Dalton Brown
Born in Brooklyn in 1951, Dalton Brown grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area. “Brooklyn had been a thriving arts community,” he recalls. “The poor people in the Marcy projects, where I grew up, had such a high level of self-esteem–it wasn’t like project living today.” His childhood interest in art led his mother to place him in a mostly white school with better facilities, where he recalls that his reading score jumped “significantly.” An uncle who was an artist took him to galleries and encouraged him to work in his studio; in 1971 Brown moved to Chicago to attend the School of the Art Institute. There he was exposed to more African art and began to connect with other black artists. Members of the Black Arts Guild, he recalls, found themselves “working in a style we defined and called rhythmism, which kind of paralleled what was happening in jazz–the same kinds of tonal changes, the same kinds of rhythmic elements.” Today Brown teaches art in the Chicago public schools, where he’s often inspired by his students, he says.
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The bright colors, sweeping lines, and feeling of wild, almost uncontainable energy of most of Brown’s 11 paintings and drawings at Tene Gallery can be found in other African-American works. What sets Brown’s strongest pieces apart is the way their shapes and lines create a sense of fissure even as they echo one another. The central figure in Woman With a Bowl of Cherries, represented by an accretion of transparent overlays, seemingly owes a debt to the cubist depiction of natural forms in multiple, somewhat geometric parts. But when some of these overlays extend beyond the figure’s contours they form colored bands “outside” of it; unlike a cubist portrait, this one has parts that do not and indeed cannot add up to a single figure. This lack of unity, precisely defined here as gaps between different elements, unbalances the viewer, making for uncertainty and thus a more active encounter between viewer and image.
Brown again manages to have it both ways in the wonderful Women in the Market Place (which recalls the “variable paintings” of Oyvind Fahlstrom, though Brown is not familiar with them). Three simple pencil drawings of women–inspired by photographs of a market in Nairobi–have been mounted together, one within a wooden frame and two on cutouts resting in grooves in the frame’s bottom edge. Not only is the picture fragmented in depth, with elements in front of one another, its parts are intended to be moved, allowing the viewer to change the composition.
