February Issue 2002
Cemala Foundation Mezzanine Art Gallery at Triad Stage Presents New Exhibition
Cemala Foundation Mezzanine Art Gallery at Triad Stage, the collaborative new downtown exhibition space that is the result of a unique partnership between the Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art, and Triad Stage in Greensboro, NC, presents a new exhibition in conjunction with the second production of Triad Stage's inaugural season. The exhibition, Three Perspectives on 20th Century Black American Family Life: Art by James C. McMillan, Alex Smoot, and Isabelle Lutterodt, will complement Triad Stage's presentation of Lynn Nottage's Crumbs from the Table of Icy directed by Caroline Jackson Smith.
"Lynn Nottage is one of the most exciting of contemporary African-American playwrights," says Preston Lane, artistic director of Triad Stage. The play recounts the heartwarming, and often humorous, struggles of one African-American family in the 1950s. Uprooted by their father from their home in the rural South after the death of their mother, the family of two teenaged girls is transplanted to Brooklyn to be nearer their father's spiritual guide, Father Divine.
"I wanted to tell the story of the migrations, particularly in the 1950s, when so much about African-American life in America changed," explains Nottage, who earned her MFA at the Yale School of Drama in 1989. "We're talking about the cusp of the civil rights movement, the McCarthy era and the war. For the first time, the government was dealing with integration in the armed forces and, later, in the country as a whole."
"In the African-American community, there's only a handful of stories that deal with that period," notes Nottage. "In a lot of the images on television and in film, that period was idealized. I want to demystify it. I don't think we've fully resolved that period in our collective memories.'
The accompanying exhibition will include photographs by Alex Smoot, made early in the twentieth century in Salisbury, NC; oils painted by James C. McMillan in the late fifties and early sixties in Greensboro; and mixed media collages by Isabelle Lutterodt, recently created in the artist's studio in California.
Alex Smoot (1911 -2001), a Salisbury native who lived in Greensboro until his death last summer, worked in the pathology lab at Wesley Long Hospital, but maintained a parallel career as an artist and photographer. His work in the exhibition documents an African-American family he, and his wife, Margaret Boylan Smoot, befriended and photographed on three Sundays in the summer of 1937, in Bostian's Alley, a neighborhood in Salisbury, NC. The entire Bostian's Alley series, comprised of more than sixteen prints and eighty.five negatives, was donated by the artist to the Waterworks Visual Arts Center (Salisbury), in 1996.
James
C. McMillan
James C. McMillan, a long-time Greensboro resident and professor emeritus at Guilford College, is exhibiting paintings drawn from his own life experiences and surroundings. Among them is a painting titled, The Chase, which portrays the artist's young daughter pursuing a butterfly in flight. Theresa Hammond, curator of the exhibition, says the painting made her think of the "Crumbs" character of Earnestine, the eldest daughter and narrator of the play. Earnestine often departs on flights of fancy, playful imaginings of how life might be, if only.... McMiIlan's painting captures the innocent and carefree characteristics that his daughter and Earnestine shared."
Isabelle Lutterodt is an alumna of Guilford College, and furthered her studies at Howard University, and recently completed her MFA at California Institute of Art. Her work, compositely titled, Global Address, examines the influences on her own life as she grew up the daughter of an African father and a British mother, and moved from Surrey, England to Accra, Ghana, to Columbia, Maryland, to Greensboro, North Carolina, and most recently to Los Angeles, California.
For additional information check our NC Institutional
Gallery listings or call either Green Hill Center 336/333-7460
or Triad Stage 336/272-0160.
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