Studio Framework
My work slips fluidly between two and three dimensions. I generate my paintings and drawings from systems that I design to measure time and imply space. My temporary spatial works are intended to be physically experienced, though they are often seen as images after they are de-installed. Both parts of my practice rigorously consider questions of text as image, the relationship between text and code—what counts, how to count it, who does the counting, and how to mark the passage of time—from every conceivable angle. My process is one of making and unmaking, looking and waiting.
The approach to my studio practice is slow, accumulative, multifaceted, layered, and process-centered. I create systems that result in objects and images. The end is often unknown at the start. Even when I think I know, things often change along the way. I notice and embrace the unexpected through careful observation and attention while continuously asking questions that lead to other questions. There is, I realize, always more to learn.
Creating a place of connection between myself and others is at the core of my work. The drawings, paintings, and sculptures that I make are invitations for reflection that begin with personal experiences viewed through the lens of specific details. The details are sifted through a matrix that leads to a point of entry, such as dates on a calendar. The calendar dates are interpreted from the personal perspective of each reader. Each person’s story related to a given date becomes the center of their experience with the work. The ability to bring stories to mind that may not receive attention, except when they are nudged to the surface by an encounter with a work of art, is a key motivator in my studio practice.
As a young artist I found relatable representations of African American lives and experiences in the literary works of Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison and their peers in the Black Arts Movement. The unfortunate omission of the work of these writers from my formal education made the urgency of reading them palpable. My studio response to encountering this vast literary canon was to use text as imagery, and treat language as visual form. I had been introduced to the work of conceptual artists Mel Bochner and Lawrence Wiener as an undergraduate student. Their text-based art gained greater resonance when I adopted text as the primary vehicle for expressing ideas of my own. I played with the scale of words written in fonts or by hand on black and white backgrounds. I paid attention to the sounds that were implicit in how the words were written. I marveled at the many ways that straight lines, curved lines, dots, and dashes, have been used to invoke meaning in languages across the globe. My influences include a broad spectrum of artists including the butoh dance company SunKai Juku, artist/musician John Cage, and the group Sweet Honey and The Rock. I share sensibilities with visual artist like Charles Gaines, Alighiero Boetti, Guillermo Kuitca, Lee Bontecou, Eve Hesse, and Betye Saar.
Early on in my explorations of text as image, I was given The Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life, where I learned that the words for drawing, painting, and writing were all the same in Mayan languages. This was affirming, and it encouraged me to continue to work in this mode. My interest in text led to my studying the relationship between text and textiles. I discovered how textiles have been used as a means of communication alongside written languages. This led to questions about the relationship between text and code. When does a code for communication become text? When does text become language?
2018 - 2023
For the purpose of this review, I am focusing on the past five years of my studio practice (research). The first year, 2018, saw the culmination of a large body of work in which I used occurrences in my journal over a 25-year period as points of data in roughly 200 circle grid drawings. I transitioned away from those drawings in 2019 when I became interested in using the amount of time spent in telephone conversations as a new data set. The social upheaval of 2020 moved me to a direct response of drawings and paintings that addressed current events. My current work is based on celebrating the life of my nephew Lawrence Wade (Ahkelo) Kimbrough. He ended his life on February 14, 2021 leaving a chasm in his wake. He was 20 years old.
The 2018 drawings began in 2014 as an inquiry into what I wrote in my journals on a given day during the period 1983-2007. My initial interest was to find out if there was a single day that had a journal entry for each of those years. Looking at the journals year by year made the trajectory of my growth as an artist and a person more evident and displayed a true sense of coming of age from 18 to 42. I scanned each page of the journals to create a digital archive of the writing. In the process of scanning, I kept a chart noting the presence or absence of an entry for each day. I did not find what I was looking for but the charts led to the circle grid drawings that were the focus of my studio work for the next four years. I shifted my attention away from what was written and towards the frequency of writing itself. The drawings relay the amount of writing in rhythmic patterns. Some of the circle grids are densely populated with darkened sections, and others are spare and open. Each drawing is titled with the month, day, and year related to the chart from which it is drawn. The grids are labeled on each axis by month and year, or day. There is a clear sense of the amount of writing over the years, not of what is written. Fueled by personal ambivalence about how much to share, and how much to keep, the drawings give a macro view of the activity of journaling over time, while maintaining the inherent privacy of the writing. It is possible to locate specific dates in the drawings, as every day of the year is present multiple times in the body of work as a whole. The circular format of the grids gives them a sense of movement and a dynamic presence that works aesthetically and conceptually when addressing the subject of time. Notations of the presence or absence of an entry become data that is visualized in patterns that share resonance with pre-Columbian calendars, celestial charts, woven baskets, tubes, spheres, and discs.
A series of paintings and drawings completed in 2019 centers the theme of vulnerability by using as data the itemized record of phone conversations between myself and a new friend. The content of the conversations is not available, only the times of day and the lengths of time for six months. I transposed the information directly from my phone bills into charts that noted the dates and times of specific conversations. There was just enough detail to open the possibility for remembering a poignant moment of connection. I created a system or a lens through which to view the information to avoid being overly sentimental. The number of conversations eclipses what may have been said. Many people know the experience of being in constant contact at the beginning of a relationship. This series marks the end of the beginning. It is made with the collective energy of two people that abruptly becomes the possession of one. I rely on the character of an edge, the placement of a shape, the overlapping of layers, and slight changes in scale, for a cumulative feeling of joy, loss, and longing across the body of work.
The events of 2020, particularly the murder of George Floyd, moved me to a studio response. I was similarly motivated to respond in 1992, when the white officers who brutalized a black man named Rodney King were found not guilty, and whole sections of the city of Los Angeles went up in flames. I made a text piece in 1992 with the words They Must Don’t Know Who We Are written in black and white stones. Nearly thirty years stand between these events, but the feelings that they engender are the same.
The initial work that I made in 2020 was a circle grid drawing with 526 sections filled with graphite. The number, 526, represents the reported seconds that the police officer kneeled on George Floyd’s neck. The protests and social unrest that swept across the world in the wake of the tragic video had an impact that is still reverberating. George Floyd’s murder is one instance in a long continuum of excessive police violence. In his case the officer was held accountable largely due to the evidence on the video that was so widely circulated.
For the George Floyd work, the original 526 Seconds drawing was expanded into four paintings in 2021. I remade the drawing and photographed it in stages. The four parts are titled Three Hundred Seventy Five Seconds, Four hundred Eleven Seconds, Four hundred Forty Four Seconds, and Five Hundred Twenty Six Seconds respectively. When the pieces are hung in sequence there is a visual transition from one to the next. The count may be interpreted as going up or down. In either direction it marks the time that it took for Mr. Floyd’s spirit to leave his body. The paintings are a memorial. They are the way that I processed the trauma of witnessing his death.
My nephew Lawrence Wade Kimbrough died on February 14, 2021. The contrast between the beauty of his presence and the horror of his death leaves me without words. I count his death as a COVID 19 loss even though he did not die from contracting the virus. The social conditions created by COVID 19, namely isolation, economic uncertainty, news of massive numbers of people dying, the fear of infection, and the fear of spreading the virus to loved ones, had an impact on young people that is still being measured today. Lawrence named himself Ahkelo when he was 14. The name didn’t stick so he was Lawrence to everyone who knew him. After he died, we found a Facebook page where he used the name Ahkelo. This time it stuck as a way to honor his memory. Ahkelo means first child after twins, which he was. He was a vibrant, outgoing, active, thoughtful, caring person. Two aspects of him that remain present for me are his affection for bright colors and his propensity for being in constant motion.
I had a practice of walking two miles a day prior to Lawrence passing. When he died, I made the commitment to walk a mile for every day of his life since he was practically in continuous motion for 7,444 days. I was inspired by the artist On Kawara who used the number of days of his life as his biography. After I calculated that it would take me approximately eight years to walk 7,444 miles alone, I invited friends and family to participate by sending me miles. I made monthly charts to keep track of the miles. Through the collective effort of 80 people, we serendipitously reached 7,444 miles on the second anniversary of his suicide.
Ahkelo’s bright and bold sensibility has inspired the color palette of my newest work. At first, I approached incorporating his colors by using oil pastels. The saturation of color in oil pastels seemed like it would work. Unfortunately, the results felt forced. I regrouped and decided to photograph his clothing for the colors that would make the palette. The photographs and the charts that track the miles are raw material for the next work. It’s too early to tell how the combination of the charts and colors will develop as drawings and paintings. Out of the eighteen pieces that I made in the summer of 2022 only four showed promise. I am using the possibilities of those four pieces to lead the way going forward.
Career Highlights
The above account of my recent studio activities is supported by 30 years of practice, exhibitions, reviews, honors, and academic accomplishments. I have exhibited work in approximately two to four group exhibitions a year since 1990. During that same period my work has been featured in 33 solo exhibitions in non-profit spaces, commercial galleries, university galleries, and museums. Exhibition highlights include solo exhibitions at The University of Michigan Museum of Art, The Sweeney Gallery at The University of California Riverside, The Baron and Ellin Gordon Art Galleries at Old Dominion University, The Dallas Museum of Art, and ArtPace Center for Contemporary Art in San Antonio. Group exhibition highlights include participating in the 1997 Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Collection in Context: Gesture at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Highlighted exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston include Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970, Perspectives@25: A Quarter Century of new Art in Houston, and Other Narratives. My work has been contextualized among international artists in the exhibitions Topologies and Geometries On And Off The Grid: Art From 1995 to the Present at The Warehouse Dallas.
Open Storage: 25 Years of Collecting is currently on view at The Warehouse Dallas where my work shares a room with works by Bruce Nauman, Lucio Fontana, and Giuseppe Penone. I have work in an upcoming group exhibition titled Imaginary I at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in the fall of 2023. A solo exhibition at the Houston Museum of African American Culture is scheduled for the fall of 2024.
Of the honors that I have received the residencies have been the most meaningful because of the time and space that they have afforded me to focus on my studio practice. I received the Core Fellowship at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Skowhegan Camille Cosby Award for African American Artists, and a MacDowell Fellowship in 1993, 1996, and 2018 respectively. My academic accomplishments include receiving tenure in 2002, promotion to Professor in 2009, and being named Professor Emeritus in 2020 at the University of North Texas.