Behind the Masks

Lois Mailou Jones and Herbert Gentry both came of age during an era when the United States was still racially segregated, and blacks -- including black artists -- were routinely treated as second-class citizens. Both lived to see the end of government-sanctioned segregation and the emergence of a more receptive climate for the work of black artists in this country.

Solo exhibitions of works by Jones and Gentry at two different local galleries provide an occasion for considering their respective artistic legacies. Jones' exhibition "The Early Works: Paintings and Patterns 1927-1937" is on view through Saturday at the Delta Arts Center, and "Herbert Gentry: The Man, The Magic, The Master" is at Winston-Salem State University's Diggs Gallery through Oct. 4.

Jones (1905-1998) studied at the prestigious School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and is known primarily for works she made after 1937, a year she spent in Paris.

Strongly influenced by African art traditions, she was an influential teacher, and her own work finally began to receive widespread attention late in her life, especially after her 1973 retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts -- the first show by a black artist at a major American museum.

As indicated by its title, the exhibit at the Delta Arts Center examines an earlier, lesser-known period of Jones' career, when she earned her living by creating fabric and wallpaper designs that were commercially sold across the country. It consists of 50 tempera paintings on paper or board, none of which measures more than about 32-by-24 inches. Jones created all of them for reproduction on fabric and wallpaper.

Most of them feature images of irises, lilies, carnations, lotuses, yucca blossoms or other floral and plant forms floating against neutral backgrounds. A number of them also include passages of stripes, zigzags, diamonds, paisley forms and other kinds of patterning. These pieces prefigure Jones' more widely known work in their boldly contrasting colors and the tropical imagery featured in some of them. Several of the liveliest designs incorporate images of exotic birds.

One of Jones' designs stands out because its free-floating geometric forms were obviously inspired by contemporaneous developments in modernist abstraction. Traditional Aztec art is the source for another one that intertwines stylized vines and repeated mask forms, which prefigure the African masks prominent in much of her later, more widely known work.

The mask was also a touchstone image for Gentry (1919-2003), whose lesser-known status by comparison to Jones probably stemmed at least in part from his residence outside the United States for much of his life. Mask-like faces, often attached to bodies, are the predominant images in the retrospective at Diggs, especially in the paintings made after 1970. Otherwise Gentry's work is very different from Jones', most obviously in its loosely expressionistic character and the singularity of its focus on the human figure during the last 30 years of his life.

Born in Pittsburgh, Gentry was raised in Harlem, studied art at New York University and, in the late 1930s, worked as an artist for the federal Works Progress Administration.

He later lived in France, where he studied in Paris at l'Academie de la Grand Chaumiere, and during the last 40 years of his life he divided his time between New York and Sweden. He died in Stockholm five years ago.

His earliest painting in this show of more than 50 works is a 1955 cityscape loosely rendered with stacked and tightly adjoined blocks in prevailing shades of brown with yellow and blue. A highlight among several figurally related abstract-expressionist canvases from the 1960s and the early 1970s is the lush, predominantly orange canvas titled Red Buffalo.

It was evidently during the 1970s that Gentry began painting the boldly expressionistic humanoid figures with mask-like faces that remained dominant in his work for the rest of his life. Among the show's noteworthy paintings of this kind are Not Alone II (1986), whose misshapen, green figure may be intended to represent an extraterrestrial being. Also particularly striking are two paintings in which multiple figures and faces are rendered in fiery reds, yellows and oranges -- Parts (1992) and Amid the Crowd (1990-91). The latter painting stands out not only for its substantial size (78 by 66 inches), but also for the eccentricity of its figures -- several with multiple heads and odd numbers of oddly placed limbs -- and their convoluted spatial interconnection.

The figural paintings Gentry made for the last 30 years of his life have more of an affinity with the work of self-taught artists Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Mose Tolliver and Jimmy Lee Sudduth than with that of Gentry's academically trained contemporaries. This is appropriate, since he was something of an aesthetic outsider and seems to have cultivated that status.

You won't find him in most of the recent survey publications on contemporary black American art. This show provides a relatively rare and welcome, if belated, opportunity to see his work and consider a broad swath of his career.

SECCA update

The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art will be closed for renovations for about a year starting Jan. 5 , according to a recent announcement by Mark Leach, the center's director. Last month Szostak Design of Chapel Hill was awarded the contract to oversee the repairs, according to Leach, who said that he expects the work to be completed by the end of 2009.

■ Lois Mailou Jones' "The Early Works: Paintings and Patterns 1927-1937" is on view through Saturday at the Delta Arts Center, 2611 New Walkertown Road. For more information, call 336-722-2625. "Herbert Gentry: The Man, The Magic, the Master" is on view through Oct. 4 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.