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Obituaries
| Artist
Noah Purifoy Joins
the Ancestors
Noah Purifoy, internationally renowned
assemblage sculptor, died on March 5 at his home in Joshua Tree, age 86.
A founding member of the California Arts Council, Purifoy was the first
director of the Watts Towers Art Center in the early 1960s. Since 1989,
he has continued to create an outdoor art museum of sculptures in the high
desert of Joshua Tree for public participation and enjoyment.
The Noah Purifoy
Foundation, established in 1998 to preserve Noah’s work in Joshua Tree,
will continue to move forward and ensure his legacy as an artist, mentor,
visionary and creative genius.
He is survived by his
sisters, Mrs. Ophelia Jeffries, Mrs. Mary Lewis, Mrs. Lucille McDaniel,
and Ms. Esther Purifoy, of Cleveland, Ohio.
Attached is a poem Noah
wrote in 1966, a poem that is guding us during a time of enormous loss.
A BOOK FLOWN
These fragmentations only
mean that
I am fragmented;
that as I symbolize what you say and agree
can I then leave you
to set these lines in order,
assemble them into a book
and, by the first strong winds,
permit its leaves to be torn from its cover.
Let them fly high
and, like leaves light
into the lap of the Universe;
separate of and by themselves
within, without, complete, yet incomplete.
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A Salute to
Dr. Jeff R. Donaldson
Printmaker, Painter, Educator
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Dear Art Enthusiasts,
As we progress
through another historical year in the arts, I regret to inform you
of the loss of a true pioneer in the African American art realm....
Dr. Jeff R. Donaldson. His passing will be felt by
everyone, and his contributions as an artist will forever shine.
This true legend opened many doors, which were permanently
parted for many artists to follow. May his great legacy continue to
enlighten. NCA and the art world mourn the death of former Dean of
the College of Fine Arts at Howard University, Dr. Jeff R.
Donaldson. There will be a memorial service on Friday, March 12th,
11 AM at Rankin Chapel, Howard University. |
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Donaldson
has participated in over 200 group and 15 one-person exhibitions here and
abroad. In addition to easel painting, his oeuvre includes murals (he
organized the OBAC Visual Arts Workshop, creators of the original "Wall of
Respect" in Chicago and was a founder of the AFRICOBRA artist guild): book
illustrations: (Gwendolyn Brooks, Haki Madhubuti, Houston Baker, et. al.);
20 album covers for Jazz-America Marketing where he served as art
director; and numerous commissions, such as the Hoyt W. Fuller portrait at
Cornell University.
Donaldson's work and career development appear in
the Thames and Hudson (London) publication, Black Culture and Art
in the 20th century by Richard Powell. His essay "Ten in Search of A
Nation" is included in Selz and Stiles, 1996 Theories and Documents of
Contemporary Art, University of California Berkeley Press.
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National Center for Afro-American Artists, Boston, 1970
Cornell University, New York, 1974
Cleveland State, 1974
Florida A&M University, 1975
Centre d'Art, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 1979 |
Donaldson, a founding member of OBAC and
AfriCobra, was born December 15, 1932 in Pine Bluffs, Arkansas. He has
studied at the University of Arkansas, where he received a B.A. degree
in studio art. He later earned a M.S. degree in art education from the
Illinois Institute of Technology (1963), and a Ph.D. degree in art
history from Northwestern University (1973).
After serving as guest lecturer at Northwestern
University form 1968-1970, Donaldson became the chairman of the art
department at
Howard University. He first studied art with Hale Woodruff's protégé, John M.
Howard, and philosophy with George G.M. James (Stolen Legacy) at the
University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. Later he trained at the relocated
Bauhaus, the Institute of Design of Illinois Institute of Technology
with Richard Koppe (painting), Misch Cohn (printmaking), and Aaron
Siskind (photography). Still, later, he studied at Northwestern
University with Frank Willett (African Art History) and African American
Art history with adjunct advisor Romare Bearden.
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The National Conference of Artist, the Center for Black
Literature of Medgar Evers College, Friends & Family of Tom Feelings,
will celebrate his life and legacy with a 2-day memorial, Friday,
February 27 and 28,
2004. Our dear brother, master illustrator, sculptor and very popular nice
guy, made his transition on August
25 after recently learning that he had cancer. Family and friends joined
him in his fight of this dreaded disease, and held a 70th birthday party
for him on May
18 (the day before his birthday) in his longtime community
of Brooklyn, NY. He had never had a birthday party prior to this, and
wanted to celebrate with his friends, not knowing how bad the condition
was.
Friends started a fundraising drive to send him to a
facility in Germany that specialized in cancer patients, but he became too
weak to travel and was hospitalized in South Carolina until he got strong
enough to travel. Tom traveled to a similar facility in Mexico, but the
cancer had spread too far, and time was not on his side.
The first memorial tribute, sponsored by The Center for
Black Literature of Medgar Evers College, will take place at Medgar Evers’
Founder’s Auditorium, 1650 Bedford Avenue, followed the
next day with a memorial service and salute sponsored by Rev. Johnny Ray
Youngblood’s St. Paul’s Baptist
Church, 859 Hendrix St., where Tom suggested as his choice of place for
celebrating his homegoing.
Both tributes will be held in his beloved Brooklyn. A partial list of invited guests include, Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka,
Jim Barnes, Elombe Brath, Ernie Crichlow, Errol
Doris, Cy Edwards, Paul Goodnight, Rev. Marshall Hatch, Eli Kince, Atiba
Kwabena, Sylvia Huen, Abbey Lincoln,
George Edward Tait, Quincy Troupe, Randy
Weston, Louis Reyes Rivera, Camille Yarbrough,
Bunch Washington, Askia Muhammad Toure, Chairman Silas H. Rhodes of the
School of Visual Art, The Putnam Avenue Group, Imani Dancers, Drummers and
Singers and the St. Paul’s Community praise ministries.
Many of Tom’s lifelong friends, and some new ones have
pitched in to form a committee and production team headed by Co-chairs,
Kwame Brathwaite, NCA president and Dr. Brenda Greene, Director of The
Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers.
Committee members and friends, Richard Barclift, Gloria C.
Thomas, Gertrude Harvey, Khaliyah Washington-Seely, Gwendolyn Wilson,
Lillian Harvey, Lafayette Robinson, Grant Spears, Surya Peterson, Izell Glover, Jimmie
Mannas, Emmett Wigglesworth, Kitty Chavis, Betty Thomas, Abdul Aziz,
Miriam Francis, Brenda Mattingly, Otto Neals, Pat Cummings, Ruth Edwards,
Joan Banks and Matthew Meade, have put together a program that includes
friends from all over the U.S. This tribute is endorsed by Kamili
Feelings, Tom’s youngest son and executor of his estate.
Copies of many of Tom’s books, The Middle Passage: White
Ships, Black Cargo; Jambo Means Hello; Moja Means One; and others will
be on sale by Nubian Heritage Bookstore at both venues.
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Babatunde Olatunji
master drummer, teacher, humanitarian and
former board member of the National Conference of Artists.
The Board of Directors
and the National Executive Board of NCA mourn the passing of our beloved
brother, colleague and friend, Michael Babatunde Olatunji. We can safely
say without fear of successful contradiction, that Baba was the best
known, longest performing and most popular African born musical star in
the world. Baba not only represented his native Nigeria, but all of
Africa promoting the varied
cultures that represent the continent.
A memorial service was
held in New York at The Riverside Church on April 28th and
friends and admirers came from around the country to attend. The
previous day, there was a funeral march through the streets of Harlem
accompanying the hearse carrying Baba to the Unity Funeral Home.
Yoruba’s from around the country came to lead the march and pay tribute
to the man that at a chance meeting with Ghana’s first President, Dr.
Kwame Nkrumah, upon discussing the lack of knowledge about African
culture in the U.S, (1950’s), and the need for someone to spread the
culture was told by Nkrumah, “you are the man to do it.
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Babatunde Olatunji |
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Members of Yoruba community in the U.S. lead march in
Harlem to honor Babatunde Olatunji.
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That he did, for more
than forty years, recording and performing all around the U.S. and the
world, spreading African culture everywhere and knocking down the
walls of ignorance of those whose only thoughts of Africa were
negative and backward, dating back to the “Tarzanization” of our
image. Baba’s music has inspired several generations of Black people
in the U.S., the Caribbean and in African itself. May his great spirit
live on in our hearts. |
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Bob Blackburn
Artist, Teacher, Master Print Maker
Passes at 80
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Robert Blackburn was one of the most important and influential figures
in the world of art. A master artist in his own right, he is best
known for his teaching of the art of printmaking, a technique of
printing and reproducing original and limited edition works of art.
Bob was always
ready to share his vast knowledge to master artists and high school
and college students as well, giving them history of art and artists
as well as technique. A case in point was his major input in the
National Conference of Artists New York Chapter’s “Gathering of
Creative Forces” at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black
Culture” where he and fellow artists, Lorenzo Pace, Ed Clarke and Herb
Gentry spoke to a group of students who came up from North Carolina
Central University in April 2000. |
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| Master printmaker,
artist Bob Blackburn at an “NCA Gathering of Creative Forces” at
the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, speaking to
college students as Lorenzo Pace listens. |
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NCAnewyork did a follow-up at a pre-conference “Gathering” at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art with Bob, and fellow artists Ann Tanksley,
Emmett Wigglesworth and Ademola Olugebefola.
Bob freelanced as a graphic artist for about
four years, for major institutions including the philanthropic Harmon
Foundation, the China Institute of America, and Associated American
Artists. He later got his own lithographic press and opened his own
studio in New York’s Chelsea, in 1948, where he
printed for other artists and encouraging his friends to experiment in
lithography. A year later Blaburn was designated a Master Printer by the National Academy of Design and
he has since received many national awards.
Blackburn’s funeral was held at
the ELIM Church located at 20 Madison Street in Brooklyn,
the church of Bob's sister Gertrude. As
expected, there was a full house in attendance. A memorial service is
planned for mid September to honor this great man of the visual arts.
For information on the planning of this tribute, contact Jane
Stephenson, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, contact her at
212.563-5855 or e-mail
efa@efa1.org. (that’s a numeral one).
In 1950, when the innovative Parisian printmaking studio, Atelier
17
left the US and went back to Europe after a war-time spell in
New York, Blackburn acquired an
intaglio press at his nearby shop. He and Barnet worked on a
groundbreaking group of color lithographs that were featured in the
contemporary art journal ARTnews.
He was also the first master printer at Universal Limited Art Editions
in New York, responsible for some of the very first editions by
20th century masters like Jasper Johns, Larry
Rivers, Robert Raushenberg and others.
In late
1999, the Georgia Museum of Art
in Athens, Georgia, presented an exhibition, (organized and circulated
by the Cochran Collection of LaGrange, Georgia) "Will Barnet and Bob
Blackburn: An Artistic Friendship in Relief."
Bob
Blackburn became a legend in
20th
century printmaking. He established what has come to be known as The Bob
Blackburn Printmakers Workshop
which operated until recently as a significant
contribution to the advancement of fine art printmaking..
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Skunder Boghossian
from allAfrica.com
Ethiopian artist and pioneer of modern
African art Alexander Skunder Boghossian was found prone and unmoving in
his Washington, DC apartment by friends who visited to congratulate him
after viewing his paintings at the Smithsonian's National Museum of
African Art. Boghossian was pronounced dead at Howard University Hospital.
The cause of death is still unknown but the 66-year-old artist had been
suffering from several ailments that had resulted in regular
hospitalization in recent years.
In 1965, Boghossian was the first contemporary African artist to have
work purchased by the Museum of
Modern Art in New York. He was also a great
teacher both at Howard University and in Ethiopia. He
inspired the careers of both Africans and non-Africans.
In many ways, Boghossian's work was bound up with African-American life
and culture. As a teenager an African American neighbor not only gave
him his first feedback on his drawings, but introduced him to jazz. And
throughout his life, jazz was often the backdrop of sound as he worked
on paintings.
"Jazz is," he told a friend, Tom Porter, "a very heavy movement of the
twentieth century. It is not one person; it is not one thought, it is a
combination of geniuses... the constant modulation of concepts... It is
the one thing we have, black folks, as artists..."
Born in Addis Ababa in 1937, Boghossian was awarded an
"imperial scholarship" when he was 17 to study at London's St. Martin's
School of Art. He extended his stay
another nine years during which he moved to Paris, becoming a student
and teacher at that city's Académie de la Grande Chaumière and at the
Ecole Superieure des Beaux Arts. In 1963 he was the first Ethiopian
painter whose work was purchased by the Musee d'Art Moderne in Paris.
Boghossian talked often of political and cultural influences in Paris
during those years, citing Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Cheikh Anta Diop
as well as creative forces in modern art like Paul Klee.
Excerpted from allAfrica.com website. For more info and
the complete article, visit
www.allAfrica.com. Check them out on a regular basis.
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Steve Martin
NCA Member Passes
Steve James Martin was born in New York
City on December 10, 1945 and grew up in Harlem and
the Upper-West side of Manhattan. His serious
involvement in photography started at the age of twenty-six after a move
to Austin, Texas. He studied photography at Austin Community College. Steve
exhibited in many NCA exhibitions and was an active member of the New
York Chapter. We will surely miss him.
His work covered a
broad range of styles including abstract, documentary, photojournalism,
portraits and self-portraits. Steve has been a devoted member of the New
York chapter and a member and officer of the Kimoinge Photographers. |
Steve Martin in one of his usual relaxed
moods even in
the face of adversity.
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Richard Bartee
More Hugging, Less Mugging
Rich Bartee at the Million Man March holding
his famous, “More Hugging, Less Mugging - Black Is Beautiful, Black Is
Dutiful” sign.
Richard Bartee, “The D Train Poet” and NCA supporter and the MC for our
December 22nd NCA Awards also passed. We are loosing many great people.
His “More Hugging, Less Mugging” campaign is legend in New York. |
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CLAUDE CLARK 1915-2001
Excerpt
From the catalog of the exhibition:
Claude
Clark: On My Journey Now
Curated by
David
Driskell
and Gladys E. Rodgers, 1996 – The Apex Museum, Atlanta, Ga.
By David C. Driskell
Claude
Clark, Sr. remains, in the eyes of many of the students he has taught over
the past fifty years, benevolent teacher, cultural mentor and importantly,
one of the fine models for artists of all generations. Most remember him
for being a person whose interest in the welfare of Black artists
throughout the African Diaspora predated even the Civil Rights movement of
the 1960s.
Clark’s interest in African art goes back to the formative years
in his career when he studied art under the tutelage of renowned collector
and art enthusiast, Dr. Albert C. Barnes from 1939 through 1944. Few
practicing artists had such a long and productive association with the
venerable Dr. Barnes at his school of art at the Barnes Foundation in
Merion, Pennsylvania.
Clark’s study at the Barnes Foundation helped inform his
knowledge of the role that African art played in the development of modern
art in Europe. It was at the Barnes Foundation that Clark first saw
African art as an important place to begin his own aesthetic development
as a painter, an interest he has genuinely maintained over the years.
While few of the works in this exhibition note the artist’s
long-standing interest in the subject of African art, nearly all show the
love affair he has carried on over the years with African American themes,
particularly those that show life in the deep south and the Caribbean.
But there are times when other themes are equally important in the
artist’s oeuvre. EXPULSION is a highly political composition that shows
Uncle Sam being expelled from what was at one time colonial Africa. SHAKE
A LEG communicates the exuberance of Black dance while RAISING THE
CROSS,
painted over twenty years ago, shows the irony of the Christian cross
being used by the Klu Klux Klan as a symbol of racial hate.
Some of the paintings in this exhibition document important places
in the artist’s work and travels over the years. ON SUNDAY MORNING is a
handsomely rendered study of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the
Manayunk, Pennsylvania community where Clark spent many of his childhood
years. WINDY HILL shows two African-inspired buildings with hip roofs,
once a dairy and in later years the campus laundry at Talladega College in
Alabama. STONE HALL was painted in 1949. The building, a freshman
dormitory for men at Talledega College, was destroyed by fire in the
mid-1970s. Clark painted both WINDY HILL and STONE HALL while he served as
Associate Professor of Art at Talledega in the 1940s and ‘50s.
Over the years, Clark has painted an odyssey showing Black people
and their journey in the African Diaspora. There are times when Clark’s
odyssey takes us to Haiti, Egypt, Mobile, Alabama, Nigeria and nearby
suburbs of the city of Philadelphia, among others. Yet there are times
when we are presented by the artist with personal tokens of love; the
joyous beauty of a bouquet of flowers, as is the case with IRIS and
GLADIOLAS --- reminding us of the artist’s sensibility to all of the
forms of nature in its convincing ways. Importantly, in all of the
accounts that we witness Clarks’ art in its varying forms, there is
indeed an undiminishing expression of the creative urge to explore form
and communicate a vision of the world that he alone has been given. Claude
Clark loves this odyssey of artistry and he remains steadfast on his
journey now.
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ANNIE LEE EVANS
1942-2001
Blessed with immense passion,
strength and fortitude, Annie Lee Evans entered the world in Screvin
County, Georgia on November 9, 1942. On May 24, 2001, after a four-year
battle with breast cancer, Ann’s soul ascended triumphantly into
Heaven.
Ann was born as the second of six children to mother Lee Daughtry
Evans, and father Ralph Evans. The family migrated north from Georgia in
the mid 1940s to Bainbridge Street in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of
Brooklyn. “Lil’ Sister”, as she was affectionately known, attended
Holy Rosary Catholic School for her primary education and Wingate High
School for her secondary education. Very early on it was evident to both
her family and classmates that Ann was a gem. She was bold and
articulate, and always excelled academically. Ann belonged to various
Glee Clubs, Doo Wop groups, and was chosen to be a member of the
illustrious All- City High School Chorus.
After High School, Ann attended Brooklyn College for several
years where her dream was to become a Field Archeologist, however, after
the birth of her first child in 1967, Ann’s attention shifted to the
arts. With daughter Kioka at her side, Ann began her sojourn as an
artist.
In 1974, Ann had her second child Geuka, after which she began
her formal study of the arts. She initially attended Empire State
College, and from 1977 to 1986 she also studied and had apprenticeships
at The Allende Institute in Mexico, Greenwich House in New York, Alfred
University in New York, Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and at The
University of Hartford in Connecticut.
Never being limited in areas of interest, Ann independently
studied African History, Native American Culture, and had a passion for
Holistic Nutrition. As she
acquired this knowledge, Ann was famous for “sharing” what she had
learned with her closest family and friends. She provided you with free
information, a bit of wisdom and usually some fresh exotic food from The
Farmer’s Market.
Throughout her adult life Ann worked as an artist and Art
Educator with a special attention towards the development of children.
She was on the Board of Directors of
The Henry Street Settlement, People United for Children, and
founded her own youth art education organization, Sankofa, Inc.
As an artist Ann’s work has been exhibited in New York,
Chicago, Atlanta, and Dakar Senegal.
NCA will miss you Ann, rest in peace. |
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