Art

Forgeries of African American Art on the Rise

NNPA NEWSWIRE — Today, the recent boom in museums has revealed a devotion to African-American artists and the increasing amount of attention paid to these artists has led to a significant rise in forgeries, according to a new report.

Published

6 years ago

January 13, 2019

Oakland Post

By Stacy M. Brown, NNPA Newswire Correspondent
@StacyBrownMedia

For African American artists, prior to 1980, exhibition venues were few, museum opportunities rare and there wasn’t concrete infrastructure for Black art.

“Before that time, the primary infrastructure for African American art lay in the hands of academia,” said Larry “Poncho” Brown, one of Maryland’s most prolific artists.

Brown noted that such talented individuals as Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett, Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden and others stood above the industry prior to the 1980s while the Harlem Renaissance, AfriCOBRA, and other black art movements were the last of the noted revolutions in African American art.

Today, the recent boom in museums has revealed a devotion to African-American artists and the increasing amount of attention paid to these artists has led to a significant rise in forgeries, according to a new report.

The ART Newspaper reported that, in the past few weeks alone, there have been many fakes purporting to be the work of Alma Thomas, Beauford Delaney, Charles White, Romare Bearden and Bob Thompson.

“It’s a whole generation: you could go from A to Z through the list, from Charles Alston to Charles White. I am seeing fakes attributed to all of them,” New York-based gallerist Rosenfeld told the newspaper.

Propelling the fakes market is the fact that many of these artists were overlooked or undervalued in their lifetimes, so scholarship and expertise in their work is limited. “You simply can’t go back to the source any more, and there is only a handful of people who worked first-hand with a lot of these artists while they were alive,” Rosenfield said.

“Forgers know they can capitalize on that.”

For artist Jonathan Green, who owns the popular Jonathan Green Studios in Charleston, S.C., forgeries are of little surprise. “In my 40-year career, I’ve run into more fraud than you can shake a stick at,” Green said. “Fraud has been around since the beginning of time.”

Because African American artists are now appreciated, there’s a high-value placed on their work and that keeps the fraudsters working overtime, Green said. Also, because black artists have historically been overlooked, so-called art experts are ignorant to many great originals, he said.

“A lot of people are capitalizing on this and, in some cases, the fault lies with the museums and the cultural centers because they’re not sophisticated enough to know about these artists,” Green said.

Additionally, as noted in The ART, some of the artists whose works are being forged, like Jacob Lawrence, have estates and foundations which should make it easier to authenticate the works.

However, foundations just aren’t doing this work anymore because they can’t afford to, said Bridget Moore of New York’s DC Moore gallery, which represents African-American artists including David Driskell, and Lawrence. For this reason, Moore says she has always kept detailed “fake files” on all of her artists.

Some of the recent forgeries include a 2011 case where Louisiana artist William Toye and his wife, Berry, pleaded guilty to charges of fraud after conspiring with a New Orleans-based dealer over the course of nearly 40 years to sell dozens of works painted by Toye and fraudulently signed as Clementine Hunter, an African-American artist who died in 1988. Hunter was self-taught and arguably one of the most significant artists to come out of Louisiana, according to the FBI special agent Randy Deaton, who led the three-year-long investigation.

“It was a remarkable case because she was a folk artist,” Deaton told The ART. “She was well known, but there wasn’t an authoritative archive on her career,” which made it easier for Toye to pass off his own paintings as hers.

One of the things that gave away the forgeries was the presence of cat hairs on some canvases, the conservator and forgery specialist James Martin, who consulted on the case, told the newspaper.

Currently the director of scientific research at Sotheby’s, Martin is the founder of Orion Analytical, which was acquired by the auction house in 2016.

“Cat hairs, the same discrepancies in under-drawing and signatures, and dirt wiped on to [the works] to impart a false appearance of age linked the fakes I examined to a common source,” he said.

Ultimately though, it was the sheer number of forged works attributed to Hunter by the Toyes that gave Martin a substantial sample size, enabling him to find the forgeries. “Generally speaking, problems with forgeries become easier to spot when seen in large numbers,” he said.

Concerns about the authenticity of several works by Charles White were raised when the Art Institute of Chicago was organizing the artist’s first major survey show, according The ART.

The exhibition, seen in Chicago last summer, is currently at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and is due to travel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art next month.

According to FBI special agent Timothy Carpenter, who manages the agency’s art crimes division, “it’s not the first time this issue has come up,” but he adds that the fake works that are surfacing are likely to be small or not of very high value, which may make dealers disinclined to formally report them.

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‘Let’s Glow SF,’ ‘Paints’ Holiday-Themed Light Shows on Landmark Buildings in Downtown San Francisco

The ‘canvases’ for Let’s Glow SF, which began on Dec. 6 and continues through Dec. 13, include 101 California St., Annie Alley, the Crossings at East Cut, the Ferry Building, One Bush Plaza, Pacific Coast Stock Exchange, Salesforce Tower, and the PG&E Substation.

Published

2 weeks ago

December 14, 2024

Oakland Post

The clock tower of the Ferry Building lights up with digital art projection. Photo by Anka Lee.

By Anka Lee, Post Intern

San Francisco has outdone itself again with the return of Let’s Glow SF, an abstract digital art projected brilliantly on various landmark buildings downtown for the holiday season.

Produced by the partnership of Downtown SF Partnership and A3 Visual, SF Glow began in 2021 with the intent to bring life back to downtown after the COVID-19 outbreak left its streets desolate.

Accompanied by different genres of music, the largest holiday projection arts festival in the U.S. is described on its web site as “a stunning journey of light” and “a striking marriage of art and technology …that elevates the city’s art scene.”

‘Painting’ the light installations onto buildings starts at 5:30 p.m. and ends at 10 p.m.

At the Ferry Building on Dec. 7, the animated light display was by featuring art by Spectre Lab, Maxin10sity, and Ryan Uzilevsky of Light Harvest Studio. Across from the Embarcadero, plastic chairs were put out for front-row seating to the upcoming projection.

Families dressed in matching sweaters chatted animatedly among themselves, couples cuddled up against the bitter wind, and the ringing of the trolley’s distant approach all served to brighten the street. Holiday-special drinks like hot chocolate and themed cocktails were sold and participating eateries like Avotoasty, Barcha Restaurant came together to bring to San Francisco America’s largest annual Christmas projection event.

The eight-day event will close on Dec. 13, with “Glow on Front: A Neon Block Party” from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. at 240 Front St.

Ervin, one of the Block by Block Downtown SF Partnership safety workers for the event, said he’s “looking at a record amount this year,” nearing around half a million attendees in total. But that evening, a lively community evolved from the original trickle of people waiting for the art show to start.

Vendors set up displays and sold jewelry, notebooks, and handmade hairbands. Seats filled up as the day’s light faded, the chill of the air increasing with the flow of people. The excitement among the crowd was palpable and contagious. It was a welcome feeling, electrifying the ever-growing holiday cheer.

Chatter quieted and adventurous music blasted from speakers that were behind the seating area. A projection by Spectre Lab shone directly at the Ferry Building, the abstract graphics of candlelight, lanterns, and disco balls ‘dancing’ to the beat of the music that transformed the clock tower into something alive. The illusory animation spun and stretched the tower with enthusiasm—this writer was in awe.

A newcomer to Let’s Glow SF thought it was really cool how it “utilizes space that we have and…adds something new…for us to enjoy.”

One family only learned about the lights show on their way home after arriving by ferry, and “[they’d] seen it on the billboard with all the artists…. It’s a very positive thing for San Francisco after everything that’s gone on [with COVID].”

Attend the Let’s Glow SF projection event today through Dec.13 for free, at any of their eight locations: 101 California St., Annie Alley, the Crossings at East Cut, the Ferry Building, One Bush Plaza, Pacific Coast Stock Exchange, Salesforce Tower, and PG&E Substation. Food and drink are sold at different participating businesses respective to each projection location. For more information, visit downtownsf.org.

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Art

Brown University Professor and Media Artist Tony Cokes Among MacArthur Awardees

When grants were announced earlier this month, it was noted that seven of the 22 fellows were African American. Among them are scholars, visual and media artists a poet/writer, historian, and dancer/choreographer who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to spend as they see fit. Their names are Ruha Benjamin, Jericho Brown, Tony Cokes, Jennifer L. Morgan, Ebony G. Patterson, Shamel Pitts, Jason Reynolds, and Dorothy Roberts. This is the third in the series highlighting the Black awardees.

Published

2 months ago

November 4, 2024

Oakland Post

Tony Cokes. Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Special to The Post

Tony Cokes

Tony Cokes, 68, is a media artist creating video works that recontextualize historical and cultural moments. Cokes’s signature style is deceptively simple: changing frames of text against backgrounds of solid bright colors or images, accompanied by musical soundtracks.

Cokes was born in Richmond, Va., and received a BA in creative writing and photography from Goddard College in 1979 and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1985. He joined the faculty of Brown University in 1993 and is currently a professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media.

According to Wikipedia, Cokes and Renee Cox, and Fo Wilson, created the Negro Art Collective (NAC) in 1995 to fight cultural misrepresentations about Black Americans.^[^5]

His work has been exhibited at national and international venues, including Haus Der Kunst and Kunstverein (Munich); Dia Bridgehampton (New York); Memorial Art Gallery University of Rochester; MACRO Contemporary Art Museum (Rome); and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (Harvard University), among others.

Like a DJ, he samples and recombines textual, musical, and visual fragments. His source materials include found film footage, pop music, journalism, philosophy texts, and social media. The unexpected juxtapositions in his works highlight the ways in which dominant narratives emerging from our oversaturated media environments reinforce existing power structures.

In his early video piece Black Celebration (A Rebellion Against the Commodity) (1988), Cokes reconsiders the uprisings that took place in Black neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark, and Boston in the 1960s.

He combines documentary footage of the upheavals with samples of texts by the cultural theorist Guy Debord, the artist Barbara Kruger, and the musicians Morrisey and Martin Gore (of Depeche Mode).

Music from industrial rock band Skinny Puppy accompanies the imagery. In this new context, the scenes of unrest take on new possibilities of meaning: the so-called race riots are recast as the frustrated responses of communities that endure poverty perpetuated by structural racism. In his later and ongoing “Evil” series, Cokes responds to the rhetoric of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror.”

Evil.16 (Torture.Musik) (2009–11) features snippets of text from a 2005 article on advanced torture techniques. The text flashes on screens to the rhythm of songs that were used by U.S. troops as a form of torture.

The soundtrack includes Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” and Britney Spears’s “… Baby One More Time,” songs known to have been played to detainees at deafening decibel levels and on repeated loops. The dissonance between the instantly recognizable, frivolous music and horrifying accounts of torture underscores the ideological tensions within contemporary pop culture.

More recently, in a 2020 work entitled HS LST WRDS, Cokes uses his pared-down aesthetic to examine the current discourse on police violence against Black and Brown individuals. The piece is constructed around the final words of Elijah McClain, who was killed in the custody of Colorado police. Cokes transcribes McClain’s last utterances without vowels and sets them against a monochromatic ground. As in many of Cokes’s works, the text is more than language conveying information and becomes a visualization of terrifying breathlessness. Through his unique melding of artistic practice and media analysis, Cokes shows the discordant ways media color our understanding and demonstrates the artist’s power to bring clarity and nuance to how we see events, people, and histories.

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Art

A Prolific Painter: Artist and Advocate Lois Mailou Jones

Lois Mailou Jones was a prominent African American artist whose career spanned more than seven decades, from the Harlem Renaissance to the modern art movement. She was not only a prolific painter but also an influential educator, bridging cultural gaps and challenging stereotypes through her vibrant and diverse works.

Published

2 months ago

October 29, 2024

Oakland Post

Courtesy of National Archives, Washington, D.C.

By Tamara Shiloh

Her unique journey of self-expression, dedication to art, and advocacy for African American and African themes made her a crucial figure in the evolution of American art.

Jones was born on Nov. 3, 1905, in Boston. Raised in an intellectual and supportive family, she demonstrated an early interest in art, encouraged by her mother, who believed in the importance of creativity. Lois studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she faced racial challenges but persisted in pursuing her passion.

Her pursuit of higher education led her to the prestigious Design Art School, where she perfected her skills in textile design. Later, Jones attended Harvard University and received further training at the Académie Julian in Paris. This European experience greatly influenced her style and broadened her perspective on art.

Jones’s career began in textile design, creating works that were used by leading textile companies. However, her true passion was painting. During the Harlem Renaissance, she moved away from textile design to focus on fine art, exploring themes that reflected her heritage and the African diaspora.

Her early works were influenced by European Post-Impressionism, featuring landscapes and still life, but Jones’s style evolved over time. After spending time in Haiti, she was deeply inspired by Caribbean culture, and her palette became more vivid, her subject matter more symbolic. The influence of African and Caribbean culture is evident in her later works, where she used bright colors and geometric patterns to convey the spirit and stories of the people she encountered.

Her contributions to African American art were significant during a time when Black artists struggled for recognition. She often focused on themes of African heritage, pride, and unity, blending African illustrations and portraits with Western artistic techniques to create a unique visual language that celebrated Black culture.

She was also a dedicated educator. She began her teaching career at Palmer Memorial Institute in North Carolina and later became a professor at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she taught for almost 50 years. Through her teaching, she influenced generations of young Black artists, encouraging them to explore and express their cultural heritage through art.

In the 1930s and 1940s, she worked to exhibit her work alongside other Black artists, helping to create a platform for voices that had long been excluded from mainstream galleries.

Recognition and Legacy

Jones achieved significant recognition throughout her lifetime, both in the United States and internationally. She exhibited her work across the globe, including in Paris, Africa, and the Caribbean.

Jones continued painting until her death in 1998, leaving behind a rich legacy of artistic achievements and contributions to art education. She broke boundaries by celebrating Black identity and heritage at a time when these themes were often marginalized.