c. 1999 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ Meg Henson Scales stepped up to the podium with her”hand-held visual object,”her personal symbol of the merging of African-American art and spirituality.”I realize that offering a prayer for someone is one of the nicest things that one can do for another person,”she said at a recent conference on the topic at Howard University.”So I made these cans: `Mary Loves Jesus Bartlet Prayers.'” The painted cans resemble the colorful fruit cans she recalls from her childhood days in Oregon but are more spiritual in nature. On the label is her depiction of Mary Magdalene, a brown-skinned woman with dreadlocks. And inside the seemingly hollow cans, she says, are her prayers.”It’s not empty,”she said in a brief interview.”It has my prayers in it.” Another piece of art by Scales,”Thank You,”an acrylic painting of a woman wearing a bright pink dress and kneeling in prayer, is one of more than 115 works currently on exhibit at the Anacostia Museum and Center for African American History and Culture of the Smithsonian Institution.

The exhibit,”Locating the Spirit: Religion and Spirituality in African American Art,”and the Howard conference explored how art and spirituality combine in the lives of some African-Americans, from the creation of the art to the final products. Both looked at art ranging from the early-20th century work of Henry Ossawa Tanner to the mid-century work of William H. Johnson to pieces completed as recently as this year touching on Christian, African and home traditions.

The exhibit features photographs of modern-day baptisms and street preachers as well as works focused on significant biblical events, often featuring dark-skinned characters. One example of the use of various media in the exhibit are the portrayals of Jesus’ Crucifixion in paintings as well as wood and naturally stressed steel.”I was fascinated with … how suffering is depicted,”said exhibit curator Deborah Willis.”Each artist showed it in different ways by using the material.” From the brush strokes in”Golgotha,”a watercolor by Romare Bearden to the welded steel of William B. Taylor’s”Crucifix I,”with an exposed, upturned face of Jesus, the artists manifest the concept of pain.

Willis said the exhibit, which features 74 artists, purposefully includes not only paintings and carvings, but altars reflecting personal spirituality and which resemble the mantles of an artist’s childhood home or express an artist’s sense of history.”We have family pictures, we have altars on our mantles,”said Willis.”It’s an art form the way our parents placed and grandparents placed objects around the home.” She cites as an example an”installation,”or mixed-media piece, by Leslie King-Hammond called”Barbadian Spirits Revisited: The Healing Hearth.”A fireplace mantle is decorated with dozens of small items, including numerous doilies; jars of nuts, cloves and healing oils; and a small bottle of Puerto Rican rum. The outer edge of the work is a semicircle of candles placed atop stacks of saucers in a semicircle at the base of the hearth.

While this altar brings back memories of home,”Altar for Four”by Radcliffe Bailey strikingly memorializes the murder of four girls at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., bombed in 1963. At its center are pictures of the four girls, but the installation also includes funeral wreaths filled with discarded dead flowers and decorated with ribbons made from yellow tape used to mark fire lines. Fire hoses on the floor near the wreaths symbolize the police weapons used against civil-rights demonstrators at the time.”When we look at the installation of Radcliffe Bailey, it has that healing process,”Willis said. Though Bailey, 30, was born after the girls died, his work depicts”the experience he knew and was affected by.” In an interview, Bailey, who was raised a Southern Baptist, said the piece is influenced by his childhood days when he visited his grandfather in a Southern Baptist church in Virginia. As a grown man, he has moved away from institutional religion.”My studio’s been my altar and my church has been my studio,”said Bailey, of Atlanta.

The exhibit, which continues through June 15, also includes non-Christian art ranging from an oil painting called”Victory”by Muslim artist Yahya Muhammad to a bright red”Shango/Chango fan”by Ben Jones, representing the god of thunder from the Yoruba tradition of West Africa. These pieces are among those that include writing by artists _ calligraphy by Muhammad and an accompanying poem called”Welcome Spirit”by Jones.”I need the Spirit, don’t you?”begins Jones’ poem.”It guides me, protects me, and challenges me. It gives me PEACE.” In another piece,”Jesus is my Airplane,”Sister Gertrude Morgan writes in ballpoint pen on her picture depicting her flight with Christ, who is the pilot.”Jesus is my airplane,”wrote the street preacher-turned artist and poet.”You hold the world in your hand. You guide me through the land. …” Willis, who also is curator of exhibitions throughout the museum and center, said the artists are”creating a sermon per se”through their art.”In terms of telling the story, a lot of the artists in the show are not dealing with conceptual pieces,”she says.”They want to communicate in a different way.” At the mid-April conference, artists used words to explain how art and spirituality had merged as they painted, photographed and carved.”In a sense, I have been located by the spirit,”said Richard Yarde of Amherst, Mass.”I have not located the spirit. The spirit has located me.” He said his art has been affected by a spiritual awakening he has received as he dealt with the challenges of kidney failure.

Yarde, who describes himself as more spiritual than religious, said he experienced”an incredible feeling of peace”after attending a Roman Catholic charismatic service and being touched on the forehead by a priest he called a healer. One of his pieces, an opaque and transparent watercolor called”Mojo Hand,”includes as its central image a torso of a pregnant female that implies rebirth and regeneration. The dozen palms above and below the torso represent healing touch, he told conference attendees.”Before I got ill, the work was about answers,”he said.”Now the work is about questions and I would also say the work is about faith.” Other artists say they feel their faith is at work as they create their art.”Drawing is really a wonderful expression for me,”said Espi Frazier, a Baltimore artist who describes herself as a”human spirit.””I find that I am really connected with the spirit when I draw,”she said.”You can almost go into, like, a trance when you draw.” Scales, who calls herself a meditator, said finding spirituality in her work has been”an act of surrender.” The prayer cans she has created come in 1,008 collectible editions in honor of the similar number of names for Shiva, the Hindu god. Scales, who lives in New York’s Harlem, practices Kashmir Shavism, a school of Hindu thought.”Every single type of person in the world, every race, every nationality throughout time, even before there were nations, has tried to locate the spirit in their own way and here we are doing it,”she said of works in and beyond the exhibit.”I tried to do it with my can.”

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