Forgotten Things, Forgotten Times
1978 Springfield Avenue, Maplewood
Closes: February 22 (Weekends Only)
For over five decades Newark visual artist and educator Onnie Strother, now 76, has touched thousands of lives through his art, teaching, curating, and community involvement.
In his latest exhibition Forgotten Things, Forgotten Times, Strother digs deep into an American history of racial injustice and demeaning stereotypes. He digs deep into labor. He digs deep, too, into religious faith, music, and dance.
The show was curated by Maplewood artist Nettie Forné Thomas. Longtime friends in art and advocacy, Thomas and Strother were also fellow board members at 1978 before its coming under Maplewood’s Division of Arts and Culture. Thomas has created 1978’s Black History Month exhibits for about 25 years.
“Nettie came to me and said, ‘We’ve shown everybody except you. It’s time for you.’” Strother said. “She came to my studio at Riker’s Hill in Livingston. I told her to take anything she wants. Then I designed the show.”
Strother thinks long about his subjects: “For Newshawks, I was out in different Newark neighborhoods every Sunday for six months,” Strother said. He made multiple trips to Pennsylvania for the Bethlehem Steel series.
He works in thematic series. In his multimedia series–The Beulah Series, Big Boy Emmett Till—each element deepening its companions. His respect—love—for his subjects inform each line in his linotype series—here as in Queens of Gospel.
Others works are single photographic images. His Bethlehem Steel, dramatically lit at night, contrasts with its companion photographs of rusted machinery and railroad cars, striking in the rich textures of their decay.
Strother weaves popular culture into his art: news headlines, advertising, movie posters.
“Sometimes, people don’t believe what happened in the past,” Strother said. “I access old news stories, photographs, event notices. I saw an artist who did transfers and learned the technique. I first used it with my works on Emmett Till, my reaction to the killing of Trayvon Martin.”
With Big Boy Emmett Till, Strother resurrects a life brutally ended by hatred: Till, a 14-year-old from Chicago spending the summer of 1955 with family in Mississippi was tortured and killed for “not knowing his place.”
Strother brings this approach to The Scottsboro Boys series, nine works for each of the young men and others for the two women who accused them. “The Scottsboro Boys is my personal favorite,” Strother said.
The impoverished Scottsboro boys, ages 13-19, were riding the rails in early 1930s Great Depression Alabama. They were sentenced to death by successive male, all-white juries for the rape of two white women that had never happened. Their crime was their skin color and Strother doesn’t want them to be forgotten:
“The trials drove American intellectuals to the Communist Party when the NAACP wouldn’t take a rape case. There was a lynch mob. The case went to the Supreme Court establishing the principle of fair representation,” Strother said. “It was vital to African-American culture, literature and art. There was fundraising at the Apollo Theater.”
“The cases inspired the film They Made Me a Criminal. Some years ago, there was Broadway play about them,” said Strother about the 2010 Tony Award-winning musical.
Strother incorporates all these events into the series, bathing it in vivid yellow punctuated with stop and look primary reds and blues. “You can see through yellow paint,” Strother said.
Yellows and oranges unify his Newshawks and, as seen below, creates flow in his elegiac compositions.
“I wanted a series about Newark–I’m very connected to my hometown,” Strother said. “I photographed men, women—all ages, all colors, all ethnicities– standing in Newark roadways hawking newspapers and all wearing similarly colored safety vests.”
Strother’s respect and empathy for his subjects gives the newshawk photographs and all his works great depth of feeling. The hawks speak to us still.
Strother and I talked about my favorite series Allegory of the Lathe: “I don’t buy new tires. I went over to Central Tire and watched the workers removing old tires from their rims, stretching, reworking the rubber–bending their bodies to the work,” Strother said. “I started thinking about an Ursula LeGuin’s story and how our souls are stretched and altered after death.”
In his black-and-white photograph, a repairman becomes one with his work. Companion photographs capture workers, face swaddled, bent over hot heating element. Strother switches to color when capturing the shop exterior, with its signature tire, sun-faded red against a blue sky–signage transformed into vernacular art.
Strother taught art and art history at South Orange’s Columbia High School for 24 years before being tapped to chair the Visual Art Department at Newark’s famed Arts High School. Strother currently lectures throughout Essex County and teaches at nonprofits, notably Livingston’s WAE Center for the Developmentally Disabled and Newark’s Creative Aging Project. He has curated scores of exhibits.
“I never include my own works in the group shows I curate,” said Strother said, who co-curated the current Freedom at Studio Montclair’s Leach Gallery.
A compelling storyteller, Strother, in Forgotten Things, Forgotten Times, teaches us all.
Learn More, See More
Onnie Strother will present an artist talk on February 21 at the exhibition.
