E-Mail This Article to a Friend Continental drifts African art at the Brush and the Hamill Galleries BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS
	"AAMARP the Legacy: African American Artists in Boston" At the Brush Art Gallery, 256 Market Street, Lowell, through May 16. "From the Grasslands: The Art of the Bamun, Bamileke and Bangwa" At the Hamill Gallery of African Art, 2164 Washington Street, Boston, through April 25.

In 1977, the artist and activist Dana Chandler persuaded Northeastern University to inaugurate a program whose aim was to provide work space, and by extension a cultural hub, for African-American artists in Boston. Twenty-seven years later, AAMARP (African American Artist-in-Residency Program) celebrates its quarter-plus century in a show that’s as much about a historical and cultural turning point as it is about the creative energy of the 11 participating artists.

Many, but by no means all, of the works in "AAMARP the Legacy" treat African and African-American themes, and one of the most intriguing aspects of the show is the test of time it represents. Works that once registered as confrontational now read like vintage posters. Some that once seemed gently nostalgic now come across as resonant and poetic.

The oldest work, Dana Chandler’s 1974 acrylic painting Black Man Break Free of the Muthafuckin’ White Egg, predates his founding of AAMARP. The title tells us we’re to understand the piece as an emblem of protest when in fact it comes across as decorous, even beneficent. Nearly three decades after its making, the edgiest aspect of Black Man Break Free is its title; meanwhile, attributes that probably weren’t salient at its creation — its geometric tightness, its harmonious use of color — now stand out. A clenched fist attached to a muscled arm shoots up out of an ostrich egg against a scalloped backdrop of Christmas red-and-green and an orderly cascade of white shell fragments. Seeing it for the first time in Lowell, I was reminded of early Soviet workers’-movement posters: it’s a stylized call for the resurrection of the fatherland. Removed in time from the wellsprings of its making, Black Man Break Free registers more as a design event than a social event. The black arm doesn’t seem to belong to a black man; it’s too much the all-purpose symbol, too much a silhouette. No more does the white egg suggest the encasement of oppression — eggs, after all, are brittle and temporary.

In a different mode entirely, Chandler’s other major contribution to the exhibit represents orchestrated fury verging on madness. Reparation Installation with Assemblages is an ongoing — weeks into the exhibit, the artist was still adding to it — accretion of objects piled on objects. They fill one end of the gallery like a self-reproducing flea market: tables and videos and beads and picture frames, lamps and vials and vessels and what-nots. The sheer volume of artifacts made it impossible for me to see their totality as related to the legacy of racism. Instead, the piece felt like a struggle with or a surrender to obsession, a maniacal piling on of artifacts whose selection and placement belong to a personal drama. Yet I sensed that, as with Black Man Break Free, the chords it strikes decades later will be different.

The most riveting work at the Brush are three soft cloth sculptures by Barbara Ward Armstrong that depict three frail, seated old women whose folded arms and careful attire suggest a conversation on a park bench after church. The women don’t look at one another; the artist has captured in their body language and their arrangement the peculiar dynamics of very old friends, familiar yet formal, intimate but within bounds. Armstrong’s technique is expressionistic — anatomical precision has no place in these poignant figures. Yet by making them life-size, by referring to black women of a certain age and position, and by grouping them so that you almost think you can hear them talking, the artist delivers precision of a deeper kind.

Susan Thompson also works in cloth and with doll-like figures, but her creations lie flat, and she covers her suggestively narrative quilts with encaustic, so that they shine as if they’d been glazed. Thompson’s quilts, like her 2001 Equestrian Figure, are dreamy affairs with pared-down, childlike forms that combine the naïveté of the home-made puppet with the authority of the stained-glass window. A wide-eyed skirted female — she looks like a little girl’s version of a woman — floats in a colorful, enigmatic space surrounded by unidentifiable forms. Equestrian owes much of its power to the outstretched arms and white circular eyes of the central figure, who lives at the cross-section of wonder and fear.

Among the other accomplished work in "AAMARP the Legacy": Keith Washington’s subtle, muted installation of multiple abstract paintings (Liminal Something or Other, 1993); mixed-media work by Kofi Kayiga, L’Merchie Frazier, Hakim Raquib, and Sharon Dunn; sculpture by Jeff Chandler; and drawings by Milton Derr and Gloretta Baynes.

As represented at the Brush, the art of the African Diaspora is an art of reclamation, an effort to counter the historical effects of slavery and the ongoing effects of racism. The work of Dana Chandler, Barbara Ward Armstrong, and Susan Thompson is grounded in the tension of that inheritance. Theirs is an art of engagement whose images and themes are aimed if not at outright social change then at a sharpened social consciousness.

In many ways, the current exhibit at the Hamill Gallery of African Art — celebrating the art of as many as a half-dozen peoples from the Grasslands of Cameroon — couldn’t be farther removed from the show at the Brush. Yet in others, it qualifies as a spiritual and æsthetic forebear.

It’s hard to imagine art more politically contrary than the three-dimensional work of the Bamileke and Bamun peoples, whose meticulously beaded stools, elaborately carved wood beds, and gigantic ceremonial masks celebrate authority, eminent social status, and wealth. It’s the art of power. The Bamileke and Bamun gongs and drums, trumpets and door posts, bracelets and bolts of cloth symbolize and, for their owners, help consolidate the royal order. These cultures are dominated by kings whose collusion with men’s societies regulate social controls.

"You’re looking at the African version of Expressionism," gallery director Tim Hamill told me, pointing to the emotionally charged masks. Hamill explains that whereas most African masks are marked by a deliberate withdrawal of affect, the masks of the Grasslands people manifest a beaming expressiveness. They’re also unusual for their overlay of intricate, brightly patterned beadwork, which is applied not only to buffalo and elephant masks but to stools and headdresses. All the beaded objects are meant to be displayed at ceremonial occasions and to promote the standing of the king. No amount of labor could be deemed excessive, with the result that tens of thousands of tiny glass beads (each about the size of two letters in the print you’re reading) festoon the surfaces of highly prized objects. Particularly intriguing are the carved wooden stools, whose middle sections sport interlocking reptiles or animals, themselves covered in beads to resemble scales and skin.

My favorite masks in the show, however, are not adorned with beads and perhaps aren’t really even masks. The oversized forms — horned buffalo heads, full-bodied birds, long-snouted elephants, some twice the size of a computer terminal and almost as weighty — fit on the head; they’re more like helmets than masks. Worn at important events like commemorative death celebrations and festivals related to the growing season, they mimic in their girth and weight and raw expressive power the authority they symbolize.