“Blak Grit” exhibit shows range of Black men’s emotions

Seven Black artists, all men, filled the walls of the Northrup King Building’s Gallery 332 with exceptional work in August, art in many different mediums, expressing a full range of human emotions and experience. “Black art is not a monolith,” said collage artist A Drew Hammond at the opening reception.The show, “Blak Grit,” curated by the artist seangarrison, embodied that truth.

“This is a way to show folks that even though we’re all Black men, we don’t all have the same mindsets, right?” said seangarrison in an interview a few days after the Aug. 9 opening. Like an orchestra, he said, “Seven cats each playing their visual instrument.”

There was triumph and celebration in Flahn Manly’s floor-to-ceiling canvas, “Breakthrough/Bright Star,” inspired by the World Cup win of the South Sudan basketball team, depicting the athletes with almost photo-like reality. His “Liberate!” — a lifelike profile of a man’s head tilted back, mouth wide open in a shout — hung from the ceiling in the back of the gallery, catching the eye as visitors walked in.

“I want to humanize the Blackness,” Manly said in an interview, explaining that he had gone through a dark phase. The first 10 years of his life in Liberia he dealt with the trauma of war, and then, trying to assimilate to being a Black man in this country brought on times of depression and anxiety for him. As he started experiencing love and joy, he said, he wanted to lift those emotions up, and give them an outlet in his art.

Connection to one’s ancestors, a theme in a number of the pieces in the exhibit, was expressed through the materials of Shea Maze’s shoulder-high bird sculpture “Sankofa,” the title coming from a word of the Akan people in Ghana, meaning “go back and get it.” Like Maze’s other sculptures in the exhibition, the graceful bird with long neck curved backward was created using pieces of gourds from his grandmother’s garden, pieces that he carefully cut and shaped and dyed using natural dyes, also from her garden, which figured prominently in his childhood and to which he returned as an adult. 

Culture, history, and social justice commentary abound in the multilayered collages of Northrup King artist A Drew Hammond. One of his many in a series of Black musicians,“Jimi Hendrix in Funk,” was included in the show. It captures the hat, the psychedelic jacket, the turquoise bell bottoms and the Fender guitar of the legendary musician. 

In a front corner of the gallery, finished just in time for the opening, his multimedia collage, “Volumes Spoken,” is an homage to the late Jean-Michel Basquiat, a prolific artist of Haitian and Puerto Rican heritage. Basquiat first gained renown as a graffiti artist and then was a rising figure in the contemporary art scene in the ’80s, until his death at the age of 27 from an overdose in 1988.

Basquiat is the central figure in the piece, and Hammond included Basquiat’s trademark three-pointed crown twice, as well as a multitude of historical references, including hands holding “I Am a Man” signs, mention of the Tuskegee Airmen/Buffalo Soldiers, a yellowed sign reading “COLORED SEATED IN REAR,” and graffiti messages such as “Stay Woke,” and “Happy 100th Baldwin.” In an artist talk in the gallery Hammond called himself an “analog artist,” who hasn’t yet explored digital collage. That may come, he said, but “there’s something about cutting and ripping and creating,” he said.

Ron Brown also included Basquiat’s crown in several of his pieces in the exhibit. “Basquiat showed us that on your work, you put who you are. The thing that flies over a lot of people who are not Black, is that’s who we are, that’s what we feel like.” And for him, it’s not simply about valuing oneself at the level of royalty, he said. “In my references, my crown is always going to be heavy, and so that’s what you see in my pieces. A lot of the burden of being a Black man, that’s our crown.”

Several of Brown’s works in the show, including “Our Ancestors” and “America” are from his AfroBlu series, a 50-piece collection that he showed in Walrus Gallery in North Minneapolis, which he had co-owned. As a background in the paintings, he uses a striking blue color that he developed himself. People find the blue appealing, he said, but it’s double-edged: “It’s Minneapolis blue. It’s the police color blue. I wanted to put our experience against this dark reality that we live in, you know, a state where we are actually, you know, marginalized and hunted and … you know, murdered on a daily basis.”

Miko Simmon’s installation filled a small room in the back of the gallery with paintings and projections. The first level of his “Danger” series consists of paintings of children on construction fabric with the word “Danger” in red, peeking through the paintings. The paintings, best viewed with 3-D glasses, are Black children simply being kids while looking the viewer in the eye. One boy sports a Wakanda Forever shirt; one girl touches another’s hair; one boy “crowns” another with his hand while a third looks on, all three smiling sweetly.

Simmons is a projection designer who has worked with opera companies and theatrical productions internationally. Projected on the wall with three “Danger” paintings, without obscuring them, was scrolling text with the names and final words of people killed by police. On the opposite wall, in “The Joy of Innocence,” three children run toward the viewer, almost bursting out of the painting in the 3-D version. Projected on that wall was a larger-than-life, black-and-white photo of a group of Black children, solemnly staring at the viewer. 

The series, Simmons wrote in an exhibit note, arose out of his experience “of channeling the trauma that was reignited in the George Floyd uprising.” He raises the question: “At what age are Black Bodies seen as Dangerous, and what is the level of trauma created with this loss of innocence?”

The paintings of Dio, the youngest artist in the group, in his early 20s, had pointed social messages, executed in a way that drew the viewer closer. Two paintings, titled “The Dangerous Myths of Black Male Sexuality (Jean and Julie),” portraits framed by the motif of celluloid film, in which each person’s arms reach across to the other canvas, were inspired by the movie “Miss Julie,” based on the play by August Strindberg. The story of a wealthy young woman and her affair with her father’s valet, and the very dark power and class and sexual dynamics that unfold between them had Dio thinking, “What would happen if Jean were a Black man?” Through tattoo-like words on the bodies of the two characters, he explores that imagined shift in perspective: on Julie, “Now Playing: Birth of A Nation,” “Man Eater,” and “Who Run the World;” and on Jean, “Erotic Thug,” “Father,” “Beast?” and “Not All Black Men.”

Dio’s “I Didn’t Know I was Black … Until I Came to this Country,” also incorporates a film motif superimposed on the American flag, along with a sea of Black faces interspersed with the words “African,” “Who? Who?” “MLK Who?” and “Y’all ain’t real nigga” and Black Power/Black Lives Matter fists on the canvas. Dio’s own awareness of his Blackness and its expression in his art didn’t come until his late teens, he said. Growing up in a traditional Nigerian household in the mostly white Twin Cities suburb of Rosemount, the Black part of his identity wasn’t wasn’t something overtly discussed in his family. 

It wasn’t until he made his way out into the world, and studied for a semester in London, that he became became more conscious of his identity as a Black male. 

seangarrison’s presence was everywhere in the show, not only in his art, but in how he presented the exhibition. His work included abstract works such as “Abstracproseality: Poetics Visual 9” (a canvas of letters and shapes on a bright red background) and “Pouring Heartache One Night at The Studio” (raw, stark colors, zigzag lines with hints of the Basquiat crown, and paint dripping like blood down the canvas). He also included some of his social justice art, the most striking a tar-black effigy crowned with bullet casings and hanging from a rope. “They Are Still With Us,” is splattered with “celestial stars,” each one representing a Black man or woman killed by police.

By taping crime scene-style body outlines on the floor in the middle of the gallery, seangarrison created a pathway that led the viewer to the effigy, then to several pieces that incorporate gun parts into the art: his own “City of Fruit,” “Dio’s Murda Musik (Killin Beef)” and Manly’s “Musi/FlowerPower,” all of which had been made for an exhibition “Beauty from Ashes,” a project of the anti-gun violence group Art is My Weapon. Other touches that enhanced the experience included his taking Hammond’s “Volumes Spoken,” delivered as two side-by-side panels and placing them at right angles to each other in the front corner, (a move that Hammond heartily approved of). The effect invited viewers to enter the piece, rather than observe from a distance.

According to seangarrison, his thinking behind the show, which was a year in the making, was to give other artists a platform, an opportunity to showcase their work, to enjoy the brotherhood of other Black artists, and also, “to break that stereotype that Black men can’t convene without causing chaos.”

Working against stereotypes and addressing social justice issues is energy-consuming for Black artists, several of the artists said. At the artist talk, A Drew Hammond, said, “Most of you, you guys have the ability to just live in these United States. Whereas every guy on this stage, we have to live and fight.” 

The “Grit” in Blak Grit has a very specific meaning, seangarrison said. “There’s a particular grit that you have to have to survive … a particular amount of audacity and nerve to say, ‘Hey, I know this society by its very essence and its creation, is not for me, but we’re gonna be great anyway.’ You have to have some intestinal fortitude to fight all this negative energy to be great.”