Skoto Gallery at 529 West 20TH Street New York is presenting…a unique exhibition by Hampton artist, and ECSU retired Professor Emeritus , Lula Mae Blocton. They offer a look into two decades of her work from 1970 to 1990.This career survey will include two more shows over the next three years focusing on the evolution of her life’s work over time.
Dr. Barbera Stehle, Curator of this retrospective has written;
Blocton moved from Michigan to a loft near Cooper Union in 1972. From her first entry into the art world, Lula has been fighting for acceptance and visibility of the LGBTQ community and the Black and feminist communities. As she remarks: “There are two constants in my life; a love of art-formal, precise, abstract — and concern for human dignity and civil rights.” Blocton was criticized for eschewing figuration, for not painting scenes contributing to the political conversation. Nothing could have been further from the truth, Indeed, she claimed abstraction as a right, not the preserve of a privileged few. For her, thoughts about color were as concrete as they were political, personal, and spiritual. In time Blocton would propose that colors, black, white, and beyond- the entire spectrum– could evoke, metaphorically, the palette for an inclusive society. Blocton’s color grids of the 1970s explore the full color spectrum and are at times reminiscent of textile patterns. Her close observation of weavings brought to her paintings an understanding of overlay and colored edges. The hues are lively and rich, the compositions dreamy. In her drawings, the textures are fuzzy and delicate, reminiscent of mohair. In the paintings, the light seems to get caught in the brushstrokes. One feels the evocation of sunsets, summer lights, dawns, overcast atmospheric skies, all captured in a grid. Despite their abstraction, Blocton’s 70s’s compositions refer to the atmospheric light of New York City and other sites. The artist’s sensibility found inspiration in the shifts of light views through her windows. In these paintings luminosity comes from the back of the picture as it does in stained glass. Light manifests itself as a movement through the colors and influences the color gradations. Blocton’s palette shows already the sophistication of a great colorist; her grays have greens, her red oranges, her blues pinks, and her white blues.
Lula Mae Blocton was born in Michigan in 1947. She achieved a BFA from the University of Michigan and while seeking an MFA from Indiana University, along with a developing awareness of social issues, dove deeply into the color theories of Josef Albers. She acquired an awareness of additive and subtractive light, color transparency, the capture of light, and the effects of light from behind. These were the bedrock of her integrating African American and LGBTQ issues into her colorful and thoughtful paintings and drawings.
After earning her MFA, Lula decided academia was a pathway that would offer security and still allow artistic space for her own visions, dialogue, and social commentary. In 1988 she acquired a teaching position at Eastern Connecticut State University. Along with her wife and fellow artist, Shirley Bernstein, they built a house with two studios here in Hampton where they reside and still work today. Lula says about Hampton, “I am still inspired by the light here. Some of the most beautiful sunrises I have ever seen are right here. I love being surrounded by nature.”
The walls of her studio are bright white and her large colorful paintings have a language infused by Lula’s attention to detail. Her messages are subtle, “I don’t try to beat the viewer over the head politically.” Some of her prismacolor drawings are quite small. She explains that the pencils must be constantly sharpened for the blending of one color over another. And “never use in summer heat; it makes the lead too soft.” Large oil paintings fill the walls, some 40” by 30”, diptychs,tripyychs, African patterns emerge, straight lines, curved lines, geometric, even a whimsical animal shape or two. Lula has something to say, and we can look and listen for the next three years.
Recently, Holland Cotter of the New York Times reviewed her NYC show and said the following:
I encountered Lula Mae Blocton’s art for the first time only three years ago in the traveling exhibition “Art After Stonewall, 1969-1989.” In that febrile, figure-intensive show her 1975 abstract geometric painting “Summer Ease” was a meditative stopping point. The politics of the era were present but indirect: The colors were those of the rainbow flag, but tonally nuanced and applied to an off-center grid of rectangles. The work didn’t directly read as gay or Black, or feminist, which may be one reason Skoto’s tight survey of two decades of early work, from 1970-1980, curated by Barbara Stehle, is Blocton’s first New York City solo since 1978.
It’s a beauty. The early geometric oil paintings and wonderful colored pencil drawings, with their stroke-by-stroke textures and blurred contours, have the look of soft woven cloth. With the 1980s, their foursquare geometry splinters into diagonals in adjustable, multipanel compositions. Illusionistic space turns some of these paintings into galactic landscapes. And the interest in prismatic color intensifies: Light, optical and, one senses, metaphorical, becomes a primary subject.
Her work beyond the 1980s has been much influenced by African textile designs, as will no doubt be evident in future shows at Skoto, which is planning a career survey as a series of solo exhibitions shows. I look forward to seeing this visual narrative unfold and to being brought up-to-date on what’s happening with this artist-illuminator, who is in her 70s, in the Now.
Wayne Erskine