Walter
Evans says he doesn’t remember going to art museums when he was growing up. At
first it was because in the 1940s in the South (first Savannah, Georgia, and
then Beaufort, South Carolina), African Americans weren’t allowed in places
like museums and galleries. Later, after moving to Connecticut, he was by then
a typical teenage boy, more “into cars and such” than art. But that would
change.
Evans
joined the Navy after high school and was stationed in Philadelphia during the
second half of his enlistment. While there, he happened to go on a date to the
Philadelphia Art Museum. By the time the second date rolled around, and wanting
only to impress her, he’d secretly done some reading about art and artists. But
something else happened, too. Soon he was visiting other major museum
collections in New York City and Washington, DC.
He
began to notice, however, that in collection after collection there was no art
by African Americans. Meanwhile, Evans also started reading American and
Russian classics as well as African American writers like Richard Wright, Ralph
Ellison, and James Baldwin.
It
wasn’t until after Evans completed his medical residency in Detroit that he
made his first art purchase: The Legend
of John Brown, a portfolio of 22 silkscreen prints by Jacob Lawrence. A few
weeks later, having been invited to a benefit in New York City for the dance
studio of Nanette Bearden, the wife of artist Romare Bearden, he bought The Magic Garden.
These
pieces were just the beginning, and by the early 1980s Evans was collecting art
in earnest. He wanted a significant body of work so that his young twin
daughters would grow up seeing work by African Americans — work that, to this
day, you still don’t see in many museums.
The
Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art is a thoughtful presentation
of a selection from an important and broad-based collection. And it’s a
collection put together by a passionate and erudite collector. Dr. Evans has
been named one of the top 100 collectors in the country by Art and Antiques magazine. At the present time he owns more than
200 paintings, photographs, sculptures, and works on paper by 19th- and
20th-century artists. Eighty works — ranging from Barbizon-inspired
landscapes to works from the Harlem Renaissance to Cubist abstractions — are
in the traveling exhibition, now at the Memorial Art Gallery.
Two
of the artists in the collection, Lawrence and Bearden, drew upon their unique
cultural experiences as African Americans and combined those experiences with
the formal language of Expressionism and Social Realism to create images that
either evoke memories of life (Bearden) or recount black history through
narrative scenes (Lawrence). The end result is a visual reward for the viewer.
Throughout the exhibition, we are treated to outstanding examples of
experimentation and synthesis.
We
see, for example, in Beardon’s The Magic
Garden (1978), the figure of a woman with a bright yellow broad-brimmed hat
sitting in the foreground. She is surrounded by a variety of flowers and lush
greenery. Although the image is small, it allows for a feeling of great
intimacy. It is as if we’ve been invited to take a peek into Bearden’s past —
perhaps back to those early childhood days in North Carolina and the
well-tended garden of a beloved grandmother.
But
what is really magical about The Magic
Garden is that Bearden constructs it from images cut out from magazines.
And somehow, these seemingly rough and fractured cuts, in the hands of a master,
coalesce in an image that reads as a seamless scene, working its way from the
foreground figure and into an amazingly believable space, and leading our eye
through the garden to the house in the process. The illusion is quite
incredible.
Aaron
Douglas, another artist highlighted in the exhibition, used the visual language
of Synthetic Cubism to symbolically represent the historical and cultural
memories of African Americans. And although over 60 years separate them, he and
Lawrence each created a series of works on paper that were not only based on
their own personal experiences in the African American church but also were
visual documents of the very important role and character of the preacher in
that church.
A
central part of the exhibition are Douglas’s illustrations of James Weldon
Johnson’s book of poems interpretatively based on popular folk sermons, God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in
Verse (1927), such as The Creation and The Judgment Day. Also included
is Lawrence’s Genesis Creation Sermon series (1989), which was inspired by the powerful sermons of Reverend Adam
Clayton Powell, Sr. — a pastor at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem
when Lawrence was growing up.
And
these are just a few of the 20th-century artists. Although no one “taught”
Evans how to collect art, he did attend various lectures and picked up
collecting strategies from some dealers. One even suggested that he buy a
painting by the late 18th- and early 19th-century artist Joshua Johnson. But,
at the time, Evans was only interested in work with black subjects by black
artists. (He passed, only to find out a few years later that Johnson’s work was
now out of his price range.)
What
Evans soon realized, however, was that even if there were a handful of African
Americans working as artists in the 19th century, for the most part, their
patrons were still predominately middle- and upper-class whites who wanted
either portraits or landscapes. So Evans started collecting the landscapes of
Robert Scott Duncanson — a self-taught biracial
artist and a landscape painter of the Hudson River school tradition, as seen in
Man Fishing (1848).
And he bought the
neoclassical sculptures — such as The
Marriage of Hiawatha (1868) — of Mary Edmonia Lewis, whose father was
African American and mother was Chippewa. Duncanson
was also the first African American artist to receive international
recognition, while Lewis achieved national prominence as the first
African American sculptor. (Of interesting local note, both were also born in
upstate New York.)
Evans
is forthright when talking about his collection. “If it weren’t for my career,
I would not have been able to collect,” he says. And he is also deservedly
proud of his efforts that have that resulted in such a collection. Not only
does he own one of Henry Ossawa Tanner’s important paintings, Florida (1894), but he and his wife were
also on hand at the Clinton White House to see a Tanner painting permanently
installed — the first and only piece of African American art in the permanent
White House collection.
When
asked if he has favorites among his collection, Evans says he doesn’t. “They’re
all my children… don’t have favorites among my children,” he says. As for why
he decided to take his collection out of his home and put it on the road, he says,
“nature doesn’t like a vacuum.”
Although
he is referring more practically to the fact that he continues to actively
collect and is running out of places to put things, metaphorically it is a
fitting coda. Things, like plants and people, need to see the air every once in
a while to live. So, let’s all be inspired by this display of an important and
unique cultural heritage. Long may it live.
The
Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art is on display at the Memorial Art
Gallery, 500 University Avenue, through January 2. Hours:
Wednesday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Thursday 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., Friday 10 a.m. to 5
p.m., and Sunday 12 to 5 p.m. Free to members, UR students, and children 5 and
under. General admission $10, $8 seniors and students. 585-473-7720,
mag.rochester.edu
This article appears in Dec 15-21, 2004.
