Georgetown’s Parish Gallery has an interesting exhibition titled “HERBERT GENTRY AND FRIENDS” running through August 30 which merits some attention and certainly a visit.

Herbert Gentry (1919-2003) arrived in Paris, France in 1946, where he stayed because of what that city could then offer an American black man: a degree of freedom from bias and no segregation.

Other American black artists of the time took advantage of this freedom and Paris gave Gentry, Lois Mailou Jones, Beauford Delaney, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Romare Bearden and the countless other African American artists (as well as Afro-Cuban artist Wifredo Lam) who ventured there in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s – a place to just be. “I paint what I experience, who I am, in the Black world, especially in America, there’s a thing that you can’t forget where you came from, you paint from your experiences and who you are”.

Gentry’s friendships were made while in Paris, Copenhagen, Stockholm and New York. His artist friends shared in their openness to other ways, which is reflected in their thematic explorations. Travel, migration and mobility are sheer inspiration.

The parish Gallery exhibition seeks to put Gentry’s work in the environment of his friends. Ed Clark, records in his broad stokes the relation between place and expression, Vincent Smith’s narrative prints of his travels south of the Sahara document a deeper search, Rachelle Puryear evokes in her representations of nature a texture of timeless endurance, while for Richard Mayhew’s landscape is a spiritual world and Romare Bearden mines the terrain of history and memory.

This exhibition “Herbert Gentry and Friends” includes artists: Hamed Abdalla, Skunder Boghossian, Romare Bearden, Nannette Carter, Ed Clark, Beauford Delaney, Robin Holder, Bill Hutson, Lois Mailou Jones, Wifredo Lam, Richard Mayhew, Sam Middleton, Toni Parks, Vicente Pimentel, Larry Potter, Rachelle Puryear, Mary Anne Rose, Merton Simpson, Vincent D. Smith, and Walter Williams.

Over at the Athenaeum Gallery in Alexandria, the Northern Virginia Fine Arts Association (NVFAA) hosts an innovative new exhibit, TXT MSG from August 16 through September 21, 2008.

Featuring “Four Letter Words” by John James Anderson and “Song for Europe” by Mark Cameron Boyd, TXT MSG is “an artistic exploration touching on letters as design icons, the meaning of words and how their impact resonates beyond their mere definition, and interactive experiences that reflect a world view of language and art.”

Anderson’s “Four Letter Words” is announced as being a “celebration of typography, language, and modular art, that challenges the vulgar and simple connotations surrounding ‘four-letter words.’ “

More than 200 eight-square-inch paintings explore the various subtleties our language possesses: homophones, homonyms and onomatopoeia (which we all know… ahem… is a word or a grouping of words that imitates the sound it is describing… such as buzz).

“Song for Europe” is a participatory installation by the very talented Mark Cameron Boyd. The artist uses his signature “text-bisection” process on a series of chalkboard panels to address four languages with European origins – Greek, Latin, French and English — whose influence pervades Western culture. Boyd invites viewers to attempt to read and decipher the bisected sentences and participate in the works with the provided chalk.

I know the secret to Boyd’s nearly cryptographic works, and I can also tell you that they are smart and intelligent works of art.

Boyd along with Dr. Lisa Lipinski, Corcoran and Catholic University of America art history professor, will present a gallery talk on Sunday, September 7 at 5:00. The topic of the discussion will be the relationship of Boyd’s Song for Europe installation to the work of French poststructuralist Jacques Derrida.

< Prev		Next >