Undefined Magazine

It's amazing that I have to find out about press about me from other people. You would think that I would get a heads up from the editor(s) that they are publishing an article on my art. Either way - thanks! Mary Bentz Gilkerson is a wonderful artist and terrific critic and arts writer. Thanks for the article Mary!

If you're expecting a subtle, tasteful discussion of social justice issues in contemporary American culture, then Colin Quashie is not the artist for you. But if you are moved by engaged visual criticism and see its potential to have an immediate impact on viewers then you'll love Quashie's unflinching examination of the lingering effects of racism in contemporary American culture.

The artist uses humor and satire, mixing wit and irony, to convey a message that needs to be seen. The recent events in Florida make it painfully obvious that the conversation about race needs to continue.

Quashie doesn't exhibit his work that often, but over the last eighteen months there have been several opportunities for viewers to participate in that dialog, two in Columbia and one in Charleston. Subjective Perceptions, the first solo exhibition of Quashie's work in Columbia was on view at Benedict's Ponder Fine Arts Gallery in the fall of 2010, and the artist was selected for 701 Center for Contemporary Art's first Biennial this past fall.

Just this past April he had a major solo show, "Plantation (plan-ta-shun)" at Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston. The title of the exhibition gives a clue that while Quashie lives in Charleston, he does not in any way fit the stereotype of the "Charleston artist". In fact, turning that stereotype on its head is one of his most effective strategies.

Born in London in 1963 and raised in the West Indies, Quashie immigrated to the US with his parents at age six and grew up in Florida. He attended college for a couple of years, but left to join the Navy working on submarines. After his discharge in 1987 he began actively pursuing his art career.

Quashie's demanding content challenges cultural gatekeepers, sometimes leading to censorship. The first instance back in 1995 devastated the artist, and he stopped making art for two years. In a move that ultimately served to sharpen his commentary, he moved to the West Coast and started writing comedy for Mad-TV. His hiatus from art making was short-lived, and although he continues writing for the film and television industry, Quashie has been an active part of the state cultural scene ever since.

The artist pulls imagery from wide variety of sources that range from contemporary pop culture to 19th century historical photographs. He packages these images in familiar formats, ones that use both the visual and verbal language of the media to address issues of race, gender and social equality, or rather, inequality. Real estate advertisements, product and package designs, billboards and coloring books become the framework for his witty and satirical dissection of our lingering cultural stereotypes.

His seductive use of the familiar makes his work very accessible. The viewer is lured in by images associated with comfort, ease and even style that are then revealed to be cultural inconsistencies that create a sense of unease and discomfort.

Quashie's ability to manipulate the allure of the familiar is exactly what makes his work so challenging to both the average viewer and art insiders as well.

Quashie has used the metaphor of a children's coloring book many times and the most recent version, Plantation Coloring and Activity Book, uses the commonplace motif to present images that appear neutral and naïve until a closer examination reveals images of brutality and horror. The jarring quality of the combination only adds to the power of the images.

The cover shows a smiling Aunt Jemima, her face wreathed in a pattern of cotton bolls. But inside are "activities" like "Connect the Dots" where the tag line reads, "Help Master whip the uppity slave and show him who's boss!" The dots connect to form scar lines on the back of the simplified outline of an African-American man. The image is derived from a mid-19th century photograph - which appears in "Plantation Digest" – now in the collection of the Library of Congress.

"Plantation Digest" is a series of large acrylic and gel transfers on board, fairly dripping with bitingly dark satire. Using the format and slick presentation of the magazine and advertising world, Quashie reconfigures a series of images pulled from contemporary media with 19th century period images and text to point out the continuing systems of gateways and gatekeepers, just as powerful now as 200 years ago.

The plantation gates on the "Cover" served to mark a boundary, the outer limit beyond which the most of the inhabitants were not allowed to pass. Similar gates are still used, marking boundaries that are just as clearly defined by race as before. With the headlines, Quashie makes a clear connection between the overt racism of the 19th century and the covert racism that remains in the 21st. The goal of plantation management was to maintain a quiet, compliant workforce. His choice of contemporary images and text points to the degree to which that is still true

Colin Quashie speaks openly about the two ton elephant in the living room of American culture, pulling it from the corner and placing it squarely in front of the TV where we all have to look at it and acknowledge its presence. What happens from there is up to the rest of us.

Tyrone Geter Undefined

Tyrone Geter recently had hip replacement surgery and was getting around with a stick, good for, he noted, keeping away dogs and writers. He was sitting in the den in an easy chair before the fireplace which, this August morning, was not in use, since at 10 a.m. the temperature was already above 90. His sister Liz had come from Ohio to give him a hand since the July operation and he had one of her hearty breakfasts perched on his lap, a glass of carrot juice on the table beside him. And his stick.

After eating and talking a bit, Geter gets ready for the trip upstairs to the two huge rooms that constitute his studio.

“You better not stand behind me in case I come back down,” he says. “This is only the second time I’ve been up here since   July 15.”

His daughter Hafizah recently cleaned out the downstairs and brightened up the house with gold and blue and purple paint. She didn’t quite get upstairs and things are piled up. As usual Geter has a batch of works in progress, lots of finished older works in racks, various pieces of machinery (printers, a gadget that spiral binds books), but to hang a piece of art on the wall he has to pound in the tacks with a tape measure because the hammer has disappeared.

The dominant image in the room is a drawing of Barack Obama. Like much of Geter’s art this drawing is a fairly traditional realistic drawing that’s not very traditional at all.  The drawing is in mostly white and black on black paper. It’s not on one piece of paper, but a bunch of torn sheets of paper. And the president is starting to disappear.

“I thought I was done with it,” Geter says. When he thought it was finished Obama looked strong and confident.
“Things had started to get complicated and there was like this fog rolling in.”

Now the president looks a little lost, his head in a murky gloom.

“We’ll have to wait and see what happens,” says Geter, an art professor and gallery director at Benedict College in Columbia.

Like most of his artworks this one has a mind of its own. Geter considers each work a journey and he doesn’t have a map for the trip; the art making shows him the way.

“I never start something knowing where it’s going,” Geter says. “I let it lead me.”

If the individual works are segments of a trip his overall output and various approaches have also come about organically and often by lucky turns.

Recently he’s been concentrating on black on black drawings because someone asked him how to work with charcoal on black paper – and there are a lot of shades of black charcoal and black paper and he uses them all – and he got hooked.

The torn paper works began when he was doing a drawing and tore it. He liked the drawing so rather than tossing it he pieced it back together, adding more torn paper. It was a long learning process.
“I’d get one right and the next one wouldn’t be,” Geter says.

These torn paper pieces aren’t collages in strict sense; they’re more like relief sculptures made of paper.

Another time, frustrated with a drawing of a head he was doing, he took a walk that led him past a local nightclub where a cleaning crew was tossing out trash – including hundreds of bottle caps. He grabbed a couple pocketfuls, took them back to the studio and attached them to the drawing.

Starting to build up the images led him more toward sculpture. The big jump came when he bought a little frame that had a little shelf jutting out. He had a drawing of a baobab tree that fit into the frame perfectly. In Africa the solitary, elephant-like tree has spiritual significance. Although it can survive on little water in harsh climates, it is easily toppled by storms. That got him thinking about water and who controls water, which is always an issue in many parts of the world.

He took another walk, this one around a lake near his home in Elgin and found a rusty old water faucet handle. It fit perfectly on a hole in the shelf.

“I dropped it in and it was finished,” Geter says.

The pieces grew larger, incorporating drawings in elaborate framing devices, found objects, from rocks and sticks and bottles to small pieces of furniture. They become true sculptures and at times installation art pieces.
“If you trace where I come from every next thing I do is completely logical,” Geter says.

(Some of these works are on display in a solo exhibition at the Sumter Gallery of Art through Oct. 29. He also has a show scheduled for Gallery 80808 in Columbia for October.)

Along with making his art and teaching, Geter also had a parallel career illustrating children’s books, among them “Sunday Week,” “White Socks Only” and “The Little Tree Growing in the Shade.”

“I never painted like an illustrator – I did the book the same way I would have painted anything,” he says. “They let me do whatever I wanted.”

Nearly all the books he did were put out by major publishers and sold well. But the books were taking him away from his art and he was only asked to do works with an African-American subject matter.

“I was just drawing and painting the same little girl over and over again,” Geter says. “I wanted to branch out.”

During the past few years, Geter has also done several large murals. The first was for the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati. Tom Feelings, a Columbia artist who taught at USC, started the mural, but became too ill to finish it and asked Geter to complete the work.

Geter was also commissioned by the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center to do a mural celebrating the dance craze “The Big Apple” that was created at a Columbia nightclub in the 1930s. He recently did another large piece, “Look Beneath the Surface” for the Underground Railroad Freedom Center.

A native of Alabama, Geter’s family moved to Ohio when he was 15.  He studied art at Ohio University and taught at the University of Akron. In 1979 he and his wife Hauwa moved to Nigeria, her home country.

“We’d been married for seven years before we got a chance,” he says. “We packed up the house and went.”
They stayed for eight years which surprised Hauwa.

“She didn’t think I could handle it,” says Geter, who taught at Ahmadu Bello University while they lived there.

They returned to the U.S. in 1987 because their children, daughers Hafizah and Jamila, were getting to be school age and it became almost impossible to get hard currency in Nigeria. The family moved to Columbia in 1999.

His first few years in Columbia went well. He took an active part in the arts community and provided the Benedict College art gallery with a much higher profile. Then came 2003. Feelings, who had befriended Geter when he came to Columbia, died. His wife Hauwa died suddenly of a stroke in 2003. A few weeks after her death, Geter had emergency open heart surgery.

As he slowly worked his way back from all these things, his hips began troubling him. He had the first replaced about two years ago, but the other has nagged him incessantly since.

“This last year or so I’ve really slacked off,” he says. “That’s not like me. “But this leg was causing so much pain.”

He had been considering retiring next year. Now that he has two good hips, he probably won’t.

“I feel better than I have in a long time,” he says. “I’m looking forward to getting back into the classroom. I like teaching foundation – drawing, painting. I think that’s where I’m supposed to be. And I’ll stay until I think it’s time to go.”