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The Evolution of An Artist: Exhibition at Diggs Gallery honors sculptor, painter who looked back and always moved forward
Garrett Garms/WSSU Photo
Freedom's Gate, acrylic on wood, is in the Charles Searles retrospective at WSSU.
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Published: February 8, 2009
Thanks to the civil-rights and black-power movements of the 1960s, those years are now universally recognized as a watershed decade for black Americans. Paralleling the sociopolitical gains that blacks in this country made during that tumultuous decade was an increasing interest in and appreciation of their African cultural heritage.
Among the many black American visual artists whose work began to reflect strong African influences during the 1960s was Charles Searles, whose work is the subject of a posthumous retrospective exhibition at Winston-Salem State University's Diggs Gallery. "Universal Reflections of Color and Rhythm," on view at the gallery through March 21, brings together about 60 paintings, sculptures and drawings that Searles made over the last 40 years of his life.
Searles (1937-2004) was in his late 20s when he developed a passion for the traditional arts of sub-Saharan Africa as a result of seeing examples in the University of Pennsylvania Museum, in his native Philadelphia. As a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, he began painting figures whose stylized faces reflect the influence of traditional masks from that part of Africa.
Paintings in the latter vein from the mid-to-late 1960s are among the earliest works in the exhibition at the Diggs. Most of them depict groups of figures with dark, masklike faces and geometrically abstracted bodies. Some of these figures appear intensely animated, as in the paintings titled The Street and Indoctrination. Searles' palette in these works includes lots of yellow and red, various shades of brown, black and touches of green and blue, but they're nonetheless chromatically restrained by comparison to his later work.
At that early stage of Searles' artistic evolution, the emerging Africanistic elements coexisted with Western avant-garde influences, as exemplified by the paintings Land (1967) and Bo Bro Bill (1969). The former centers on a torn poster for an appearance by Black Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad in an otherwise collage-like arrangement of painted geometric forms suggesting a heavily patched urban wall. The latter piece juxtaposes one of Searles' painted mask faces with actual fragments of commercially printed sheet-metal signs advertising cola drinks. Both works evidence the pronounced impact of collage, assemblage and pop art.
Searles began to develop a more distinctive approach around 1972, when he used a fellowship award to finance travels to Nigeria, Ghana and Morocco. The rhythmic patterns and bold colors incorporated into the textiles, architecture and ceremonial art he saw on that trip profoundly influenced his subsequent work. The show's earliest evidence of these influences is his 1972 painting Filas for Sale, a spatially distorted view of lively commercial activity in an African marketplace on a roughly 6-by-4-foot canvas. The title refers to the woven skullcaps sold in such marketplaces -- articles of headgear worn by this painting's angularly elongated figures and stacked at its bottom edge. The palette, conspicuously brighter than in the earlier paintings, chromatically echoes the boldly multihued filas themselves, setting a precedent for the blazing colors that characterize most of Searles' subsequent work.
The chromatic and stylistic influences Searles' absorbed in Africa are impressively reflected in two paintings from his "Dancers" series, both dated 1975. The dancing women sinuously posed in these works -- resplendant in richly patterned, form-fitting blouses and long, hip-hugging skirts -- are somewhat reminiscent of figures in classical Egyptian art.
Break on through
By 1977, Searles achieved a stylistic breakthrough, judging from this show's several works from that year. In these large paintings and works on paper, the figures have been replaced by or transformed into configurations of geometric-abstract shape, pattern and form. Right angles are rare among these cleanly delineated geometric components, which are predominantly curvilinear and evidently freehanded. Like the "Dancers" series but without the figures, these pieces convey a sense of sinuous movement.
By 1980, Searles was taking this approach into the third dimension in sculptures he made from interconnected pieces of cutout wood (or cast bronze in a few cases). Curves, crescents and arches are prevalent in these works, whose surfaces are sometimes punctured with cleanly cutout holes of various shapes.
Several of these sculptures are wall-mounted, and a few are bilaterally symmetrical, resembling stylized shields or large birds (as in his 1980 piece Flight of My Father). The freestanding or pedestal-mounted sculptures, meanwhile, invite scrutiny from all angles. The largest and most ambitious examples -- the imposing Warrior (1987) and the monumental Freedom's Gate (2000) -- are 8 to 10 feet tall.
The exhibition -- which also includes sketchbooks and drawings for sculptural works -- provides a welcome if overdue opportunity to consider the formidable career of an artist whose work continues to merit wider exposure.
■ "Charles Searles: Universal Reflections of Color and Rhythm" is on view through March 21 at Winston-Salem State University's Diggs Gallery, in the lower level of the university's O'Kelly Library. For more information, call 336-750-2458.
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