Black Romantic: the Figurative Impulse in Contemporary African-American Art.

From the Studio Museum in Harlem by Thelma Golden with Valerie Cassel, Lowery Stokes Sims, et al., April 2002 $25.00, ISBN 0-942-94923-4

In Black Romantic, there's a painting of a dapper young man wearing a suit with thick, black, billowy hair that tentacles out in all directions. There is another of an elderly woman resting her hands on her hips as she stands in front of laundry blowing in the breeze on a clothesline, and in another, two small girls are contemplating a flower blooming through a crack in the sidewalk. The images are quite different from the picturesque portraits and landscapes usually associated with the American and European Romantic style of art of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. The themes, however, are of the Romantic genre, all the same.

In one way or the other, the images reflect a romanticized spirit: they are fashioned with an emphasis on atmosphere, creativity, individuality and emotion. Set in rural, urban and utopian scenes along with the fantastical scenarios and realistic portraits, these paintings are rooted in and represent the diversity of African-American culture.

In the catalogue that accompanies the exhibit Black Romantic: The Figurative Impulse in Contemporary African-American Art, which opened at the Studio Museum in Harlem this spring, Director Lowery Stokes Sims says the show is organized around: "elements of desire, dreams, determination, and romance particular to the black experience present a viewpoint that is oppositional to modernist conceptualizations of blackness flavored by exogenous exoticism, stereotype, caricature, and even abstractionist manipulation."

Thelma Golden, the museum's deputy director of exhibitions, is known for staging daring, provocative and unique shows (Black Male at the Whitney and Freestyle at the Studio Museum), and with Black Romantic, once again, she introduces an intriguing take on the African-American experience to the mainstream.

While the catalogue is no substitute for actually taking in the show, it does offer a view of a collection of creatively, beautiful and individually produced images steeped in black culture, emotion and imagination.

--Clarence V. Reynolds is a copy editor at BIBR.