Artist Birthday: Moe Brooker
Moe Brooker was one of several African American artists who championed a spiritual type of abstraction as an important contribution to contemporary African American and American art.
Artist Birthday for 24 September: Moe Brooker (1940-2022 US)
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Moe Brooker’s work illustrates his familiarity with African textile traditions and southern African American women’s quilt-making. Works like Present Futures are reminiscent of the alternate plain-weave and inlay designs of Asante kente cloth from Ghana. The floating patches of color represent, for Brooker, the joy of the human spirit. The spiritual plays a major role in his work. He attributes his turning to abstraction as an intuitive choice rather than a conscious one, equating it with improvisation of jazz musicians.
Brooker likens his process of building color harmonies to creating a piece of music with chords — the true joy comes when all the chords, like the colors in his paintings, come together and create excitement. A unique aspect of Brooker’s paintings is his use of black underpainting, which creates a stunning visual contrast with patches of pure color that have often been overpainted many times with different hues to give the colors depth and richness.
Background
The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s galvanized Black artists to push for a revival in the exhibition and study of African American art that had stagnated since the Harlem Renaissance (ca. 1918-1930s). This led to the formation of the Spiral Group in New York in 1963. Artists active during the Harlem Renaissance as well as younger artists joined and the styles ranged from Abstract Expressionism to Social Realism. As during the Harlem Renaissance, some of the artists felt that the group’s art should be relevant to the African American community, with scenes of everyday life and elements of their African ancestry. Others believed that style was a means to an end, and that any style, regardless of its “Blackness” could represent modern African American art as a significant element of contemporary American art.
Moe Brooker was born in Philadelphia, the son of an African Methodist Episcopal minister, like African American painter Henry O. Tanner (1859–1937). Also like Tanner, Brooker studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts where he was influenced by alumni, realist Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) and Dark Impressionist and mentor of the Ash Can School, Robert Henri (1865–1929).
Gradually, Brooker's spiritual life became a powerful influence in his work, yet another parallel with Tanner. Rather than emphasizing realism, Brooker drew inspiration from artists who were searching for modes of expressing their intuitive inner vision — artists like Vasily Kandinsky (1866–1944), whose book Concerning the Spiritual in Art was a great influence. Both Kandinsky and Brooker equated painting with music; for Brooker, it was American jazz.
Correlations to Davis programs: Experience Art 1E,1.2 -- Approaches to Artmaking, Using Color; Experience Painting, Chapter 7 Encaustics; Exploring Visual Design 4E, Chapter 9 Contrast -- Color
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