Black-Art Panelists Are Open to Interpretation : Discussion: Experts delve into the politics of race at a spirited session at UC Irvine. But they come up with no tidy conclusions.

Two students walked into the art gallery at UC Irvine the other day to see a new show of photographs by black Americans.

Drawn to Coreen Simpson’s portraits of black youths from the streets of New York City, one black student liked her work, finding it probing, truthful. His Japanese-American friend, however, thought the pictures reinforced negative stereotypes about blacks.

Clearly, the way an artwork is perceived and understood is determined by who is doing the looking, said artist Todd Gray said Wednesday night during a panel discussion at the university. Depending on who the viewer is, he said, a photograph may be “a mirror, not a window.”

That premise was a dominant theme of a wide-ranging session that delved into the politics of race in the contemporary art world. While no tidy conclusions emerged, some in the standing-room-only, ethnically mixed crowd of about 100 enthusiastically took part in the discussion, broadening its scope and fueling its spirited tenor.

The panel was held in conjunction with “CONVERGENCE: 8 Photographers,” an exhibit organized by Deborah Willis curator of photographs and prints at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. With more than 50 prints, organizers say the show is one of the largest traveling surveys of photographs by black artists. Its works range from straight portraiture to conceptual pieces combining images with text; most comment on social issues with autobiographical references.

Panelists--all of them black--were: Pat Ward Williams, UC Irvine assistant professor of art; Roland Charles, owner of the Black Gallery in Los Angeles; “Convergence” artist Gray; Lyle Harris, a Los Angeles photographer; and artist Richard Wyatt, also from Los Angeles, who has painted well-known murals there.

Relating the story of the two students’ opposing reactions, moderator Williams launched a lengthy exploration of viewers’ perceptions.

“There is a contrast,” she said, in how Simpson’s photos are understood by people in Jamaica, Queens, a largely black area of New York City where she first saw the show, and how they are interpreted in Orange County.

Viewers in Queens, Ward said, “looked exactly like” people in Simpson’s pictures, who wear their hair in long dreadlocks or cut short and adorned with razor-precise, shaved zigzag designs. In Queens, Simpson’s subjects “are not in any way exotic or different,” she said.

But viewers from less culturally diverse regions are more likely to draw upon stereotypes perpetuated by the media and make erroneous assumptions--perhaps that only gang members would wear such haircuts or that all black men are criminals, she and others said. In fact, “if you don’t know these people, it’s potentially dangerous for you to guess who these people are,” Ward said.

Charles agreed that television, movie, advertising and press portrayals of blacks has had profound influence. Encountering a little white girl on a Hollywood street one recent evening, he saw a look of abject fear in her eyes, he said.

“I thought, how could she possibly interpret me as a threat?” he said, concluding that the media were responsible.

Damaging “media interpretations of who we are” began long before television became ubiquitous, Wyatt added. Stereotypes of blacks hark “way back to slavery,” he said, and were later reinforced by such figures as Little Black Sambo, the children’s storybook character after whom one large, now-defunct restaurant chain was named.

In contrast to the race issues that panelists focused on, some audience members said other matters occupied their attention as they toured the exhibit, and that their perceptions were, in effect, colorblind.

“I don’t bring to (the art-viewing process) political issues,” said one white woman. “I don’t have to know a lot about the person doing it.”

Even Jeffrey Scales’ photographs, which include portraits of the notorious Compton Crips asserting their gang affiliation with hand signals, led her to concentrate on aesthetic, rather than racial issues, she said.

“Sure you see the hand signals, but I saw the skill of the photographer and the artist’s psychological insight into those faces,” the woman said, noting that she was raised in New York City. “Some (of the youths’ looked) assertive, some were frightened, some were pugnacious.”

Another audience member, a white man, had a similar reaction. “I didn’t see it (exclusively) as black art.”

Panelist Harris countered that cultural differences, even among various black subcultures, should be respected. But Gray said he wished more curators had a colorblind approach, sparking a discussion of whether blacks continue to be “ghetto-ized” in black-artist-only exhibits and, in turn, underrepresented in mainstream museums and galleries dominated by white artists.

Some panelists said blacks are still largely shut out from the mainstream, although Ward said the situation has improved.

That, however, may be true only because funding subsidies for multicultural art are considered politically correct, she added.

Another audience member charged that no minorities have yet attained parity in the artistic establishment. Eliciting the evening’s loudest round of applause, Los Angeles Chicano artist Daniel Martinez said minority artists must strive to “infiltrate the system at every level.”

If you can’t get in through the front door, Martinez said, “blow the place up! Do whatever you have to do.”

“CONVERGENCE: 8 Photographers,” works by Albert Chong, Todd Gray, Jeffrey Scales, Coreen Simpson, Clarissa Sligh, Elisabeth Sunday, Christian Walker, Wendel White, through Feb. 4 in the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery, Campus Drive and Bridge Road. Gallery hours: noon to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday. Admission: free. Information: (714) 856-6610.