Buildings and Grounds
February 24, 2021 – April 17, 2021

Installation Photography : Christian Carone

Image Photography : Juan Giraldo

Press Release

Buildings and Grounds

From February 24 through April 17, 2021 the Wilmer Jennings Gallery at Kenkeleba is pleased to present BUlLDINGS AND GROUNDS, an exhibition of prints by 10 African American Artists.     

The title of the exhibition relates to a series of linoleum prints of buildings on the Atlanta University Campus made by Hale Woodruff.  His emblematic images were created to raise funds for supplies for art students at the five colleges during the Great Depression.  In this sense, the exhibition suggests a connection between Saddler’s interest in teaching Pinhole Photography to inner-city students and the prints in Buildings and Grounds. In both exhibitions, the connection to the Black cultural tradition is apparent in the accessibility and affordability of the materials and techniques.

Building and Grounds also relates to the exhibition of Pinhole Photographs in the surprising visual connections and parallel thinking between the prints and the photographs of the Saddler presentation. A major distinction appears in the extraordinary depth of field in the photographs and the predominantly frontal perspective of the prints. On the obvious level, all prints and all of the photographs are produced in a stark black and white format.  In addition, whether a linocut, etching, lithograph or woodblock print, as in the pinhole photographs, the open areas are angular and blisteringly white against the stillness of deeply mysterious shades of black. While some of the printmakers prefer flattening the images of buildings in an almost symbolic fashion, Saddler prefers working with geometric angles that are intensified by the sharp contrasts of the urban landscape.

There is a startling congruence in thinking between the pinhole photographers and the printmakers.  For the photographer, there is the issue of invention and the reality of inversion in that the pinhole photographs appear in the camera as an image upside down. Likewise, printmakers have to be able to think and construct images in the reverse, as an inverted perspective.  This speaks to the interior consciousness and agility of the artists.

Sharp contrasts are also employed by printmakers, such as William E. Smith in Leaning Chimneys, but others prefer a softer context, although still stark, as in the Norman Lewis Southern Landscape. Margaret Burroughs in Chicago Rooftops presents an allover composition that mirrors the density and congestion of the urban landscape. While the Charles Alston lithograph, Looking From The Jump Off presents the congestion of the natural world in an allover composition.            

Kenkeleba programs are funded in part by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and many generous friends.