Monday night at the Swann Fine Art Gallery (East 25th Street), in conjunction with their auction of Black art that featured one of his quilts, Harlem artist Michael Cummings told 50 or so admirers something about his momentous journey.
Born and educated in California, he earned a BA in American art history at Empire College in Santa Rosa. First, though, determined to please them, he told Swann’s Director of African American Art, Nigel Freeman, that he studied for two years to become the accountant of his parents’ dreams. After he decided he must make art, and that their suggestion of maintaining his creative output as just a hobby was impossible, his father responded, “Fine! But I won’t support you.”
It was a high school field trip to an exhibition where he had seen Van Gogh’s pulsating “Starry Night” that first made Cummings say to himself, “That’s what I must make!” Initially working as a painter, constructing collages and shadow boxes, Cummings gradually, early in the 1970s, followed friends’ advice to do something different. Moving to New York, he also taught himself to quilt, studying the works of local quilt artists who, he said, were invariably women, he read everything he could find about this ancient domestic art form. Quilting, he learned, is deeply rooted in the African American experience out of a necessity — surviving by turning trash into treasure.
“Quilting was meant to keep you physically warm, simultaneously warming your soul, through the process of making objects to beautify your environment,” said Cummings.
For the longest time, he said, it might have actually looked like quilting really was just a hobby for him. “I wanted to defy the limits [his parents] tried to impose on me,” he said. “That entailed keeping a day job, but because my every waking moment and even my dreaming, contributes to a compulsion to tell stories with quilts, I’ve been an artist all along, for the past 50 years.”
Vivian Ayers-Allen was the first New York gallerist to exhibit Cummings’s quilts. Then in 1997, he was commissioned by Seagrams to contribute a narrative quilt to their clever Absolut Vodka advertising campaign.
“I have been creating quilts the entire time I’ve been in New York,” Cummings said. “I love being able to tell the stories it was impossible for me to find as a youngster. I tell these stories and portray people who represent and valorize me. Working with fabrics to reflect and construct a world that extols our value and importance makes my art quilting an exciting adventure. Fabrics allow me to surround myself with color, pattern, and texture that are energizing. Sometimes I’ll keep bolts that spoke to me in the fabric store on the shelf for months, for years even, then taking [them] down, almost in a trance. When I get ‘in the zone,’ cutting out shapes, piecing them together, like you would with a puzzle or a mosaic, I like to listen to jazz, to all kinds of music, and the rhythm feeds me and fuels my creative process.”
With a penchant for creating series that enabled him to explore variations on a person or theme, Cummings has honored and immortalized President Barack Obama; Obama’s favorite president, Abraham Lincoln; Shirley Chisholm, Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall, Langston Hughes, and others from the pantheon of African Americans worthy of recognition. Befitting their dignity, his portrayals are iconic and timeless. Inspired by Faith Ringgold, some are emblazoned with the subject’s words, emboldened with direct quotes that Cummings hopes provide viewers with some background related to struggles and pains that came before and still remain in a class- and race-riven America.
His work, now commanding tens of thousands of dollars and more, his place in collections like Harlem’s Studio Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and Washington’s Renwick Gallery, attests to the prominent stature Cummings has gained. So does his piece “Josephine Baker in Cabaret,” up for sale with a group of works by the best-known Black artists of the 20th century. Works by Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett, Hughie Lee-Smith, and more are all here, expected to fetch many millions among them.
Until recent times, though, no matter who you were, the value of Black art always lagged far behind that realized for work by white painters, printmakers, or sculptors. “A bronze by Richmond Barthé cost much less than one by Daniel Chester French, just as a genre scene painted by Henry Ossawa Tanner still commands pennies compared to the tens of millions you’d get for a George Bellows boxing match. No Tanner has ever sold for as much,” said Harlem painter Larry Bentley.
Ever so slowly, though, this will change. Championed by the Swann Gallery, the process has already begun. “The Sugar Shack,” Ernie Barnes’s picture of withering dancers, used on the “Good Times” TV series and for the cover of Marvin Gaye’s “I Want You” album, was once considered little better than an illustration — ordinary commercial art. When Eddie Murphy bought it from the Gaye estate for $50,000.00, some people were amazed. “But seeing changes in attitudes toward Norman Rockwell or Maxfield Parrish, I didn’t blink,” continues Larry Bently. He recalled that, “in 2022, the duplicate painted by Barnes … sold for $16,000,000.00. A work by Basquiat [that] cost as little as $19,000.00 in 1984, in 2017, sold for $210,500,000.00.”
Overall, Black art remains undervalued now, but this sort of “correction” is also the destiny of Michael Cummings.
Asked if his parents ever changed their mind about what they thought should be his “hobby,” Cummings smiled drolly. “Well, even past 90, my mother would refer to my work that way, but she was present for plenty of awards and art openings. She saw me applauded and mobbed by so many people, Black and white, who struggled just to get close enough to shake my hand. They’d end up pushing her out of the way and monopolizing my time, so I knew she knew.“
If equity and parity are the goal, there’s still a long way to go, but Michael Cummings’s triumphant trajectory is an indication that Black people can succeed as artists, and that we are well on our way.