February 5 - April 9, 2000
From Robert Scott Duncanson’s sublime mid-19th century landscapes to Richard Hunt’s recent sculptures exploring experiences like the Middle Passage, the Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art offers a breathtaking view of the African American contribution to this country’s visual arts. More than 70 works from Dr. Evans’s collection of paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs will be on view at the Heckscher from February 5 to April 9, with an opening reception on Sunday, February 6.
Walter O. Evans, a Detroit surgeon, has amassed one of the largest private collections of African American art, as well as rare books and literature pertaining to the African American experience. Determined to raise his children in an atmosphere reflecting the richness and diversity of their cultural heritage, Dr. Evans put together a collection that has since traveled the country in museums and university galleries from Boston to Hawaii.
Dr. Evans began serious collecting in the late 1970s when he met the famed artist Romare Bearden, whose artistic roots lie in the Harlem Renaissance, a literary and visual arts movement that flowered in the mid-1920s and embraced and celebrated African American cultural traditions. Dr. Evans bought a collage from Bearden, and came to know the artist well.
His taste for collecting whetted, Dr. Evans went on to meet and purchase work from such major 20th-century figures as Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett and Richard Hunt. He also commissioned work by a number of artists, among them the photographer James VanDerzee, who made portraits of Dr. Evans’s son and the collector himself.
But Dr. Evans’s spectacular collection exhibition is notable not only for its quality, but for its depth and historic range, representing 150 years of African American artistic tradition. Among the earliest works in the exhibition are landscapes of the 1850s and 1860s by Robert Scott Duncanson, who was influenced by the Hudson River School, and Edward Mitchell Bannister’s quietly reflective pastoral scenes of the 1870s. Both men worked in styles favored by the mainstream art establishment of their time. Indeed, Bannister was awarded a gold medal at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia; the jury was clearly not aware of Bannister’s race, and the artist was almost denied entrance to the exhibition before he was able to identify himself.
Also among the early African American artists whose work is rarely seen is Mary Edmonia Lewis, who studied at Oberlin College and lived and worked in Rome in the 1860s. Lewis won early kudos for her portrait busts of renowned abolitionists; she is represented here by two neoclassical sculptures, The Wooing of Hiawatha and The Marriage of Hiawatha. The works were inspired not only by Longfellow’s poem but by Lewis’s own background — her mother was a Chippewa, and she lived with her mother’s tribe until she was 11.
Dr. Evans has also drawn together a rich tapestry of 20th century African American art, reflecting major movements of the era, including the Harlem Renaissance, social realism of the 1950s, naive and folk art, as well as contemporary pieces. Richard Hunt — the first African American sculptor to be honored with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art — is represented by several works, including his 1997 Instrument of Change (This Diaspora) and his model for Middle Passage Monument, reflecting on major events in the African American Experience.