Visual Arts

By: Sylvia Arnstein

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Visual Arts

For the past one hundred fifty years, conditions of ignorance and suppression have been challenged by black women artists whose work reflects the exhilaration of social and political change. Now, with the speed and accuracy with which both images and sound can encompass the entire world, things that influence us, and how we interpret them, are multiplying. One thing remains constant: a person drawn to the making of images is trying to understand the world and her place in it.

The Early Years in America

Pre–Civil War black artisans developed skills useful to their owners. Frequently slaves were trained in crafts such as metalworking, silversmithing, carpentry, sign painting, ceramics, and needlework. Many of these craftspeople used the techniques and images of their African heritage. Black women were particularly influential in weaving, basketry, and quilt making. Although they were forced to produce European patterns while working for their owners, they often drew on their own cultural memories for objects made for their own use. Their own artistic sensibilities also influenced their productions. A woman who dyes, spins, and weaves reveals herself in her work even in the smallest choices she makes. In this way, African colors, patterns and symbols entered the folk art tradition in America.

The Apple Paring, c. 1945, by Clementine Hunter (1886 or 1887–1988); oil on paper, 12 1/2 by 16 inches. For fifty years, Hunter painted continually, on any surface she could find; it is estimated that she created more than five thousand paintings.

Collection American Folk Art Museum, New York. Gift of the Mildred Hart Bailey and the Clementine Hunter Art Trust 1996. Photograph by Gavin Ashworth, New York

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Some of these artisans purchased or won their freedom and went on to ply their trades, thereby establishing their own businesses. Among women, one of the early entrepreneurial artisans was Elizabeth Keckley, who purchased her freedom with loans from her dressmaking customers and eventually became Mary Todd Lincoln's dress designer. So many black women made their living by their sewing skills that, by 1860, 15 percent of free black women were dressmakers. Among more affluent free black families, young women were taught the skills of drawing and painting just as they were taught to sing and play musical instruments, to make them more accomplished. Sarah Mapps Douglass, for example, slipped sketches and watercolors into her letters and painted them in the scrapbooks of friends.

Many black women also were expert quilters. The best known of these was Harriet Powers, whose quilts now hang in the Smithsonian and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Powers was born into slavery in 1837 and displayed her first work in 1887. She used the appliqué technique that was common among African American quilters and colors that may have been African-inspired. The quilts are pictorial, illustrating events from the Judeo-Christian Bible.

The Drive to Learn and Do

As time passed and black women moved out of slavery and closer to realizing their potential, one great obstacle remained in the way of all women who yearned to be artists: the refusal of art schools to give them adequate training. This was far more difficult, however, for black women than for white. An example of this is the experience of Annie E. Anderson Walker. She was born and grew up in Flatbush, New York, in 1855 and, after teaching for a brief time, married an attorney. The Walkers moved to Washington, DC, and Annie Walker took private lessons in drawing and painting. She then applied to the Corcoran Gallery of Art and was admitted. When she appeared for classes, however, she was turned away with the words, “If we had known you were colored, the committee would not have examined your work.” Although Frederick Douglass wrote to the Corcoran, appealing to them to change their decision, the school held firm. Walker was able to gain admittance to Cooper Union in New York City and was able to afford the travel her education required because of her husband's income. She was also able to complete her studies in Europe. However, she was then expected to fulfill her duties as the wife of a successful professional man, leaving her little time for her art. She had a nervous breakdown in 1898 and was an invalid until her death in 1929.

Edmonia Lewis had a somewhat different story. She was of African and Chippewa descent. Born in 1843, she lived with her mother's tribe in upstate New York until the age of twelve. Perhaps these happy early years gave her the tenacity to overcome the tremendous obstacles in her path to becoming a professional sculptor. Her brother, a successful prospector in the California gold fields, paid her way to Oberlin College and later set her up in a studio in Boston. In 1864 she sculpted a bust of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, a Civil War officer who led a black battalion. It was purchased by Shaw's mother, and several hundred casts were sold to others as well. With the proceeds, Lewis moved to Rome. There, she learned how to carve in marble and first began to support herself by making and selling copies of classic sculptures and by accepting commissions to do portrait busts. Today, her artistic evolution in terms of both skill and content would seem inevitable and natural; at that time, though admired, she was more often considered the exception that proves the rule. Because she was considered odd, her example could be used as a tool to demonstrate what women and African Americans could not normally do and therefore should not strive to do. These attitudes contributed to the lack of references to her extraordinary accomplishments in the years following her death.

Lewis's work often dealt with the issues of racial oppression for African Americans and Native Americans, as well as women's rights. This would have been highly unusual for a black male artist, most of whom avoided African American subjects in order to be taken more seriously in the established art world. However, it was not unusual for a black woman. Several woman artists preceded Harlem Renaissance thought by exploring their African heritage and depicting the African American experience.

First in Philadelphia and later in Framington, Massachusetts, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller had a long career as a sculptor and a theater designer. Her style lay within the continued development of Western European art, and if she had been a white male, she would certainly have attained real professional success. As a black woman, however, she found too many doors firmly closed to her. Also, she often explored themes that were directly connected to black experience and depicted black people with African features, which was a revolutionary step. Thus Fuller's successes were quite exceptional, but full recognition was a long time in coming. As part of an urban middle-class black community, she received support from that community in the form of exhibitions and commissions offered by libraries, schools, and women's groups. On a larger stage, she participated in events such as the “Making of America” festival in New York City in 1921, at the behest of W. E. B. Du Bois. We are fortunate that many of Fuller's works still exist. Their survival allows us to assess her artistic accomplishments critically, an outcome she greatly desired during her lifetime.

May Howard Jackson went even farther than Fuller. The two were both born in 1877 in Philadelphia and attended J. Liberty Tadd's school of art. Jackson went on to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and then launched into an exploration in sculpture of the faces of African Americans. She eschewed the sentimental or cartoonish representation of black people that was popular at the time in favor of realistic portrayals of the variety of black and mixed race people. Perceptive critics have credited her as the first significant artist in what would become the Afrocentric aesthetic. It was a risky thing to do, and it probably prevented her from receiving the recognition that she deserved and that was accorded some of her black male contemporaries who chose subject matter more acceptable to the white art world.

The Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance is usually dated from 1919, when cheering crowds on Fifth Avenue welcomed the 369th Infantry Regiment of black american soldiers home from France, until the middle to late 1930s. These years witnessed an extraordinary coming together of visual artists, writers, musicians, actors, dancers, philosophers, filmmakers, political leaders, activists, and those who participated as the ever-important audience. This period in American history marked the first time that such a large number of African Americans could come together in such a small geographic area, having made significant strides in income and education, and having become politically influential. Activists such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey were redefining how blacks might view themselves, and they inspired an interest in Pan-Africanism. Even before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was established in 1910, a number of influential local organizations had been founded. These included the Afro-American League in Chicago, the National Association of Colored Women in Washington, and the Phillis Wheatley Club in Detroit. Periodicals such as Crisis and Opportunity brought a stimulating dialogue to a broader audience. Central to the creation of the Harlem Renaissance had been a significant migration of blacks during the era of World War I from the rural South to the urban North. While seeking better jobs there, they brought the rhythms of music, social dancing, and oral story telling that, combined with an awakening of historical and anthropological interest in the African diaspora, resulted in exciting new works of art.

Although New York City's Harlem was the heart of this vibrant movement, the cultural ferment it produced extended to places such as Washington, DC, Chicago, and Boston. Not until the 1960s would America see such a period of creative unrest again. And as both of these cultural episodes prove, while some things change, others remain the same. Despite all evidence to the contrary, during both eras women were considered best suited to play a supportive role. With the exception of performers, they were expected to remain in the background and to keep things running. Many women believed this to be their proper role and occasionally have even received credit for it. Those who chose differently faced hard times. The efforts of black women artists were regularly dismissed by writers and critics, whether white or black. Nonetheless, some persevered and established important reputations.

Fuller and Jackson continued to work through the Harlem Renaissance, with Jackson doing some of her most important work. Other women who made important contributions during this time and the years immediately following include the sculptors Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Augusta Savage, Selma Burke, and the painters Laura Wheeler Waring and, a little later, Lois Mailou Jones.

Nancy Elizabeth Prophet was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1890. She was an only child whose parents had plenty of opportunity to encourage her gifts and whose teachers recognized her talent. After high school she enrolled in the very prestigious Rhode Island School of Design. With the financial aid of one of the Vanderbilts, she went to study in Paris in 1922. From 1924 to 1927 her sculpture was exhibited at the Paris August Salons and the Salon d'Automne. She returned to the United States around 1932 to teach at Spelman College and then moved to Atlanta University. She attempted to enter the art world of Atlanta, teaching at Atlanta University, but she soon discovered there was no room for a black woman in this milieu.

Prophet returned to Rhode Island with the burden of starting her career all over, but it was an almost impossible task. She was no longer in touch with her earlier supporters and found herself unable to attract others. Eventually she took work as a domestic, dying in 1960 in poverty and obscurity.

Augusta Savage's life was very different from those of the middle-class women we have been discussing. She was the seventh of fourteen children born into a working poor family in Florida. Her minister father disapproved of her making “graven images” out of the Florida red clay. She said later that her parents almost whipped the art out of her. She married at fifteen and was widowed, left with one child, in her early twenties. Her career started in earnest when she entered some of her work in a county fair and received considerable recognition. When she was twenty-nine, she moved to New York and supported herself as a caretaker at an apartment building while she went to school at Cooper Union. For many years, she worked at a variety of jobs to support her studies, her family, and her art. In the early 1930s, she opened the Savage School of Arts and Crafts in Harlem, the first of several Harlem-based schools.

Gamin, by Augusta Savage, c. 1929; bronze, 9 inches high. This sculpture, for which Savage used her nephew Ellis Ford as a model, captures the essence of youth. It won a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship, enabling her to study abroad.

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC/Art Resource, NY

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During the depths of the Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt established the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which consisted of government-funded programs to provide jobs. Besides building roads, the WPA established an arts program called the Federal Art Project (FAP). Between 1935 and 1943 the FAP awarded commissions to many black artists, in large part because of the unrelenting efforts of Augusta Savage. The majority of the muralists were men, and most of the teachers and community art school organizers were women. This meant that work by men was viewed by a larger public; their enhanced reputations made it possible for them to produce and sell more work and become part of the critical lexicon. Although the women teachers had no reason to regret or apologize for their extraordinarily effective efforts to foster the talents of their students, they lost the opportunity to compete in the art market. As the author Samella Lewis said of Savage, a particularly fine sculptor, “The generous donations of her time undoubtedly limited her own personal contribution as a sculptor, which might otherwise have brought her greater success and critical praise.”

Through the FAP, Savage was able to found the Harlem Community Art Center, where she trained a number of the most significant artists of the next generation. She was joined there by Gwendolyn Bennett, who was perhaps best known as a writer but who was also an illustrator and an artist in batik, and Selma Burke, who would come into her own as an artist in the 1940s.

Like Savage, Selma Burke was the daughter of a minister, but in her case artistic encouragement and support were abundant. Her father's primary income came from his work as a chef on cruise lines, so he was able to travel to Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe, bringing back to his family in Mooresville, North Carolina, art and artifacts from all these places. In addition, two of young Selma's uncles were missionaries to Africa, and the artifacts they collected became part of the Burke family heirlooms, providing an appreciation for and familiarity with African art early in the sculptor's life. She received encouragement from patrons as well, but her mother insisted that she be practical and train as a nurse. Later, one of her private patients would become a generous patron, and Burke was never reduced to the kind of economic straits that plagued many other black woman artists. Although she exhibited widely and successfully, she is best known for her bas relief plaque portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which was later adapted for the Roosevelt dime.

Laura Wheeler Waring was a member of the black upper class, born in 1887 in Hartford, Connecticut. She studied in the United States and Europe before accepting a position teaching in Philadelphia. Her work was exhibited widely, and she painted some of the great figures of African America, including W. E. B. Du Bois and Marian Anderson. She also did a series of paintings interpreting spirituals.

As the Harlem Renaissance geared down, another development in American art would put black artists in a difficult position and raised questions about whether a black artist must always carry that modifier before his or her name. In other words, could a black artist create art that had no racial content?

The Years between the Wars

Forced to flee Europe in the 1930s, many visual artists settled in the United States. New York City, rather than Paris, became the epicenter of modern art developments until well into the 1980s. These artists brought with them a strong academic training that, when combined with newly developed theories in science and psychology, resulted in a freeing of the constraints of academia without losing appreciation for their traditional emphasis on skill and beauty. They eventually abandoned the representational for the abstract. It was a very exciting movement and, before too long, virtually the only style accepted as valid by the American art establishment.

For black artists who had been so strongly encouraged during the Renaissance to explore their own history and heritage, this presented somewhat of a problem. What makes an artist “black” if not the content of the work, that which it represents? And does a black artist commit some sort of betrayal if she chooses to work in this exciting new way instead? Alma Thomas, on one hand, and Elizabeth Catlett and Lois Mailou Jones, on the other, had different answers to this question.

Born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1891, Alma Thomas moved with her family to Washington, DC, when she was sixteen and remained there, in the same house, for the next seven decades. She was the first graduate from the art department of Howard University. For thirty years she supported her painting by teaching. Her work at this point was representational, but revealed a youthful pre-dilection to go against the mainstream. Her early work was influenced by knowledge of Kandinsky and the Blue Rider Group in prewar Germany. The artists Morris Louis and Sam Gilliam and others of the Washington Color School were her contemporaries. According to Samella Lewis, by the 1960s Thomas's extensive knowledge of color theory permitted her to freely use scientific systems in a seemingly casual way. In 1960, she showed her first abstract work in a one-woman show at Howard.

In 1972, Thomas became the first African American woman to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. That same year, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, presented a Thomas retrospective. Her work is in the permanent collections of some of the most respected museums in the United States, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian American Museum, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and others.

Elizabeth Catlett moved toward abstraction, but all of her work remains to some degree representational and very much tied to the lives and histories of African Americans and other oppressed minorities. She was born in 1915 in Washington, DC, a grandchild of slaves. She studied at Howard and at the University of Iowa, where she was the first student to get a master's degree in sculpture. She became well known during the 1960s and 1970s, celebrated for her politically informed prints and sculptures. Later, she moved to Mexico, became a Mexican citizen, and taught sculpture in Mexico City.

Lois Mailou Jones moved through places and cultures, gathering inspiration as she went. Born in Boston in 1905, she studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. In 1928 she was hired as head of the Art Department at Palmer Memorial Institute in Sedalia, North Carolina, and two years later she began teaching art at Howard University in Washington, DC. During her first sabbatical, she studied in Paris and began to use some of the techniques of Impressionism and Postimpressionism. When she returned to the United States, she was persuaded by the Harlem Renaissance writer Alain Locke to pay more attention to her African American heritage. For the rest of the 1940s and into the 1950s, her work strongly reflected that heritage. In 1953, she married the graphic artist and designer Louis Vergniaud Pierre-Noel and the couple went to live for a time in Haiti. There, Jones was entranced and invigorated by the colorful and vital African-influenced culture of Haiti, and another element was added to her work.

The 1960s and Beyond

In her autobiography, We Flew over the Bridge, Faith Ringgold asserts, “The sixties were mean but intriguing, wonderful but alienating, inspiring and godawful, productive but self-destructive, enlightening and confusing, informative and contradictory.” The artistic response to all this caused the established criteria for judging art to be rejected as patriarchal, racist, and classist. Along with new materials and new formats within which to present art, products of the past began to undergo reevaluation. For example, quilting, embroidery, and other forms of needlework, although admired, had not been recognized as fine art. Now they were reassessed as autobiographical and historical statements and, although not made of paint or plaster, critiqued in terms of composition, color, and content. There were three circumstances that converged to allow these reevaluations: One was artistic—abstraction. A second was political—the civil rights and women's movements. A third resulted from the collision of the two—the bridging of the divide between craft items and fine art.

Traditionally, artisans produced craft items that ultimately had a purpose: a clay jug to hold water; a silver box to hold tobacco; a wooden chest to contain linens. And although these useful objects could display extraordinary beauty and technical expertise, they were not to be considered the equal of historical, mythological, and religious painting and sculpture—unless they were produced by suitably old civilizations for suitably exalted personages. In the 1960s, that began to change, and many black women began to use the media and techniques of crafts to express serious artistic ambitions.

For Yvonne Edwards Tucker, a native of the south side of Chicago who was born in 1941, the medium has been ceramic sculpture in which the combination of the utilitarian and the decorative transcend both in order to represent the link between the otherworldly and the mundane. The ceramist Marva Lee Pitchford Jolly, who was born in 1937 and grew up on a farm in the rural South, remains aware of the spirit and beauty of the countryside and of the realization that the earth contains an abundance of all things and that all are somehow connected and thus can not be circumscribed by racial segregation.

Camille Billops, born in 1933, and living in Los Angeles and New York City, felt that through ceramic sculpture she could create her own gods, since she found that “all the gods of the church were white and male; I was dark, female, and had no power, so now I have created my own.” Clay is an ancient medium of both utility and spiritual power. In many cultures it embodies the mythologies of mother, earth, and creation. The very material becomes a conduit for the past to connect with the present; for the artist, it provides an almost godlike opportunity to mold her universe physically. It has been noted that until the 1940s most black female artists were sculptors. Perhaps it took someone with both the character and the inclination to handle clay to overcome the difficulties of poverty and racism, to have the audacity to become a professional artist.

Ringgold sharpened her vision in the early 1970s when her work focused on expressing her newfound black feminism. She took the quilt patterns and techniques of the past and reconfigured them. She painted portraits directly on the squares of the quilts and added texts by Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Shirley Chisholm. Later she studied the dyeing and printing techniques of various cultures, incorporating them into contemporary statements on the invisibility of the female in the past and the present. She combined her artistic output with teaching and with political activism. One result of that political activism was the picketing of the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971, resulting in the inclusion of Betye Saar and Barbara Chase-Riboud in the annual sculpture exhibition. They were the first African American women to exhibit at the museum.

Beyond her two-dimensional work, Barbara Chase-Riboud is one of the most versatile artists in a wide variety of media. She is gifted in many creative forms, including sculpture, poetry, and novels that explore African American history. She was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1939. By the time she was in high school she had already sold her first prints to the Museum of Modern Art. She attended Yale University in the 1960s and was the sole African American woman there during her entire time at the university. Today her work hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the National Collection in Paris, and everywhere from Algeria to the Middle East, Nigeria, and China. She is probably most frequently associated with the subtle contrasts of color and texture of metal and fiber in her sculpture.

Betye Saar is now recognized as a major figure in modern art. Born in California in 1926, she went to the University of California to study design. Moving from strongly graphic work in the early 1960s to mixed media, she was inspired by Joseph Cornell to begin her now-renowned assemblages. In them she explores history and memory, a kind of collective human identity. Some of her most important work explores and rejects negative images of black women throughout American history. Her daughter, Alison Saar, has also become an important artist. Born in 1956 in California, she learned from both her parents about working with different materials and expressing her vision outside the conventional bounds of the art establishment. She creates sculptures and room installations that reflect the cultural depth of the African diaspora.

Howardina Pindell, born in 1943, is probably best known for her piece Autobiography; Water/Ancestors/Middle Passage/Family Ghosts, completed in 1988. It is a quintessential mixed-media work that includes acrylic, tempera, cattle markers, oil stick, paper, polymer-photo transfer, and vinyl tape sewn on canvas. Significant in size alone, the creation measures 118 by 71 inches. This piece is actually part of an autobiographical series started in 1986, reflecting nurturing relationships with her family and with other African American women artists. Pindell showed an early interest in color applied in the pointillist style. In the 1970s and 1980s, rebelling against the two-dimensional limits of the canvas, she began to cut up her canvases and sew them back together. Her explorations took her through nonobjective grid and dot drawings to video drawing to paper collage, eventually returning to paint in the late 1980s.

Phoebe Beasley, who is an activist, lecturer, and businesswoman, was born in 1943. The patterned composition and abstract forms in her work reflect the 1950s and 1960s, while her decorative and stylized approach is reminiscent of the art nouveau period. She acknowledges a particular debt to the work of Romare Bearden, although she developed a distinctive interpretation of collage. She uses decorative patterns in conjunction with torn and cut-out shapes along with painted areas to describe and evoke the lives of anonymous individuals. The subject matter is most often women in common settings. Two of her paintings have received the Presidential Seal. In 1989 Beasley was commissioned to design the official poster for the inauguration of President George H. W. Bush. More recently, President Clinton presented some of her artwork to the ambassadors of the diplomatic corps. Other accomplishments include designing the anniversary poster for Essence magazine and a commission from Oprah Winfrey.

Margo Humphrey is an artist and printmaker with spirit and a sense of humor. One of her best-known pieces, The Last Bar-B-Que, was part of a major exhibit (1989) where viewers were both enlightened and entertained by the writing and rewriting of black history. The piece was the product of three years of contemplating many versions of the Last Supper through the history of art. The final work, in the words of the art historian Jennifer Strychasz, “embraces many sources and traditions to create a scene that is meaningful, humorous and visually beautiful” in one critic's description. The humor is obviously not only in the title but also in the addition of such details as watermelon and chicken on the table. Humphrey says of the lithograph, “it is a serious piece; a rewriting of history through the eyes of my ancestry, a portrayal of a savior who looks like my people.” Humphrey was born in Oakland, California, in 1942. She received her BA from the College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland in 1972, and, subsequently, an MA from Stanford. She has been an associate professor of art at the University of Maryland from 1989 into the twenty-first century.

Martha Jackson-Jarvis was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1952. She studied at Howard University, Tyler School of Art, and Antioch College. She contends that the inspiration for her work comes from her “unabashed fascination with the elastic quality of clay.” Clay has been her medium of choice in her site-specific floor mosaics and installations, and in a wealth of landscape projects. Music of the Spheres and River Spirits, both abstract installations, are recent projects. As her work has gained popularity, at the same time as the demand for “city sculpture,” her work has evolved into the simplest forms, often spheres, and a grand scale. She loves working with groups of large spheres because she feels they invite one to walk through them. In cooperation with another sculpture, JoAnna Viudez, Jackson-Jarvis has worked on a reconceptualization and renovation of Malcolm X Memorial Park. In 1996 her work was celebrated in a twenty-year retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

The sculptors Polka Mills, living from 1918 to 1964, and Geraldine McCullough, born in 1922, applied the theories of abstraction in painting to three-dimensional work. Using sheet metals, sometimes torched or distressed to produce almost painterly texture, they welded large and complex pieces. The willingness to integrate industrial materials and techniques into the traditional handmade approach is a hallmark of late-twentieth-century art. Political reevaluation of women's work meant bringing the domestic sphere to the forefront. References to the home and child rearing, to poverty and discrimination, to the crippling psychology of a body that did not live up to prevailing ideals, all began to appear in every medium imaginable. These artists, like Betye Saar, managed to harness the violence of this era by taking its debris and reconfiguring it into something of worth. The found objects of everyday life were assigned value by placing them in the context of fine art.

Samella Lewis has been a profound influence, both as an artist and as a scholar. She was born in New Orleans in 1924, and in early childhood moved with her family to California. In 1951 she became the first African American to earn a doctoral degree in art history and fine arts, from Ohio State University. Her early studies were guided by Elizabeth Catlett. She has held teaching positions at a number of colleges and universities in California and in 1984 was named Professor Emeritus at Scripps. Her lithographs and serigraphs are exhibited around the country in galleries, universities, and archives, including the Art Institute of Chicago. She helped to found the Museum of African Art in Los Angeles and established the scholarly journal Review of African-American Art. She is a leader in the Women's Caucus for Art of the Southern Art History Association. As a mature artist she views art “as an essential expression of the [African American] community and its struggles.”

Although some things remain the same, as can be seen from the women covered here, a great deal has changed in the course of the last century. These women, each in her own way, have managed to break through seemingly insurmountable barriers and in doing so, they have changed the very nature of the barriers that remain. Artists continues both to explore and to reflect upon themselves and their world. This is their job and it is an ongoing process, as it is for the viewer. The storyteller needs an audience and the audience needs someone to tell its story. Communication does not exist in a vacuum; it represents far more than a mere commercial exchange, despite being advertised as such. Rather it is the glue—or the clay—that binds us together while, at the same time, allowing us to remain unique.

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