Portland Museum of Art
Portland, Maine
1-207-773-ARTS or 1-800-639-4067
http://www.portlandmuseum.org
Bearing Witness: Contemporary Works by
African American Women Artists
Opening April 7, 1999 at the Portland Museum of Art, Bearing
Witness: Contemporary Works by African American Women Artists surveys
the impressive and unique contributions of an important and under-recognized
segment of the art community. Featuring 47 paintings, prints, drawings,
photographs, mixed-media installations, and sculpture by 24 talented women,
Bearing Witness includes works by Emma Amos, Elizabeth Catlett, Jean
Lacy, Howardena Pindell. Rachelle Puryear, Faith Ringgold, Alison and Betye
Saar, Lorna Simpson, and Carrie Mae Weems. Bearing Witness will be
on view through May 31, 1999.
African American women artists have had to struggle to
find a completely new way to address their experiences. 
From the use of
domestic materials like beads, buttons, and fabric to the incorporation
of non-western artistic approaches and models, they have enriched and informed
the course of 20th-century American art. Spanning four generations, the
works in Bearing Witness address a diversity of social and personal
issues, including history, ethnicity, age, class, religion, prejudice, and
invisibility through the eyes and experiences of the artists. Each generation
of women in this exhibition faced new challenges in their art and lives,
and emerged victorious.
Pioneers like Lois Mailou Jones and Elizabeth Catlett,
who began their careers in the 1930s and 1940s, had to 
fight to be recognized as individuals and artists,
while members of the younger generation like Alison Saar and Carrie Mae
Weems face the prospect of providing leadership for African American women
artists in the new millennium. While each artist has her own unique vision,
she also supports, or "bears witness," to the lives and works
of her sisters. 
The exhibition debuted in the spring of 1996, at the new
Museum of Fine Art in the Camille Hanks Cosby Academic Center at Spelman
College in Atlanta, Georgia. The opening coincided with the 115-year anniversary
of Spelman, the first college in the world founded for Black women.
Top to Bottom: Lois Mailou Jones, Chanson D'Bahia,
1989, acrylic on canvas, 40 x 29 inches; Faith Ringgold, Marlon Riggs:
Tongues Untied, A Painted Story Quilt, 1994, acrylic on canvas with
pieced and quilted fabric, fabric borders, and quoted given to Faith by
Marlon, 89 x 59 1/5 inches; Amalia Amaki, Souvnir Gaze #2, 1995,
wood, color photographs, buttons, simulated pearls, beads, and jewelry fragments,
20 x 16 inches; Carrie Mae Weems, From the installation: From Here I
Saw What Happened and I Cried, 10 work installation of monochromatic
color photographs with sand blasted glass, 26 3/4 x 22 3/4 inches, P.P.O.W.
Gallery, New York, New York.
For further biographical information on selected artists
cited above please see America's Distinguished
Artists, a national registry of historic artists.
rev. 9/20/10
Search Resource
Library for thousands of articles and essays on American art.
Copyright 2010 Traditional Fine Arts Organization, Inc., an Arizona nonprofit corporation. All rights
reserved.
Opening April 7, 1999 at the Portland Museum of Art, Bearing
Witness: Contemporary Works by African American Women Artists surveys
the impressive and unique contributions of an important and under-recognized
segment of the art community. Featuring 47 paintings, prints, drawings,
photographs, mixed-media installations, and sculpture by 24 talented women,
Bearing Witness includes works by Emma Amos, Elizabeth Catlett, Jean
Lacy, Howardena Pindell. Rachelle Puryear, Faith Ringgold, Alison and Betye
Saar, Lorna Simpson, and Carrie Mae Weems. Bearing Witness will be
on view through May 31, 1999. 
