Napoleon Jones-Henderson’s “I Am As I Am-A Man” closes at the Institute of Contemporary Art on July 24. But if you want another taste of the Boston artist’s deep human imagination, he organized “‘THE LONG VIEW ‘-WHAT YOU SEE (DO YOU SEE ME!) ”At the Bromfield Gallery, featuring five local artists of color who have nurtured their art, their communities, and their souls for decades: Ekua Holmes, Bryan McFarlane, Chandra Dieppa Méndez-Ortiz, Judge Raquib, and Jones-Henderson himself.
The paradigm of individual and community is not binary, Jones-Henderson wrote in a poem in his manager’s statement: “… a person lives in the community/ while thinking of himself as an individual,/ while at all times/ you is just a ripple of,/ a LONG. LOOK. ”
The art turned the gallery into a small but spacious spiritual chapel: a place for memory, dreaming, and the soft knitting of pain and hope. McFarlane’s paintings, richly coated, lubricated, and coated with lush colors, are like the very rolling imagination, full of vague glimpses of horrors and comforts, demons and gods.
Time and space merge and blur in the collages of Holmes and Méndez-Ortiz. Holmes’s “Return,” with heavy flowers and gossamer blooms wiping a figure on a door, seems like a precious memory, an almost tactile glimpse into the home.
The “Watershed” of Méndez-Ortiz also has a figure on a door-here, of a tumbledown, red-roofed shack next to the water. The second door opens into an urban alley with steel over the windows; a city is inside. The threatening reddish sky was dripping with paint. “Watershed” describes the point of title change, a home on the brink of dissolution and change.
More shacks can be seen on top of two of Jones-Henderson’s “Requiem” totems. He sees the cloth -decorated sculptures as safe havens for Black heroes such as jazz musician and composer Charles Mingus, activist Marcus Garvey, and poet Countee Cullen.
The works in “THE LONG VIEW” cover threats, wounds, and loss of life. But there is help and joy as well. Just look at Raquib’s digital print “The Dancers,” in which proud figures move against a glowing, kaleidoscopic ground. It reveals the roots of the power of the imagination in the binding relationships: homes, communities, rituals, and historically the gardens (manure, compost, and all) where art grows.
“THE LONG VIEW” – WHAT YOU SEE (DID YOU SEE ME!)
At Bromfield Gallery, 450 Harrison Ave., until July 31. 617-451-3605, www.bromfieldgallery.com
Cate McQuaid can be reached at catemcquaid@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @cmcq.
