Nobody Knows My Name: The African American Experience in American Culture
curated by Philip E. Collins featuring the works of Jean Lacy, Robert Pruitt, and Angelbert Metoyer
Utilizing found objects and artistic elements combined with social messages inspired by African American literature, the three dynamic artists continue the mandate of African American philosopher and scholar Alain Locke. Locke encouraged African American artists who were primarily engage in the Harlem Renaissance to look to Africa as an inspiration to create an honest aesthetic expression to identify and define the state of African American culture. He encouraged artists to depict African and African American subjects and draw on their history for subject matter. The exhibition provides a myriad of visual perspectives focusing on the conscious and unconscious issues of racism and identity created in a contradictious democracy.
Large Gallery
Angelbert Metoyer
The Fire Next Time
The nomadic New Orleans-born artist Angelbert Metoyer is one of the most imaginative creative minds working today. In the MAC exhibition, The Fire Next Time, Metoyer shows his interest in what he refers to as the “hidden language of religion.” Across all of the mediums he works in – painting, sculpture, performance, video art and sound art – his explorations act as a powerful conduit to ancestral memory and what the radical psychoanalyst Carl C. Jung would describe as “the essential a priori archetypes that define what it means to be human.”
Angelbert exploded onto the art scene in 1995, when at the age of 18 he was included in dual exhibitions at Project Row Houses (Houston) and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. His works have been exhibited at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, The African American Museum at Dallas, The Museum of Fine Arts in Leipzig, Germany and the Williamson Museum of 21 Century Art in New York. Angelbert solo shows include Barbara Davis Gallery and New Gallery/Thom Andriola in Houston and Gerald Peters Gallery in Dallas. Metoyer studied at the Atlanta College of Art and Design. He lives and works in Houston, Texas.
Square Gallery
Robert Pruitt
The Souls of Black Folk
The notion of black identity has been complicated and largely misunderstood. We control neither the construction, nor the distribution of our varied and multilayered stories of self.
-Robert Pruitt
The exhibition The Souls of Black Folk is mostly object based. Pruitt uses figurative drawings to focus on modes of adornment and dress as a way of expressing political and cultural identity, specifically as it relates to black identities. For this exhibition of new works, Pruitt concentrates on using the forms and objects that make up much of that adornment as material for sculpture. “I am responding to the different ways I see these materials out in the world, and how they become abstractions within culture and on the body.”
Robert Pruitt holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin 2003, BFA Texas Southern University 2000 in Houston, Texas, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, 2002 in Skowhegan, Maine. In 1999 Pruitt participated in the legendary Tougaloo Art Colony in Jackson, Mississippi and completed a residency program at ArtPace 2007, San Antonio, Texas. He has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial (both individually and as part of Otabenga Jones and Associates), SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico: Drawing for Projection and P.S.1/MoMA, New York, NY, to name a few.
In 1999 Pruitt received the Dallas Museum of Art’s Arch and Ann Giles Kimbrough Fund Award, the Emerging Artist Grant from the Cultural Arts Council of Houston, Texas, the Artadia Artist Grant 2004, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship Grant 2007, Creative Capital Foundation Grant (Otabenga Jones) 2007 and the Art Matters Travel Grant 2009. From 2008 to 2010 Pruitt taught drawing and painting at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois. He currently lives and works in Houston, Texas.
His work has been acquired by the Dallas Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, The Studio Museum of Harlem in New York, the University Museum at Texas Southern University, Houston, Texas, the Cleveland Museum of Art and private collections.
New Works Space
Jean Lacy
Invisible Man
Laura Jean Lacy was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up near the campus of Howard University. Lacy was introduced at an early age to the philosophical thought and writings of Locke, Dubois and other African intellectuals. Lacy’s focus on the Black male as a dilemma has remained a consistent theme for the artist and continues in the exhibition Invisible Man. Using found objects and materials in her work, her concepts seemingly come into play spontaneously. A museum education specialist, Lacy has developed a number of educational programs aimed at emphasizing cultural enrichment. Lacy holds a B.A. in Art Education from Southern University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana 1956; Art Student League, New York, 1956-57; Otis Art Institute, 1958; Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas graduate studies in art education, 1977; North Texas State University (University of North Texas), Denton, Texas, graduate studies in museum studies, 1977.
Her work has been acquired by the Dallas Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Tyler Museum of Art in Tyler, Texas and private collections.
About the curator: Philip E. Collins
Phillip Collins is the former Chief Curator at the African American Museum in Dallas, Texas. Collins has curated over sixty exhibitions locally and nationally. He has developed art education programs, exhibition installation designs, fabrications, and art installations and has written art reviews and essays for local, state and national catalogues, periodicals and other related art publications. As a public servant, Collins has served as juror for art exhibitions statewide and nationally, served as Treasurer on the Texas Association of Museum (TAM) Board of Trustees in Austin, Texas and served on numerous local boards and committees for cultural institutions with a focus on the visual arts, cultural diversity, and arts education. Currently, Collins serves as Cultural Commissioner At Large and Public Art Committee, Chair for the City of Dallas Office of Cultural Affairs.
Among many awards and commendations, Phillip Collins has received the J. Paul Getty Museum Management Scholarship 2000, Artist Advocate’s Award by the Visual Arts Coalition of Dallas 2004, Creative Arts Award for Community Service by the Dallas Historical Society 2004, and the President’s Award for Outstanding Community Service and Volunteerism by The Black Academy of Arts and Letters, Inc Dallas, Texas.
Collins is the Executive Director of the Memnosyne Foundation, a nonprofit organization whose mission advocates and promotes change.