“This is America,” an exhibition at Five Points Art Gallery and Studios is one of a handful in Milwaukee that have opened to the public, with appropriate safety precautions in place. There’s no rulebook for public reopening, of course, and it seems almost every institution is developing plans with nervous improvisation. The general hesitation within the cultural community seems somewhat odd given that most art viewing spaces are less occupied at their densest than the parking lot of any area Walmart. Gratefully though, when we need art more than ever, this necessary show addresses our peculiar and troubled time with a wide array of works by artists of color, displayed within the fold of a cultural space that itself looks to represent one possible future model of community-based art.
Fatima Laster, the space’s visionary creator, brings together artists addressing social issues directly and less directly through perspectives based on particular identities and experiences. Standouts in the show include collages of local Renaissance-lady Della Wells, whose two contributions teem with energy drawn from accumulated snippets of architecture, faces, American Flags, flowers, and other representational material. Each work builds piece-by-piece to raucous urban landscapes that conjure Romare Bearden and Terry Gilliam, but gel into unique kaleidoscopic visions. Also notable are the collaged drawings of Komikka Patton, whose montaged visions of African American experience grip with a mix of exuberance and foreboding. Each of her three works in the show are skillfully constructed and compositionally sophisticated, with loose, active lines and skillful draftsmanship, lubricating them for ensuing psychological penetration. “Gatekeeper II – Metropolis” is a stunner. Similarly, Chrystal Gillon-Mabry’s small, deftly constructed collages reel the viewer in with esthetic grace before losing more subtle personal and social content.
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Informal Vibe
Most of the work in the show has a vernacular feel, which serves the informal vibe well. The counterpoint to this is Nirmal Raja’s chest-high wall of text, wood, and fabric-embedded bricks in the center of the main gallery. Its formal sleekness is either a necessary counterpoint or a conceptual oddball within the context of the show. But given “This is America’s” scope and inclusivity, its crisp effeteness might be seen as a welcome element of formal divergence rather than a hiccup. Laster herself offers works of her own to the exhibition, several of them wonderful abstractions that live ambiguously between Five Point’s gift shop and the exhibition spaces. I wasn’t sure whether these paintings were part of the show officially, but yes or no, her raised explosions of acrylic paint and radiating strokes were visually striking and extended my viewing from the gallery into Five Points’ kunstkammer-of-a-gift shop. My fluid meanderings ended up being a most telling statement about the nature of the Five Points project.
With its eclectic shop, gallery space, restrooms-as-art-projects, community kitchen, and artist studios, the complex of Five Points is clearly more than an institutional exhibition space, or orthodox art center, it’s a crossroads of ideas and viewpoints, at an alternative intersection. In this context the show itself takes on another dimension. Its titular phrase “This is America” functions as a geopolitical marker, a plaintive sigh, and also an allusion to Childish Gambino’s track and controversial video addressing racial injustice in this country. Donald Glover (for whom Gambino is an a.k.a.,) also inhabits multiple personae, as a comedian, actor, and activist, as well as a hip-hop artist. The show at Five Points, too, lives at the intersection of multiple identities and spaces. Just like America, ca. 2020. It is America, indeed. Occupying a once-funeral home off the beaten bourgeoisie path, it brings together place and perspectives that are often lost in the whitewashed, gentrified art world, allowing them to collide constructively in a diverse and inclusive public arena.
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