From Those Who Should Be Seen and Heard

Usually when a gallery employee is also an artist with work on display there, I’ve felt uncomfortable as I passed him or her on the way out. Please, please don’t ask me how (or if!) I liked your piece, I think. I wish I could say I loved it, but I honestly can’t.

At “Reflections: African-American Art,” through March 1 at the City of Brea Gallery, I finally got lucky. Paintings by 24-year-old Gene Cook, who works at the gallery, add a welcome injection of youth culture to an exhibition weighted toward more traditional modes in which African American artists are working today.

The guest organizer of the show is Cecil Fergerson, a longtime former curator at the Los Angeles County Museum. His most recent exhibition, “African American Representations of Masculinity,” organized for the Coalition for Cultural Survival of Community Arts, was shown at three Los Angeles venues last spring.

That show was meant as a positive counterweight to negative and outre images of black men in the controversial UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum’s exhibition, “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art.”

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that the Brea Gallery show--work by 32 Southern California artists--looks the way it does. There are wood sculptures inspired by traditional African models, strident political paintings, mellow portraits, decorative pieces, shrine-like installations, upbeat images of assertive-looking women and meditations on ancestry, familial and racial.

Much of this work is the kind of art you would expect to see at a community center. Too often, despite undoubted sincerity and obvious vibrancy and passion, there is little freshness in style and content. The work tends to come across as pat sloganeering: Racism is bad; family bonds are good; heritage is important. Worthy sentiments, but where are the ambiguity and complexity that haunt these issues in real life?

The exceptions stand out by virtue of their more subtle and personal visual styles or the issues they raise.

John W. Outterbridge, whose sculpture has long been celebrated for its inventive use of junked objects, has three pieces in the show. While “Woman With Bean Pot” is classic Outterbridge (a fetish figure with nut breasts, pieced together from yarn and hair and other odds and ends), one of the other works stands out for its quietly authoritative treatment of a major theme.

“In Search of the Missing Mule” is an indictment of racist “justice,” symbolized by a towering, blindfolded figure made from an upright metal container and leather-sheathed fragments of old wood. Shackles hold a long, thick lynching rope to the figure’s wrists. A red, white and blue wooden snake extending its forked tongue completes this emblem of a devious white society all too ready to cast African Americans in the role of scapegoat.

Gregory C. Chaney’s “Know Thyself” is a black- and gold-glazed pottery image of a head in the style of an ancient Egyptian sculpture, but with a prominently flattened nose and thick lips. Conservative in style, this piece argues for a point of view considered subversive in some quarters: That the ancient Egyptians were sub-Saharan black Africans.

Stanley C. Wilson’s rather baldly straightforward installation, “Will the Real Egyptians Please Stand,” invokes the same theme with miniature black pyramids and paintings in which black men and women are lined up--sometimes juxtaposed with lizards or mask faces--as if illustrating an ethnographic treatise.

Cedric Adams sometimes wastes his fine draftsmanship on such bland subjects as the nuclear family in “Lion, Lioness and Cub.” His other large-scale drawing in the exhibition, “Like Nobody’s Business,” offers a bit more leeway for interpretation.

Is the agricultural worker letting loose a giant kick recalling the Brazilian martial dance form, capoiera, acting in fun or in earnest? Is this a matter of justice or mindless rage or just working off steam? In any case, Adams’ ability to render the delicate nuances of texture remains his great strength.

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What Cook brings to the party in his loosely brushed paintings is a perspective different from that of nearly everyone else in the show, a wry, deadpan view that doesn’t moralize.

In “Dig?” he portrays a young man holding a large bottle and wearing a woolly cap with a “dig” logo and a jacket emblazoned with two footprints. Inside one of the squares that serve as shorthand for apartment house windows, the words “Brady Bunch” appear upside-down.

Although the footprints might represent oppression, they might also be remnants of a fight he won. The hip-hop culture that his hat celebrates coexists alongside the retro appeal of old TV sitcoms to other Gen X-ers. There’s an open-endedness about this image--as well as Cook’s “White Reign,” an image of a black woman with a White Rain shampoo bottle and blond-highlighted hair--that seems particularly contemporary. Telling us how it is, Cook leaves us to ponder how it might be.

* “Reflections: African-American Art,” through March 1 at the City of Brea Gallery, Brea Civic and Cultural Center, 1 Civic Center Circle. Hours: Noon to 5 p.m., Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday; noon to 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday. Admission: $1 adults and seniors, under 18 free; on Thursdays from 5 to 8 p.m. Brea residents are admitted free. (714) 990-7730.