TWO EXHIBITS DOCUMENT BLACK MUSIC, MUSICIANS

The air will be filled with music at the California Afro-American Museum.

A photographic exhibit, Friday through July 19, documents the formative years of rhythm and blues, while another display, running to Aug. 14, explores how the black musician has been depicted in American art since the late 19th Century.

Lizzetta Le Falle-Collins, the museum’s visual-art curator, says together the exhibits cover 200 years worth of history.

“Many of the 50 images in ‘Rhythm and Blues: Black American Popular Music, 1945-1955’ come from private collections and appear to be public relations photographs sent out from record companies,” says Le Falle-Collins. “But there are lots of live contextual scenes from clubs, theaters, street corners and dance halls.”

Joe Turner, Fats Domino, Nat King Cole and the Orioles are among the musicians pictured in the traveling exhibit, on loan from the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

“I was made aware of the rhythm-and-blues exhibit when I was doing the research for ‘The Portrayal of the Black Musician in American Art,’ notes Le Falle-Collins, the show’s curator. About 85 artworks, mostly paintings, from the 1890s to the 1970s illustrate the development of the image of the black musician and how and why that image changed, as influenced by social, musical and economic flux.

“In the 19th Century, most images of black musicians were created by white Americans,” Le Falle-Collins says. “You had few blacks painting until the end of the 19th Century, and they avoided black subject matter because there had been so many images of blacks characterized as overdressed dandies or buffoons, their movement and faces exaggerated with bulging eyes and large lips. And, while some Afro-American artists were painting landscapes, they were not really proficient with figure-painting techniques, and if a figure came out looking like a buffoon, they were chastised by the black community.”

The image improved, however, especially during the 1920’s Harlem Renaissance, Le Falle-Collins says.

“Musicians appear to be more confident about themselves. It’s a time when confidence and pride in oneself is at a peak, and that pride comes out in the art.”

The vibrancy lasted roughly through the ‘50s (views from the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s in the exhibit show jitterbug dancers, blues singers and jazz bands), she says, at which time less energy was spent on art and more on the civil-rights movement.

“However, the ‘60s reawakened an arising cultural awareness. Only this time you have some works that use the musician as a symbol of protest--protest that Afro-American music had been stolen or changed, or that full credit hadn’t been given where it should have.”

Artists represented in the exhibit include Jennings Samuel, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Duncanson S. Robert, William Sidney Mount, Archibald Motley Jr., William H. Johnson, Betye Saar and Dana Chandler.

CARRY A BIG STEREOSCOPE: UC Riverside has recently discovered more than 200 photographs and negatives illustrating Theodore Roosevelt’s presidential campaign tour.

The turn-of-the-century images, one depicting Roosevelt amid American flags, red-white-and-blue streamers and crowds of supporters, were found in the university’s Keystone-Mast Collection of stereoscopic prints, or postcard-size photographs that create the illusion of three dimensions when viewed through a stereoscope.

A Cal State Fullerton art history student discovered the photographs while conducting a computerized inventory project. The find raised the number in the university’s “Teddy Roosevelt” collection to 375.

Styles of campaign decor have not changed significantly since Roosevelt’s 1903-1904 presidential bid, observed the university in an announcement. Works in the collection include that of a train covered in flowers at a campaign stop in Redlands, a photograph depicting Roosevelt at a rally for votes standing beside the grizzly he shot during “The Great Bear Hunt,” and Roosevelt announcing his Square Deal policy to a crowd of onlookers.

Stereoscopic photography was a popular home entertainment in the 1900s. The Keystone-Mast Collection is the world’s largest collection of stereoscopic negatives. Appointments to view the “Teddy Roosevelt” campaign tour and other stereoscopic prints may be made by calling (714) 787-5214.

VIDEO GRANTS: Topics ranging from parenting to life on a fictional desert island will be explored in five videos to be produced by winners of the Long Beach Museum of Art’s “Open Channels” television production grants.

The completed works will premiere later this year in an exhibition at the museum and on “Viewpoints on Video,” a cable series produced by the museum and telecast statewide on local public-access cable-television channels. A cash award of $1,000, a case of videotapes and eight days access to cable production equipment and facilities will be given to the winners. They are:

Donna Matorin, from Los Angeles, for “Quickening,” a work about parenting and the passage of love and violence through generations; David Bunn, from Los Angeles, for an untitled video based on a fictional discovery of an isolated desert island and the resulting questions about map making, art making, history and colonialism; Paul Kos, a San Franciscan, for “Tower of Babel,” a work that explores language as a medium for universal expression and cultural differences; Paul McCarthy, from Pasadena, for “Family Tyranny,” a domestic drama that uses the sitcom “Father Knows Best” as a prototype; and Jim Shaw, also from Los Angeles, for an untitled video charting one boy’s coming of age in the mid-1960s.

On the panel that selected “Open Channel” artists sat David Bolt, executive director of the Bay Area Video Coalition, Valerie Faris, independent producer, and Julie Lazar, media curator at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art.

LOCAL FOCUS: For a body of work depicting a side of humanity “most of us wish to overlook,” Peter Reiss has been awarded the Friends of Photography’s 1987 Ferguson Grant of $2,000.

Reiss, a Los Angeles-based photographer, portrayed in black and white his developmentally disabled photography students at the Art Center of the Exceptional Children’s Foundation.

Reiss and his students collaboratively produced the winning portfolio of images.

The photographs “are haunting and memorable,” writes photographer Jo Ann Callis, who judged this year’s grant competition. Reiss “makes work that is strongly connected to his inner life, which is what gives the pictures their power. He has been persistent in his compassionate exploration of the look and affect of people that most of us wish to overlook.”

Recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships for portraiture, Reiss also teaches at the Otis-Parsons Art Institute.

The Bay Area-based Friends of Photography has awarded the Ferguson Grant annually since 1972 to support and recognize outstanding early career photographers.