Leigh Busby Photos
The figures in the gallery space at Creative Arts Workshop on Audubon Street stand tall and proud, majestic and welcoming. They draw you toward the gallery window. Once there, though, there is more to see. There is the way the figures hearken back to Africa. A line of bricks, each embossed with the word “freedom.”
Except that that road winds precariously past a gallows emblazoned with the American flag, with police colors. A row of raised fists as a sign of struggle. And outside, in the column in the garden if the viewer turns to face the street again, another set of sculptures, with the words and context to bring it all into the present moment.
“From Every Angle” is the latest exhibit in Creative Arts Workshop’s Made Visible series, in which artists and curators are invited to use the gallery space facing the street to create a show meant to be viewed from the outside, looking in.
This latest show, curated by artist Shaunda Sekai Holloway, is perhaps the most successful yet for its near-seamless integration of the work of three fellow artists: Aileen Ishmael, Iyaba Ibo Mandingo, and Kyle Kearson. All are New Haven-based artists, and together they make a powerful statement about the Black experience and about the strength of the Elm City’s arts scene as it emerges slowly from the Covid-19 pandemic.
In an artists’ talk on Wednesday, Holloway guided a discussion among Ishmael, Mandingo, and Kearson to talk about how they each developed their artistic practices over the years, and how the show itself came together. “Each of the artists engages you with social issues and transports you to a higher place,” Holloway said. “I’m honored to work with each of them.”
Holloway first asked the artists how they became sculptors. Ishmael revealed that she was introduced to sculpture through Creative Arts Workshop classes. She started with a jewelry making class; “then I dived into making sculptures and using metals.” That began with CAW’s metal sculpture class. She realized she would need a torch to do the same kinds of sculpture at home that she’d done in class. She didn’t have a torch — but could get same results with aluminum flashing, and has been doing so since. Mandingo turned toward sculpture 20 years ago after a teacher told him “I think like a sculptor with my paintings,” in that it was clear to the teacher that Mandingo was thinking about what was behind the figures he was painting. “That sent me to Home Depot for some wire, and that was the beginning of my journey.” Kearson started as a sculptor at UCONN. In a clay class, “I got my hands in the mud” and discovered a desire for “making art in the physical.”
Each has faced challenges as Black artists. Mandingo spoke of having to prove to galleries that “I’m not a ghetto artist or a passé artist or a cliché artist — I’m an actual artist.” Ishmael talked about how some observers called her art “primitive.”
“What do you mean by that?” she recalled asking them. “Though of course I knew what they meant.” Echoing Mandingo, she said, “it is difficult to be taken seriously. You don’t see a lot of representation — not as much as you should” in museums and galleries.
Kearson then talked about the results of those obstacles. “A challenge was lack of exposure for artists who looked like me,” he said. “There are limited opportunities.”
“You shouldn’t have to search for your reflection,” Holloway said by way of agreement.
But making art that tapped into social consciousness could also be a source of joy. “I get joy from making people think,” Kearson said, “raising things to the surface … making people confront reality.” Mandingo agreed. “You feel like you’ve been given a job or duty,” he said, and to see the piece emerge through work, “to know that you’ve done the job the universe asked you to … I have five children, and that’s the only thing that comes close.”
Ishmael agreed, adding that she intentionally makes her pieces inviting to draw people in. “I love for people to come close and then see the message.” When joy radiates from the piece, she said, “I think people are more accepting of the message you have to convey.”
Holloway also gave the artists a chance to talk about who they feel they are indebted to in helping shape them as artists. Mandingo talked about his grandparents, who were artists in their own right. His grandmother was a seamstress and his grandfather was a tailor. “He remains the biggest thing in my world ever,” Mandingo said. After his grandfather died, Mandingo learned that he was a painter and sculpture too. He knew he was an artist already, though, “because of the way he attacked the cloth.” Ishmael felt her debt to her mother, who cooked and made her clothes. “My love for Asian art comes from her directly” as well, she added.
“My mother gave me the opportunity to create as a child,” Kearson said, by enrolling him in classes in CAW. He got turned on to sculptor Martin Puryear, who “was there at the earliest stages of the modernist movement.” He was “committed to putting out his vision … without beating you over the head with it.”
The artists also talked about their connections to Africa. “I definitely am going,” Kearson said, citing a desire to see the Egyptian pyramids, perhaps the first “monumental sculptures.” Ishmael wanted to go on a “textile journey” in West Africa, not only in picking up textiles, but learning how to make them herself “and incorporating it into my art.”
Mandingo had spent “six months and change” in South Africa and Nigeria and described it as a transformative experience. “Everything about my work was changed when I went there,” he said. “As a Black artist trying to search for your soul, you will hit a wall” in your development if you train under a strictly European model. Part of the issue was a tendency in European thought to separate art from everyday life, whereas “everything about Africa is art,” Mandingo said — the way people carry themselves, the buildings, the clothes, the dancing.
“Everything changed my whole perspective,” he continued “In Western theater you don’t break the fourth wall. Africa didn’t get that memo.” In a performance piece in Africa, “if you make the mistake of engaging him,” you get swept up in it, like carnival in Antigua, where Mandingo was born. After his six months, “I came back with no more writer’s block, no more painter’s block,” he said. “It’s everything.”
The conversation then turned to the gallery exhibit at Creative Arts Workshop, addressing the way the artists’ pieces work together and complement one another to form a complete whole. “A sculpture makes you look at it from every angle,” Holloway said. “One of the things that was important to me was the continuum.” Ishmael said the pieces she made for the show “really reflected all the things that went on in the year 2020, from the social unrest to a pandemic to being stressed by just having to take part in a pandemic, by being a teacher who was quarantined half the time and having to go to school half the time.”
“I think if there is an arc to my work, it is growth and discovery inside,” Mandingo said “When I see somebody connecting with it, I hope that’s the reason.” His pieces in the show reflected that “I feel complete and totally indebted to Black women” — his mother, grandmother, and three aunts. When he came back from Africa, “I wanted to do something that represented that.” He noted that revering women was reaching back to the forms of African culture he experienced when he visited more rural areas there. “Our systems haven’t been destroyed completely,” he said. “In those places you still see the foundation they say we don’t have anymore. The woman is the center of the village and everything flows out of that.”
Kearson, meanwhile, drew from “the perseverance of the people. There is real beauty in the Black experience,” he said. Even in the face of police brutality and the long legacy of slavery, “there is this gold within that is going to shine forth no matter what.”
As curator of the exhibit, Holloway said that “everyone’s work is emphatic. When you’re in your truth, that resonates.” Looking at the different artists’ pieces, “I knew it could work together.” Putting it together in the space “was a little tricky,” she said with a chuckle, but “the solution was greater than the problem.” In Ishmael’s text and bright colors, “you connect to it and you’re thinking.” Kearson’s freedom trail was “like Harriet Tubman leading you to Canada.” And there were Mandingo’s mothers.
“Everyone’s work is so strong,” Holloway said. “Behind the glass or in front of it, these pieces draw you in.”