Breaking Barriers
A Writer Discovers How Artists Feel About Black History Month

By Kyle Bailey

	Vickie Pierre

It’s late January, another hot winter’s day in Miami, and I’m sitting in my car in front of the Project Room Gallery in the Design District. My story is due the next day and I’m still out scouring the city for any artists and galleries that may have a show planned for Black History Month. On my lap is a sheet of paper with a list of the names and phone numbers of all the art galleries in Downtown Miami. I’m going down the list, making call after call that’s so far turned up nothing. A receptionist with a heavy Spanish accent (Spanish meaning from Spain and not Miami) answered one of my calls and, after telling her I was with an online magazine, began going down the list of all the things they had planned for the next few months. I had to politely interrupt her in order to get to the point of my call, and the answer I got was, “Black History Month? When is that?” I found it amusing to say the least. About a dozen calls later I found myself talking to an overly enthusiastic guy who found my inquiries a bit puzzling to him. “Black History Month shows? Sir, our art is for everybody.”

Some might think that, being of African descent myself, I might find this all a bit troubling, but in reality it was quite refreshing. If any community should be the first to stop categorizing individuals into hyphenated Americans and instead look at people as just, well, people, then it would probably be the art community.

With these grandiose concepts going through my head, I decided it would be a good idea for a follow up story to speak with a few artists to get their view of what Black History Month means to them and how these ideas inspired their work. I sat down with Vickie Pierre and Georges Lebar, who both submitted paintings, along with several other ArtCenter resident artists, that are now on display at an exhibit on Miami Beach titled Black to Black: A discourse on color and race.

Georges Lebar

Lebar left Australia at the age of 17 to live in Paris, where he studied fashion and illustration. A year later he attended the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and after working for various fashion houses in New York City, became interested in the fine arts. He expanded his mediums to video and photography while attending the New World School of the Arts in Miami and is now a resident artist at ArtCenter. One of the ideas of the show was to present paintings that used the color black as a hue and Lebar’s Nude and Nude Black Study both represent this concept.

“These pieces come from a new body of work called Magic that… blend with this sort of undertone of identity, and the pieces that are in this particular show are about the loss of identity,” said Lebar.  “It worked with Black History Month because it was saying that ‘I am not this physical image, I am an image but I’m not categorized.”

I asked Lebar about the painting called Nude, an image of a face that fades in and out of shades of black.

	Nude Face by Georges Lebar

“It’s not silent,” he said, “but it’s trying to get the viewer to look at it in a different way without color or race or creed, it’s just the essence of the portrait.”

When I first approached this story I made the assumption (wrongfully so) that the artists would be black, and we would discuss issues in the art community as it related to black artists, but after meeting Lebar, who is white, and learned of his involvement in the show, I found the story moving in another direction, off the beaten path. Looking back I found that I was guilty of some of the same assumptions we all fall for in our everyday lives.

“The show sort of breaks out of that idea that ‘You’re black, you should be in this show’,” said Lebar.  “It was about the work and the intention of the work that fitted with the idea, which was very clever.

Nude Study Black by Georges Lebar

“When you look at art,” said Lebar, “there’s always two rules that I use, and that is, ‘What do you see?’ and then secondly, ’How does it make you feel?’ And if you ask yourself those questions, then the art starts to talk to you and you start having a relationship with it. Because, you know, we are told what’s good, we’re not even questioning, and this whole Black History Month thing is about questioning, which goes back to the whole idea of what [the show] is about.”

Vickie Pierre, whose parents are from Haiti, was born in New York, where she studied at the School of Visual Arts until 1992. She left school to live in California, where her friends encouraged her to continue in the field of art and a few years later she returned to New York and continued her education for five years. She has lived in Miami ever since and is now a resident artist at ArtCenter.

I talked to Pierre about the experiences she drew from in her piece, Untitled, which is also part of the Black to Black show.

“This is kind of interesting,” said Pierre. “I realized where my work was coming from very recently… it comes from my experiences, memory. But I’ve never been one to be specific. I just didn’t think about it, I was just living my life. I would have teachers saying, ‘Why don’t you do something that draws from the black experience?’ But I knew that if I did that, I would be the biggest phony in the world…because I would be exploiting something that I didn’t need to put a big focus on—not that it wasn’t important to me, but I feel like all of those that came before me went through everything so that we can be who we are. I just didn’t want somebody else telling me what I’m supposed to be doing in order to create.”

	My Brown Lush by Vickie Pierre

With art education becoming increasingly privatized due to the reduction of art in public schools (Thanks, Jeb), getting a good education in fine art is becoming more of a financial issue, and it seems that contemporary art is quickly becoming the territory of those who can afford it. I asked Pierre whether she thought there was enough support from the black community for fine art in general.

“I don’t think there’s a lot of support in the black community for contemporary art,” she said. “It’s very tricky, it’s almost like there’s a formula. As a black artist you could be doing your greatest truths, and I’ve found in my past experience, kind of like my teacher, that if your not doing something obviously black or African Diaspora, then everyone is like, well, ‘What are you doing?’

The need to somehow promote an artist’s race or ethnicity is not new, and as our chat came to a close, Pierre gave me her opinion on that touchy subject:

“When it comes to a black artist it’s always so important that it’s made clear that the person is black, and sometimes that bothers me and sometimes it doesn’t,” she said.  “Sometimes it bothers me because I don’t want people looking at my work with this attachment that they already have before they’ve seen the work. They’ve already made a decision before even seeing it. On the other hand, I think it’s important for people to see diversity, where the issues we focus on and that we think about stretch beyond our race.”