Artists and Artworks of Color : As Appreciation Crosses Ethnic Boundaries, Annual Show Draws Wide Audience at Mall

“This is bad, “ the man says, admiring the art on display at Fox Hills Mall.

The piece that has caught his eye is a striking ceramic face by Dominique, one of more than 80 mostly African-American artists represented in the Ninth Annual Artists’ Salute to Black History Month, which continues through today at the Culver City shopping center.

Featuring everything from an all-black version of “The Last Supper” to sepia-toned photos in a series called “Coloured Nostalgia,” the exhibit and sale include original work and reproductions by African-American artists whose work is increasingly being sought by collectors.

Among the best-known is Varnette P. Honeywood, who does bright, abstract paintings and cut-paper collages of scenes from African and African-American life. Honeywood, who is from Los Angeles, has become something of a celebrity since her work was featured on “The Cosby Show.”

A former teacher, Honeywood, who lives in the Crenshaw District, remembers when most museums and galleries were indifferent to her work. Her first boosters, she recalls, were frame shops. Now in a position to choose her venues, she says that she continues to do the Fox Hills show and one other mall show each year because it brings her work before an audience, particularly a black audience, that she might otherwise not reach.

Unlike collectors, she said, “the general public has to find art where they can.” At the mall, she said, “the setting is very informal, and people can enjoy art in a very noncommittal way.” Such shows have an educational function and they also make good business sense. “It is a shopping mall, so, on the marketing end, you do think of making purchases.”

Honeywood is assisted at her display by her sister and business partner Stephanie (a poet) and by her mother, Lovie, who reveals that the only other artist in the family was one of her uncles, who did graveyard sculpture in Magnolia, Miss.

Self-taught artist Barbara Wesson initiated the Fox Hills show and sale almost a decade ago. “My prime reason for doing it was to bring some recognition and exposure to minority artists,” said the artist, whose works are admired by Arsenio Hall, among others. Like many of the other artists, she sees the familiar, low-anxiety atmosphere of a shopping mall as an excellent place for people to encounter works of art.

Looking back over the decade, Wesson said, there has been a shift away from the angry images--portraits of Malcolm X and raised fists--that were once popular. “People have been saturated with the imagery,” she said. “People are requesting landscapes and seascapes,” albeit landscapes and seascapes by African-American artists, she said. Less concerned about the iconography, African-American art buyers are responding more to the color and beauty of the work, she said.

“Oh, it’s beautiful!” said teacher Eloise Hunt of View Park, entranced by the bright, Africa-inspired silhouettes of artist Kathleen A. Wilson.

When the artist approaches Hunt, the teacher asks an informed question about the technique used to achieve a particular effect. Hunt said she usually buys something at the Fox Hills show. Wilson’s work ranges in price from $25 for an unsigned poster to $800 for one of her original serigraphs.

“I think the appreciation of art is growing so much with people of color,” Hunt said. As to why, she speculated: “We’ve been working on our self-esteem for a long time, and we’re finally beginning to appreciate ourselves.” Hunt says she plans to return and bring her teen-age son to the show.

Artist Wilson, who grew up in Ypsilanti, Mich., and went to Pepperdine on a fine arts scholarship, lives in View Park. “I’ve never been to Africa,” she confessed, although she clearly travels there regularly in her mind. Wilson said one of her great pleasures is meeting people who have been touched by her work. During the recent National Black Artists Festival in Atlanta, a woman fan came up and pressed the artist to her formidable bosom. “She had every piece I ever published,” Wilson said.

Describing herself as a cheerleader for the artists, Joan Murray of Baldwin Hills thinks the Fox Hills show is a valuable corrective to destructive stereotypes about black life.

“Every time you look up there’s something negative,” Murray said. “But there’s so much that’s positive that goes on in the African-American community--people who maintain their homes, people who support the homeless, who support young children and the schools. The majority of African-American life is positive, and the art signifies that.”

As Murray points out, there are important black art collectors as well as talented black artists. “If you go to Harlem or Watts or Palm Springs, you will find there are African-Americans who collect a variety of art because we live in a multiracial, multiethnic world.”

Many of the artists in the show say that their work is appealing to a larger audience than ever before. “Whites are buying black artwork--not just whites, Chicanos, Orientals,” said Roderick Vines of Pasadena, who is doing pastel portraits at the show as well as selling his other work. “Black artists are stepping out.”

Artist Paul Nzalamba has been supporting himself as an artist since he was in school in his native Uganda. Idi Amin was in power, the Ugandan economy was in decline and Nzalamba found his creativity could keep him in soap and other necessities.

“I did my artwork and took it to Kenya to sell it and buy detergent and buy toothpaste and other things,” he said.

Nzalamba, who came to Los Angeles 13 years ago and lives in the Wilshire District, found that Uganda was too small for both him and its maniacal leader. “It’s like living in South-Central,” he said of the bad old days. “People fall all around you.” Once, he recalled, he was walking, carefully dressed, to work when the dictator’s intelligence men splashed him with muddy water. “They turned around and laughed,” he said. “I couldn’t even curse them.”

Nzalamba’s technique is batik, in which he painstakingly creates scenes on cloth with dyes. He remains in Africa in his work, which features women with their children, a father and son, scenes of village life. It takes weeks to do one of his originals, so publishing his work has been a financial godsend. His small reproductions sell for $30, larger ones for $55. He hopes to buy a house soon.

“Not having grown up in a culture that was color-conscious,” Nzalamba said, he began selling his work in mostly white venues. He has consciously sought an African-American clientele as well. He likes mall shows and other non-elitist exhibits. “People have to see your work first,” he said. “Then they think about it.” Then, sometimes, they buy.

He is appalled that he was once asked, when applying for an art fellowship, whose collections he was in. “It wasn’t up to them to give me a fellowship because Michael Jackson has my work,” he says. (The Gloved One doesn’t, as far as Nzalamba knows.) But one of his exuberant portraits of a mother and her child is featured on the cover of a genetics textbook. “And I have some work on some TV show,” he said. “I don’t know what it is.”

Over the years, Nzalamba’s palette has brightened. Indeed, if the Fox Hills show is any indication, earth tones are deader than dashikis. “I’m using more blue and red,” he acknowledged, “but I keep dreaming of going back to my browns.”

The artist laughs when an observer points out that his subjects seem to have unusually large feet. Exaggerating the feet of the people in his work is “my way of making them look stable and strong,” he said. “That’s the anchor.”

He added, in what might be the motto of all the artists who have persisted in the face of indifference or worse, “You must not be blown over by the wind.”