The remarkable wealth and breadth of African-American artists’ interpretations of Biblical stories and traditions in historic and contemporary art will be the subject of a loan exhibition at the Museum of Biblical Art in New York City from Feb. 15 to May 26.
“Ashe to Amen: African-Americans and Biblical Imagery” will investigate the ever-shifting intersections and crossroads of aesthetics and belief. Themes that recur throughout the exhibit include creation, revelation, faith, liberation and identity.
The exhibition includes 60 works of art and design that date from the late 19th century up to the present by nearly 50 artists, 25 of whom are still active today.
Artists whose works are in the exhibition include the well-known Romare Bearden, Sister Gertrude Morgan and Henry Ossawa Tanner as well as those who have become established during the past decades, including Oletha DeVane, Rashida Bumbray and Xenobia Bailey.
Some of the works in the exhibition reference traditional African art from various cultures. Regardless of the period in which the art was created, the artists used the Bible’s stories as a means to express their identity and spiritual and religious beliefs.
Many facets of the Bible’s impact on the African-American community, including how it has informed and influenced cultural identity, have been explored by scholars. “Ashe to Amen” and the soon-to-be-released publication of the same title are among the first scholarly efforts to investigate how the Bible has informed this multicultural and initially disenfranchised community’s artistic expression.
“There is no uniform or monolithic African-American art,” said exhibition curator Leslie King-Hammond, Ph.D., who was the founding director of the Center for Race and Culture at the Maryland Institute College of Art. “This exhibition is about the artistic and spiritual process of discovery, revelation and expressive interpretation of very personal, intimate relationships that each artist evokes as a response to their own experience as channeled through the sacred text of the Bible. The works in the exhibition find common ground in representing visions of life and philosophical beliefs that emerged from a distinctive American culture that has developed and evolved over centuries and are now a unique addition to the broader field of American art.”
Although reading was largely banned for Blacks on American antebellum plantations and the content of books was inaccessible to many African-Americans until the rise of literacy in the 20th century, the Bible was known through oral tradition. The Bible’s narrative and parables provided artists of African descent with the inspiration, contexts and themes to express their responses to the awesome, harsh and frequently incongruous realities of life in America.
The exhibition’s title includes terms commonly used in African and African-American communities: amen and “ashe” (or “ase” in a variant spelling), a word from the Yoruba language of Nigeria. Among the Yoruba people, ashe (pronounced AH-shay) is a crucial dynamic of the “inner eye” of the creativity of an artist, or the power to make something happen. Western scholars also interpret the term to mean power, authority or life force. In all cases, the words are affirmations–essentially, “so be it”–both in America and throughout the African diaspora.
“Ashe to Amen: African-Americans and Biblical Imagery” is on view Feb. 15 to May 26 at the Museum of Biblical Art, 1865 Broadway at 61st Street. For more information, call 212-408-1500 or visit www.mobia.org. Admission is free.
