Deep Blues: Rik Freeman's exhibit at Delta Arts Center is about more than music

The ostensible subject of Rik Freeman’s paintings at the Delta Arts Center is the blues, the globally influential African American music tradition in which both jazz and rock’n’roll are rooted. Most of his 16 paintings in “The Chittlin Circuit Review,” at the center through Jan. 15, feature images of a black man playing an acoustic guitar, the blues’ primary musical instrument in the pre-

electric-guitar era. But the exhibition is about a lot more than music.

Its most ambitious and absorbing paintings deal in substantial narrative detail with the social and cultural context in which the blues originated and found its ongoing inspiration. In a broader sense, the show is about the lives and circumstances of black Americans in the seven decades following their liberation from institutionalized slavery.

What viewers can see at the Delta Arts Center is an abbreviated rendition of a larger exhibition with the same title at the Greater Reston Arts Center in Reston, Va., where these paintings and more from the same series were shown in 2008.

Freeman works in the narrative tradition of American regionalist painters such as Thomas Hart Benton and the federally funded, public-mural painters of the Depression era. The great Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera are also an obvious influence. What’s most interesting about Freeman’s work is the extent to which he has applied this approach to subject matter rooted in his own life as a black man born and raised in the South.

Although he’s not a blues musician and has admitted he didn’t listen to the blues during his youth, he was born in 1956, so he’s old enough to recall the era of racial segregation as manifested in the black neighborhood where he grew up in Athens, Ga. The title of his exhibition and the series of paintings represented in it references the name applied to the circuit of Southern nightclubs and other music venues where black musicians and entertainers and audiences were restricted to performing during the segregation era.

Instead of portraying and documenting real-life exponents of the blues, Freeman takes a storyteller’s approach, creating his own cast of characters and well-researched settings where he depicts these characters playing the music and acting out scenes related to it. As he explains in a brief documentary film available for viewing on a DVD in the gallery, the main character is a guitar-picking blues singer named Mud Paw Willie, who appears in most of the paintings. Willie, or Da Paw, as he’s called in the title of a small portrait on view, is usually depicted with his guitar in his hands as if he’s in mid-song.

A few of Freeman’s paintings are set in juke joints and other nightclubs of the kind that made up the Chittlin Circuit, but others are set in homes, neighborhoods and business districts like those where black Americans lived and congregated during the early decades of the 20th century. A number of them are set in the rural South, where most black Americans lived in the several decades after the Civil War. Such paintings tend to highlight Freeman’s ability to give an organic look to his characters and their surroundings, as if they had grown directly from the earth or been shaped and molded from the soil and other natural materials.

In one of these rural scenes, Say What!, family members and friends are gathered around an outdoor fire over which a man fries fish in a pan. At the right, Mud Paw Willie holds a copy of a Chicago newspaper from which he appears to be reading aloud to his companions.

Close inspection of the newspaper reveals it to contain a headline about flooding along the Mississippi River, referencing a real event that took place in 1927, with tragic results for black people living in the river’s floodplain. The newspaper also contains a prominent photo of black union organizer Marcus Garvey in his favored military garb.

Say What! is one of the show’s several paintings specifically grounded in the real-life history of African Americans in the early 20th century. A more ambitious example, is Moses Train, an interior view of a railroad passenger car carrying a group of black Americans to the North during what has become known as the Great Migration, when large numbers of black Americans left the South in hopes of finding better opportunities for jobs and housing in northern cities. Almost cinematic in scope and detail, it’s a highlight of the exhibition.

Relaxing in a seat at the left side of the train car, Mud Paw Willie leans against a window while plucking his guitar. In the corresponding seat at the right, a young boy peers out a window and waves at a crow flying in the opposite direction from the train — a clever reference to the South’s “Jim Crow” laws and customs relegating blacks to second-class citizenship. It’s an appropriate symbol of the life these folks were hoping to leave behind.

“The Chittlin Circuit Review” will remain on view through Jan. 15, at the Delta Arts Center, 2611 New Walkertown Road. For more information, call 722-2625.