In early video works, Gatson remixed scenes from Black history in woozy, kaleidoscopic sequences two of these montages appeared in “Freestyle,” an influential 2001 exhibition at the Studio Museum that brought notice to a host of Black artists. He has pursued his career since the Nineties in New York City, including the past thirteen years in Bushwick, making him an elder of the neighborhood scene. Gatson switched his major from graphic design to fine art and went on to the Yale School of Art, where he studied sculpture under the program’s longtime director, minimalist sculptor David von Schlegell. There, he says, the confluence of living in an overwhelmingly white milieu, hearing the militant music of Public Enemy and others, and being encouraged by a professor who guided him toward writers like bell hooks and Frantz Fanon sparked a lifelong interest in race and identity. His political awakening, however, happened as an undergraduate at Bethel College in Minnesota in the late Eighties. But these works on paper, begun in 2007, are just one stream in his oeuvre, which spans sculpture, painting, and video, sometimes in combination.īorn in Georgia but raised in Riverside, California, Gatson grew up in the kind of modest, tract-homes setting where people like his parents - a nurse and a steelworker-turned– landscaping contractor who left the South at the tail end of the Great Migration - were forming a new Black middle class.
Village returns very village voicey series#
It features collage-based drawings from a series that celebrates Black cultural heroes in an idiosyncratic, abstracted style, in which bold, precise lines radiate from small cut-out photographs.The mix of influences - minimalism, constructivism, propaganda art - and the earnest but oblique engagement with history are characteristic of the 51-year-old artist. “Icons,” Gatson’s current exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, embodies this approach. My program is to move it in some other direction.” There are specific things that I’m trying to address, but in a way that isn’t about telling or retelling the history. “History is important, and so is abstraction,” Gatson tells me. But so is the pull of abstraction, the concern with lines, blocks, repetition, variance.
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Nearby, silhouettes taken from vintage images of Black Panthers and civil rights protesters stand beneath strong colored vertical stripes or radiating lines.īlack history is in the room - in the African textile references of some of the painted panels, with colors and patterns reminiscent of kente cloth in archival photographs of spectators at lynchings that Gatson is building into new work on the bookshelf, with its tomes on African masks, Emmett Till, and New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians. Large paintings on the wall alternate geometric sections in red, black, orange, yellow, and green with others in black and white. Other planks lie across tables, works in progress involving ovals and circles. Tall rectangular panels painted in intricate patterns lean against a wall like abstract totems. Rico Gatson’s studio, in Bushwick, is awash in color and geometry.