The Fall Exhibition 2007 at the Bermuda National Gallery

The Bermuda National Gallery Fall Exhibitons 2007, Living With Art, opens on October 9 and continues until January 3, 2008, is a travelling international exhibition featuring the most important African-American artists of the 20th century.

Living With Art includes 74 works by 37 of the most important African-American artists from the modern and contemporary periods. Norman Lewis, Charles Alston, Palmer Hayden and Lois Mailou Jones are from the Harlem Renaissance period (1920s and 1930s) while artists Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Alma Thomas, Charles White, and Elizabeth Catlett, are included in the group who were active during the Works Progress Administration era in the 1940s. Contemporary artists include Herbert Gentry, Richard Mayhew, Ed Clark, Mel Edwards, Al Loving, Bill Hutson, Betye Saar and her daughters, Alison Saar and Leslie Saar.

Living With Art is drawn entirely from the collection of Alitash Kebede, an Ethiopian-born, Los Angeles collector, who owns one of the finest private art collections in the United States.

Stretching from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s through the 20th century, the collection features a wide variety of styles, subjects and media ranging from portraits, landscapes and abstracts to sculptures and mixed media collages. Indeed, it provides an excellent primer for art students of some of the major key themes throughout art history as well as an introduction to modern and post-modern works by African-American artists.

In fact, Kebede’s story is an example of how important it is to expose young people to art at an early age. Kebede was exposed to art in her home as a child and as a teenager, the turning point in her life came when she attended an exhibition of Ethiopian-born modern painter, Skunder Boghossian, at Addis Ababa University. Bhogohssian, who was trained in Paris, is known for his abstractions based on the symbols and material culture from his native Ethiopia as well as the Black Diaspora.
In the 1970s Kebede went to study in the United States. She minored in studio art at Lindfield College in McMinnville, Oregon and then moved to Los Angeles, to attend graduate school at UCLA. In the early 1980s she took frequent trips to New York to pursue her interest in art. During this period she met many artists including Vincent Smith, Ed Clark, Herbert Gentry and the Ethiopian-born artist Elsabeth Atnafu. In 1982 Kebede met her hero, Skunder Boghossian in Washington, D.C. She purchased one of his paintings and started her collection.

After attending college in the United States, she began to collect seriously and now owns more than 100 works. It is Kebede's love of art and her desire to expose young people and others to the joy she has experienced collecting and living with the art that has inspired her to make her collection available for this traveling exhibition.

While Kebede’s collection is specifically African-American, her collecting outlook is international. Living with Art is an ever-evolving experience that grows and is shaped by her experiences and personal relationship with the works and artists she collects.

Her collection illustrates the many influences and identities that contribute to the spectrum of works by African-American artists. In a 2002 essay A Look Beyond Content: The Collection of Alitash Kebede, art historian Dr. Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins wrote: “Works of art by African Americans, like the artists themselves, have often been classified under one sweeping view. Some contend that it must somehow “look Black” and be created from the specific experience of being Black in America. Yet the critical thinker realises that works of art by African Americans, like the people themselves, does not fit within a monolithic definition, character, or identity. And like African American people, it is very diverse within the ethnically Black population.”

Living With Art: Modern & Contemporary African American Art from the Collection of Alitash Kebede will be on display at the Bermuda National Gallery from October 9, 2007 – January 3, 2008.

To find out more about Alitash Kebede, her collection and the artists featured in Living With Art, click here.
The Fall Exhibitions continue to January 3, 2008. See below for information regarding exhibition-related lectures and programmes and the BNG’s updated events calendar .

Portrait of Alitash, by Emilio Cruz, oil on canvas, 1991
Harlem Street Scene, by Jacob Lawrence, Silk screen, 1975
In the Garden, by Romare Bearden, lithograph, 1979
Fiona by Allison Saar, Mixed media, 1987