Basic ‘Black’ and Pearls of Wisdom : A Few Striking, Metaphorically Engaging Pieces Dress Up an Otherwise Racially Predictable Show

“In the Black,” through Feb. 26 at the Irvine Fine Arts Center, is freighted with a daunting and not altogether logical sociocultural agenda: to explore the various meanings of blackness as a way of somehow reclaiming the work of black artists from the ghetto to which the white art world habitually assigns it.

Guest curator Myrella Moses has chosen 37 works by made by a wildly eclectic roster of well-known and obscure or fledgling artists. Most of the pieces are concerned primarily with blackness in its racial sense; only a few (made primarily by non-black artists, as it happens) explore other meanings of the word.

Yet the show’s catalogue (with an essay by J.S.M. Willette) deals only in the most belabored and obvious ways with biased assumptions on the part of white viewers. One wishes for the insights of last year’s UC Irvine exhibition, “The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism.”

Ultimately, “In the Black” comes across mostly as a wishful attempt at promoting understanding among the races--always a welcome sentiment, but one that could have used more intellectual rigor.

This thematic vagueness throws the burden of the show on the strength of individual works. Unfortunately, a few of the notable artists in the show--John Outterbridge, Tim Hawkinson, Vernon Fisher--are represented by work that is less than their best, and some of the work by the unknowns is thin or narrowly didactic. But several visually striking and metaphorically engaging pieces make the exhibition worth seeing.

“Rose Tattoo,” Alison Saar’s bust-length sculpture of a black women, is covered with nailed-on pieces of tin bearing images of roses: a direct and lovely way of conveying the inner spirit of a person some may categorize purely on the basis of skin color.

Lorna Simpson’s “Holding and Breaking” consists of a large Polaroid photograph of a young black man in business attire, seen from the rear. Below, under the words “an agreement,” the drinking glass he holds is shown smashed to bits. A fragile everyday object, the glass symbolizes the bond of trust and respect that a younger black generation has warily come to expect from whites, but which routinely is ignored and broken.

Ma-Dau-Sha, a Haitian artist in her 70s, fled her homeland after dictator Francois Duvalier came to power. In her painting “Pere le Brun” (Father Brown), fire engulfs a screaming black man, presumably the victim of a political attack. The bright, roiling colors and stick figure composition give the piece a poignant transparency.

Solomon Huerta’s “Reflections No. 9”--a scrap of paper with childish writing by a young Chicano, with Huerta’s likeness of the child’s pensive face--appears to be raw documentation of a child’s beliefs awkwardly amended by lessons in toleration. The piece offers an unusually frank account of the heart of the fears and superstitions that block cross-cultural understanding.

Lavialle Campbell’s sculpture “Throne” is a giant Afro, big enough to sit on (there’s a small indentation where the scalp attachment would be on a wig). A luxurious fuzzy dome, it rests on a base majestically decorated with golden hair picks.

Campbell has taken a key visual element from the black pride movement of the 1970s and given it a witty, Pop Art dimension in a way that hilariously satirizes a hairdo while quietly reaffirming the values it embodied. By transforming the formerly de rigeur explosion of hair into a throne, Campbell forges a link with enthroned African rulers immortalized in indigenous sculpture. It’s deft and ingenious.

Kim Dingle’s painting “Two Girls, One With More Hair Than the Other”--part of a series of images of little girls tussling--is a teasingly elusive work, for all its apparent simplicity. Although the girl with more hair is black, and the other child is white, Dingle has been quoted as saying that such contrasts were purely painterly decisions.

To be sure, the creamy whiteness of the black girl’s socks wouldn’t register so vividly against a white surface. But it’s hard not to see the pale arm bisecting velvety black skin in racial terms, even as you wonder whether the white girl is hugging her friend or preventing her from doing something--and whether they both are posing for an unseen voyeur.

The white girl’s extraneous black arm--the one that looks like a rejected early painting attempt--raises further questions. Its presence in the finished painting suggests the arbitrariness of a painter’s creative decisions.

Is a white artist like Dingle somehow freer to portray blackness without the same burdens of inherited injustices? What does it mean for a black artist to choose to make art that apparently doesn’t refer to racial experience? Is that even possible? Such are the knotty questions left for another exhibition to tackle.

* “In the Black” continues through Feb. 26 at the Irvine Fine Arts Center, 14321 Yale Ave., Irvine. 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday; 9 a.m. to 5 p.m Friday; 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday; 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission: free. (714) 724-6880.

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VISIONARIES: At the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art through Dec. 23, “Six: A SLAMB Show” introduces local viewers to an artists’ collective that traffics in the mystical side of life. Pieces by Kate Savage and Siobhan McClure stand out by virtue of their alluring eccentricity.

Savage’s mixed-media paintings with delicate renderings of women’s hands in various positions and accouterments borrowed from Old Master paintings--a tassel, an ornate sleeve, an astrolabe--have a dreamy, timeless quality, pulling into the foreground the tactility and ornamental value of forgotten details from well-born lives in other eras. Savage’s assemblage “Perpetua’s Ladder”--a meditation on the life of a saint--creates a sweetly logic-defying realm of fantasy, grace and private grief.

McClure’s paintings, which variously resemble vintage photos or obscure fairy tale fragments, sidestep the cloying aspects of her mixed-media pieces to focus on children in mysterious distress--two uniformed Russian schoolboys in “The Edge of Winter,” a disquieting landscape of faceless babies in white dresses in “The Weaving of Words; The Wrapping of Wounds.”

* The Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Space 111, 3621 W. MacArthur Blvd., Santa Ana. 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. Admission: free. (714) 549-4989.