It Takes a Village: A World of Art
MOAH - Museum of Art and History Lancaster
through April 22
Lancaster Museum of Art and History, Lancaster
By Genie Davis via Art and Cake art magazine
“It Takes a Village” at the Lancaster Museum of Art and History (MOAH) through April 22nd, is the world in a microcosm, truly wonderful exhibitions that address essential and universal elements of community in subjects ranging from family to race, gender, home, and age.
In the Main Gallery, beautifully curated by Betty Brown, the works of assemblage artist Betye Saar and her daughters are showcased in “Memory & Identity: The Marvelous Art of Betye, Lezley & Alison Saar”. The Saars have astonishing work here, mixed media that towers literally and figuratively through the gallery. The dimensional assemblages use photos, fabric, painting and found objects to create thoughtful, compelling assemblages that reveal identity, history, and a pull of emotion so raw and real that it stops viewers in their tracks.
Take Alison Saar’s Smokin Papa Chaud, wood, ceiling tin, and found objects in a sculptural piece that bears witness to what appears to be the literal weight of the world and its expectations on the head of a man. Betye Saar’s serigraph on rice paper, Passe Blanc is haunting, a creased and textured image of a woman as ghostly as she is eternal. Betye Saar’s mixed media assemblages, Record for Hattie and Liberation, each use vintage materials to create startling images that smack issues of race on the head. The figure in Liberation wears an apron with an American flag and totes a shotgun in one hand, a broom in the other. She is no one’s servant. The cast bronze of Alison Saar’s Travelin’ Light also pulls no punches in its depiction of a man hung from his feet like a rack of meat. Lezley Saar’s gorgeous acrylic and digital photograph on fabric, Lady Calantha ruminates on dark family roots. Her Interacial Cha-Cha is an insightful take on both gender and race; on freedom, the past, and how the past itself is a keepsake, even a past we may not want to keep.
Using recycled materials, textiles, and discarded objects as mediums, serving as collectors, historians, and above all, creators, the Saars offer works that collectively and individually pulsate with power, passion, and the inescapable yet transformative past.
Moving upstairs, the documentary photography of Lancaster resident Wyatt Kenneth Coleman, a freelance photojournalist whose career spans more than fifty years, takes us “Beyond the Village” with beautifully defined work that focuses on social issues and humanitarian contributions, from the legacy of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement to acts of kindness in the community. These are perfectly framed, evocative images, as fascinating for their precise style as for their subjects.
Richard Chow’s “Distant Memories”, is a lovely black and white series that takes us from the village to the sea. Capturing elegiac images of a childhood he could’ve experienced on Southern California beaches, but as an immigrant, did not; he’s collected a beautiful series of images into wall installations. Viewed at a remove through pier telescopes and long lenses, Chow lets us view just glimpses of wonder, a personal window into community, family, and love. Subjects from the Manhattan Beach Pier to body-boarders in the surf framed by the shade of a beach umbrella cumulatively shape and recreate an ephemeral time and place that never quite was, but always will be.
https://artandcakela.com/2018/03/11/it-takes-a-village-at-moah/