Ta-coumba T. Aiken

Last updated

Ta-coumba T. Aiken (born 1952, Evanston, Illinois) is a painter and public artist who identifies his work as superlative realism. [1] He has created over 600 murals and public art works. [2] A mural Aiken designed in 2013 using over 596,000 Lite Brite pegs holds the Guinness World Record for the largest picture made of Lite Brite. [3] He has also taught and curated. [4] He is sometimes referred to as the "mayor of Lowertown" for his neighborhood presence at his longtime studio in the Lowertown Lofts Artists Cooperative in the Lowertown neighborhood in downtown Saint Paul, Minnesota. [2]

Contents

Early life

Aiken was born on December 29, 1952, in Evanston, Illinois. [5] [6] His mother was a healer and worked as a house cleaner. His father worked as a garbageman and brought home damaged paint sets for his son from stores that had thrown them in the trash. [7] [8] His parents were religious and emphasized community, including keeping a separate freezer for food for anyone who needed it. [7] His mother died on his 20th birthday, and he views part of his work as carrying on her legacy of healing. [7] [8]

At the age of three, he was interested in painting, and by age six, he did an exhibit in his childhood home's basement. [9] While in high school in Evanston, he attended the International Design Conference in Aspen, Colorado. [1] He came to Minneapolis at the age of 16 for art school and graduated from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1974. [10] [4] He initially intended to head for Madison's art scene but got lost and stopped to buy gas in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where he asked where the nearest town was with more Black people. The gas station employee told him to go to Minneapolis. [4] He worked at Honeywell in Minneapolis as an illustrator. [8] While he worked there, he was invited to the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in Nigeria, and that experience changed his artistic path, leading to his work in what he calls superlative realism. [8]

Work

Aiken works in paint, canvas, paper, clay, glass, and metal. [6] He has worked in places across Minnesota, including creating a 1987 mural on a grain elevator in Good Thunder Township, [2] a large mural on the side of the Jax building across from the Union Depot light rail station in downtown Saint Paul, [2] etched glass for the Capitol River Watershed District, [11] [12] murals on a new apartment building in the Rondo neighborhood of Saint Paul, [13] [14] and the ceramic fireplace on the fourth floor of the Minneapolis Central Library. [15]

In 2013, he designed a mural made of over 596,000 Lite Brite pegs that was assembled by volunteers as part of the Saint Paul Foundation's Forever Saint Paul Challenge. The finished mural is 12 feet tall and 24 feet long and is on display at Union Depot in downtown Saint Paul. [16] [17] It remains the world record for the largest picture made from Lite Brite. [3]

In 2022, Aiken was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in fine arts after previously applying for it several times. [9] He is Minnesota's first Black fine arts recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. [8] His work is in the collections of the Walker Art Center, [18] the McKnight Foundation, the Minneapolis Central Library, [15] and Augsburg University, [19] among others.

Collaborations

Aiken often collaborates with fellow artist Seitu Jones. They have collaborated since 1972 and done many murals together. [20] In 1992, they created "Shadows of Spirit," a series of sculptures in the form of human silhouettes cast in bronze that were embedded in the Nicollet Mall wide sidewalks as a commission by the City of Minneapolis. Poetry by Rosemary Soyini Vinelle Guyton is inscribed on each shadow. [21] At the time of their initial installation in 1992, the city did not allow individuals to be identified in art works, so the public had a more difficult time connecting the sculptures with the stories of the people behind them. [21] The seven individuals included: [22]

In 2019, the two artists, along with Guyton, developed seven sculptures at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden entitled "Shadows at the Crossroads" that were intended as an extension of their 1992 Shadows project. [23] [24]

Awards and fellowships

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexander Archipenko</span> Ukrainian-American avant-garde artist, sculptor, and graphic artist

Alexander Porfyrovych Archipenko was a Ukrainian-American avant-garde artist, sculptor, and graphic artist, active in France and the United States. He was one of the first to apply the principles of Cubism to architecture, analyzing human figure into geometrical forms.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John T. Biggers</span> African-American muralist

John Thomas Biggers was an African-American muralist who came to prominence after the Harlem Renaissance and toward the end of World War II. Biggers created works critical of racial and economic injustice. He also served as the founding chairman of the art department at Houston's Texas State University for Negroes, a historically black college.

Martin L. Puryear is an Afro-American artist known for his devotion to traditional craft. Working in a variety of media, but primarily wood, his reductive technique and meditative approach challenge the physical and poetic boundaries of his materials. The artist's Liberty/Libertà exhibition represented the United States at the 2019 Venice Biennale.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Minneapolis Sculpture Garden</span> American sculpture garden

The Minneapolis Sculpture Garden is an 11-acre (4.5 ha) park in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the United States. It is located near the Walker Art Center, which operates it in coordination with the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board. It reopened June 10, 2017, after a reconstruction that resulted with the Walker and Sculpture Garden being unified as one 19-acre campus. It is one of the largest urban sculpture gardens in the country, with 40 permanent art installations and several other temporary pieces that are moved in and out periodically.

Rirkrit Tiravanija is a Thai contemporary artist residing in New York City, Berlin, and Chiangmai, Thailand. He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1961. His installations often take the form of stages or rooms for sharing meals, cooking, reading or playing music; architecture or structures for living and socializing are a core element in his work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George Morrison (artist)</span> American painter and sculptor

George Morrison was an Ojibwe abstract painter and sculptor from Minnesota. His Ojibwe name was Wah Wah Teh Go Nay Ga Bo. Morrison's work is associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement in the United States.

Minneapolis is the largest city in the US state of Minnesota, and the county seat of Hennepin County.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Virgil Cantini</span> American sculptor (1919–2009)

Virgil David Cantini was an American enamelist, sculptor and educator. He was well known for innovation with enamel and steel and received both local and national recognition for his work, including honorary awards, competitive prizes and commissions, along with a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1957. Cantini long served as a faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh, where he helped to create the Department of Studio Arts. A longtime resident of the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Cantini died on May 2, 2009, at the age of 90. Today, many of his large scale works are on display throughout the city of Pittsburgh.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gabriel Fernández Ledesma</span>

Gabriel Fernández Ledesma was a Mexican painter, printmaker, sculptor, graphic artist, writer and teacher. He began his career working with artist Roberto Montenegro then moved into publishing and education. His work was recognized with two Guggenheim Fellowships, the José Guadalupe Posada medal and membership in the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana.

Lester Johnson was an American artist and educator. Johnson was a member of the Second Generation of the New York School during the late 1950s. The subject of much of his work is the human figure. His style is considered by critics and art historians to be in the figurative expressionist mode.

Michael Loew was an American Abstract Expressionist artist who was born in New York City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lucile Blanch</span> American artist (1895-1981)

Lucile Esma Lundquist Blanch was an American artist, art educator, and Guggenheim Fellow. She was noted for the murals she created for the U.S. Treasury Department's Section of Fine Arts during the Great Depression.

Charles Gaines is an American artist whose work interrogates the discourse of aesthetics, politics, and philosophy. Taking the form of drawings, photographic series and video installations, the work consistently involves the use of systems, predominantly in the form of the grid, often in combination with photography. His work is rooted in Conceptual Art – in dialogue with artists such as Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner and Mel Bochner – and Gaines is committed to its tenets of engaging cognition and language. As one of the only African-American conceptual artists working in the 1970s, a time when political expressionism was a prevailing concern among African-American artists, Gaines was an outlier in his pursuit of abstraction and non-didactic approach to race and politics. There is a strong musical thread running through much of Gaines' work, evident in his repeated use of musical scores as well in his engagement with the idea of indeterminacy, as similar to John Cage and Sol LeWitt.

Jacob Getlar Smith was an American painter and muralist who worked mostly in New York City. Smith studied at the National Academy of Design in New York from 1919 to 1921.

Sedrick Ervin Huckaby (1975) is an American artist known for his use of thick, impasto paint to create murals that evoke traditional quilts and his production of large portraits that represent his personal history through images of family members and neighbors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frank J. Brown</span> African-American visual artist (1956–2020)

Frank J. Brown was an African-American visual artist active in Minnesota. His sculptures have entered several public collections.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Seitu Jones</span> American Artist

Seitu Jones is a multi-disciplinary artist and community organizer known for his large-scale public artworks and environmental design. Working both independently and in collaboration with other artists, Jones has created over forty large-scale public art works.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nyeema Morgan</span> American visual artist

Nyeema Morgan is an American interdisciplinary and conceptual artist. Working in drawing, sculpture and print media, her works focus on how meaning is constructed and communicated given complex socio-political systems. Born in Philadelphia, she earned her BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art and her MFA from the California College of the Arts. She has held artist residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Smack Mellon. Morgan's works are in the permanent collections of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and the Menil Collection.

Shadows at the Crossroads is a collection of seven sculptures created by Twin-Cities based artists, Ta-Coumba T.Aiken, and Seitu Jones, as commissioned for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. On display since 2019, the works depict historically prominent and influential Minnesotan figures. The collection is a revival and continuation of a previous collaboration by the respective artists, titled "Shadows of Spirit," which was commissioned for the Nicollet Mall situated in downtown Minneapolis in 1992. It was funded by the T.B. Walker Fund, 2019. Thomas Barlow Walker founded the Walker Arts Center in 1927, which, in partnership with the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board, manages the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden where the collection is housed.

Malcolm Haynie Myers was an American painter, printmaker and professor known primarily for his Intaglio-style engravings. His work is included in numerous museum collections.

References

  1. 1 2 "'I'm colorblind' | Artist defies odds, wins competitive fellowship". kare11.com. 2022-04-29. Retrieved 2023-12-22.
  2. 1 2 3 4 "Lowertown Pioneer: Ta-coumba Aiken, the 'Mayor of Lowertown'". The Lowertown Archive @ Lowertown.info. 2020-01-26. Retrieved 2023-12-22.
  3. 1 2 "Largest picture made of Lite-Brite". Guiness Book of World Records. December 26, 2023. Retrieved December 26, 2023.
  4. 1 2 3 "Ta-Coumba Aiken: Call and Response opens at the MIA". Mn Artists. 2007-11-19. Retrieved 2023-12-27.
  5. ↑ "About". Ta-coumba T. Aiken. Retrieved 2023-11-21.
  6. 1 2 3 4 "Tyrone Ta-coumba Aiken". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation... Retrieved 2023-11-13.
  7. 1 2 3 "Guggenheim fellow Ta-coumba Aiken's solo show at Dreamsong gallery – Northeast Minneapolis Arts District" . Retrieved 2023-12-22.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 Robinson, Robyne (2022-08-28). "Ta-coumba Aiken's Guggenheim Fellowship Was a Long Time Coming". Mpls.St.Paul Magazine. Retrieved 2023-12-27.
  9. 1 2 "Ta-coumba T. Aiken wins a Guggenheim, recognizing decades of dynamic work". MinnPost. 2022-04-26. Retrieved 2023-11-21.
  10. ↑ "Ta-Coumba Aiken | Minneapolis College of Art and Design". www.mcad.edu. Retrieved 2023-12-22.
  11. ↑ "2019 Capitol River Watershed District". Ta-coumba T. Aiken. Retrieved 2023-12-27.
  12. ↑ Sant, Mary Van (2019-09-04). "CRWD Feels Fortunate to Call Hamline-Midway Home". CRWD. Retrieved 2023-12-28.
  13. ↑ "2019 Selby Milton Victoria Project". Ta-coumba T. Aiken. Retrieved 2023-12-27.
  14. ↑ "Public Art Gallery". CHICAGO AVENUE FIRE ARTS CENTER. Retrieved 2023-12-28.
  15. 1 2 "The Power Of …". www.hclib.org. Retrieved 2023-12-27.
  16. ↑ "St. Paul artist's Lite Brite work wins Guinness record". MPR News. 2013-02-17. Retrieved 2023-12-27.
  17. ↑ "Public Art". UNION DEPOT. Retrieved 2023-12-27.
  18. ↑ "Ta-coumba T. Aiken". walkerart.org. Retrieved 2023-12-27.
  19. ↑ rjohn (2017-12-12). "December 11, 2017: Furniture and art". Hagfors Center for Science, Business, and Religion. Retrieved 2023-12-27.
  20. ↑ Millington, Maxwell (April 16, 2023). "Get to know longtime Twin Cities artist Ta-coumba T. Aiken". Axios Twin Cities. Retrieved December 26, 2023.
  21. 1 2 Flanagan, Regina (2017-12-27). "Shadows of Spirit: What's Invisible, Becomes Visible". Nicollet Mall Public Art. Retrieved 2023-12-27.
  22. 1 2 "Shadows of Spirit are Restored to Nicollet". Nicollet Mall Public Art. 2017-07-24. Retrieved 2023-12-27.
  23. ↑ "Shadowy exhibits added to Minneapolis Sculpture Garden". MPR News. 2019-06-20. Retrieved 2023-12-28.
  24. ↑ "Walker Art Center Commissions New Work by Seitu Jones and Ta-coumba T. Aiken for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden". walkerart.org. Retrieved 2023-12-28.
  25. ↑ "40 winners named in St. Paul Knight Arts Challenge; 'Glensheen' at History Theatre". MinnPost. 2015-10-07. Retrieved 2023-12-28.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.