and haunted people in that image could speak, what would they say?
