The Inventive Reginald Baylor: "My Afro’s Future" at Var Gallery on 5th Street

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Photo by Tom Jenz

Reginald Baylor art exhibit at Var Gallery

Reginald Baylor art exhibit at Var Gallery

For most of his early career, Reginald Baylor’s art portfolio consisted of large-scale acrylic on canvas paintings. Not long ago, when I visited his Milwaukee studio, he showed me a painting of his aging parents watering the lawn of a beautiful Midwest-style home. The painting is rendered in blocks of bright cartoon colors. The style is original.

“That’s how I feel about my artworks, that I am filling in spaces with color crayons,” he said. “Color in my work is very childlike.”

But Baylor has expanded his style as witnessed by his major solo exhibit, “My Afro’s Future,” at Var Gallery on 5th Street in Walker’s Point. The exhibit’s introduction invites the viewer to explore the boundaries between creation and deconstruction, between the whole and its parts. Baylor calls his artworks “artistic manufacturing” because of his method. He provides a blueprint—measurements, size and colors—and gives that blueprint to his contractors. It’s like an architect instructing a carpenter to build a house from his drawing. Included in this exhibit are textiles, acrylics, and mirrors.

Building Art

Baylor’s artworks are accessible. He once told me, “I wanted to be an architect because I love looking at blueprints. I liked looking at lines, at the straight edge concept.” He builds an artwork by first creating a maze of black lines, which create various contained shapes. He then fills in the shapes with colors or cartoon-like symbols. In this exhibit, Baylor’s canvasses are rendered on vinyl, mirrors and drawing paper. 

Walking through the gallery, I found his images strangely provocative as if a child with a precocious talent rendered his dreams on canvass. These are visual comments on community life accented toward the urban Black experience.

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Photo by Tom Jenz

Reginald Baylor art exhibit at Var Gallery

Reginald Baylor art exhibit at Var Gallery

On the gallery’s central wall hang a grouping of three large artworks of equal size, each rendered on patterned fabric, orange, teal and tan. The teal vinyl background showed numerous renderings of small symbols such as a clock, squirrel, cap, land rover, flamingo, butterfly and a roller skate. Also scattered around are single words, numbers and math equations.

The orange vinyl piece was littered with pasted-on-like symbols of lifestyle carefully aligned as if a mathematical equation. Kids crossing street, railroad crossing, Weber grill, an airplane, winter boots, wrong turns, stop sign, pot of flowers, crossing guard and a moving truck. The tan vinyl artwork had a similar style, showing more symbols, easy chair, wheelbarrow, roses, flying bird, rooster, squirrel, watering pail and roses. The largest symbol on this artwork features a debossed sports car leading to an assemblage of symbolized math equations.  

Busy Environments

Taking in all three artworks, I felt like I was inside a busy inner city urban environment without the car horns.

The next section of the exhibit features 12 black and white drawings in small frames, some a combination of different shoe styles. Others include Black faces made by a matrix of black lines. 

Another exhibit area features artworks on three different mirrors with little cartoon creations that include faces of Black women, a wheelbarrow, stoplight, Weber grill, dog, roses, boots, sunglasses, sprinkling can, and all of these with white tabs as if adhered to the mirror’s surface in the form of paper dolls.

The largest of the artworks is the only painting, acrylic on canvass, and well over six feet square. An urban scene of crayon colors, Black men balancing Black women on their shoulders, almost like a cheerleading squad formation. The background is a three-story neighborhood house. Could it represent a celebration of the urban Black experience? That’s the beauty of Baylor’s work. He leaves it up to the viewer to pick up a feeling, explore the interior and boundaries, examining that feeling.

As I slowly turned and turned, taking in all the artwork, I had a feeling of jazz improvisation, angles and curves, male off female, hot and cool, simplicity within elaboration, a premonition of syncopation and offbeat rhythms. Jazz music is an urban Black invention, and I was thinking that Baylor was inviting us into the Black culture.

To find out more about his art, check out Baylor’s website: reginaldbaylorstudio.com.

For more  bout “My Afro’s Future,” visit Var Gallery at vargallery.com.