Talle Bamazi

Last updated
Talle Bamazi
Born
Bamazi Talle

NationalityAmerican
Education Art Students League of New York,
New York Academy of Art
Occupation(s)Artist, curator, gallery owner
Website http://www.talleart.com

Talle Bamazi is a Togolese-born Kabye painter, curator, and gallery owner. He is based in Columbus, Ohio.

Contents

Early life and education

Born in northern Togo (West Africa), into the Kabye ethnic group. Bamazi began his artistic career as an apprentice to his uncle, a traditional Togolese artist. Although he studied architecture in Lomé, he rapidly returned to painting, and developed his own distinctive style bridging traditional African and contemporary modern art. [1]

After moving to the United States, he studied at the Art Students League of New York, and earned a MFA degree at the New York Academy of Art. [2] He is currently the lead artist-in-residence at the King Arts Complex, where his monumental series of life-sized portraits of Columbus-area black artists, formerly featured at the Columbus Museum of Art, now hangs in the historic Pythian theater. [3]

From 2004 until 2011, Bamazi operated a gallery called KIACA (Kabiye Impact Contemporary African Art), which was the only black-owned gallery in Columbus' noted arts' district, the Short North, and one of the few black-owned galleries in the city. KIACA served as an influential talent incubator for many Columbus-area African and African-American artists, including psycheñwelic painter April Sunami. [1]

Exhibitions

Bamazi's work has been featured at the Columbus Museum of Art, where he had a solo show in 2008 and an upcoming solo show ("The Flying Calabash Man") in 2020, as well as at the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center in Wilberforce, Ohio. His other solo exhibitions include the Columbus City Hall, Welancora, Karma and Brecht Forum galleries in New York and the Goethe Institut in Lomé. His work has also appeared in group shows at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, the African American Museum in Hempstead, NY, and the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts in Brooklyn, NY. [4]

Awards and honors

Bamazi was recognized, alongside MacArthur "Genius" grant recipient Aminah Robinson, at the 27th Annual King Arts Center Gala in 2014. [5]

Media

Bamazi has frequently appeared on "Good News," Time Warner Cable Channel 23, and hosted his own television show around the arts during his youth in Lomé. His work has been featured in Art in America, Monarch Magazine, C-BUS Magazine, Valentine New York Art Magazine, and Diva Magazine, among others. [4]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kehinde Wiley</span> American artist (born 1977)

Kehinde Wiley is an American portrait painter based in New York City. He is known for his naturalistic paintings of black people that reference the work of Old Master paintings. In 2017, Wiley was commissioned to paint former President Barack Obama's portrait for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. The Columbus Museum of Art hosted an exhibition of his work in 2007 and describes his paintings as "heroic portraits which address the image and status of young African-American men in contemporary culture."

Togo has very diverse and rich traditions in music and dance, which is in part reflected by Togo's regional hip hop scene. Hip-hop togo is the style of Old school hip hop of America mixing with the traditional music of Togo.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Samella Lewis</span> American art historian (1924–2022)

Samella Sanders Lewis was an American visual artist and art historian. She worked primarily as a printmaker and painter. She has been called the "Godmother of African American Art". She received Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement from the College Art Association (CAA) in 2021.

“Art is not a luxury as many people think – it is a necessity. It documents history – it helps educate people and stores knowledge for generations to come.” – Dr. Samella Lewis

Melvin "Mel" Edwards is an American artist, teacher, and abstract steel-metal sculptor. Additionally he has worked in drawing and printmaking. His artwork has political content often referencing African-American history, as well as the exploration of themes within slavery. Visually his works are characterized by the use of straight-edged triangular and rectilinear forms in metal. He lives between Upstate New York and in Plainfield, New Jersey.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pheoris West</span> African American artist (1950–2021)

Pheoris West was an African-American artist. He was an Associate Professor Emeritus Ohio State University College of the Arts, where he joined the faculty in 1976.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robin Rhode</span> South African artist based in Berlin (born 1976)

Robin Rhode is a South African artist based in Berlin. He has made wall drawings, photographs and sculptures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rashid Johnson</span> American artist and film director (born 1977)

Rashid Johnson is an American artist who produces conceptual post-black art. Johnson first received critical attention in 2001 at the age of 24, when his work was included in Freestyle (2001) curated by Thelma Golden at the Studio Museum in Harlem. He studied at Columbia College Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his work has been exhibited around the world.

Paul Sietsema is a Los Angeles–based American artist who works primarily in film, painting and drawing. His work addresses the production, consumption, and proliferation of cultural objects, reflecting his interest in the possibility of an artwork to mediate information or meaning in a way that engages with the aesthetics of a specific time period. In the words of Sarah Robayo Sheridan, “Paul Sietsema compounds organic and artificial detritus in all his artwork, scavenging in history’s wake to identify specific tools of cultural production and foraging for concepts of art promulgated in the words of artists and attitudes of critics. He mines film as a vestige, the medium of the mechanical age, pressing and squeezing its very obsolescence through a contemporary sieve. In so doing, the artist hovers in the switchover between a bodily inscription in the image and a fundamental reconstitution of sight and representation in the matrix of the virtual. Where body stops and image starts is a divide collapsing through a series of innovations and accidents that go back as far as the people of Pompeii trapped in an emulsion that marked their death, but which paradoxically carried forward their image into eternity.”

Linda MacNeil is an American abstract artist, sculptor, and jeweler. She works with glass and metal specializing in contemporary jewelry that combines metalwork with glass to create wearable sculpture. Her focus since 1975 has been sculptural objets d’art and jewelry, and she works in series. MacNeil’s jewelry is considered wearable sculpture and has been her main focus since 1996.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alvin D. Loving</span> African-American abstract expressionist painter (1935 - 2005)

Alvin D. Loving Jr., better known as Al Loving, was an African-American abstract expressionist painter. His work is known for hard-edge abstraction, dyed fabric paintings, and large paper collages, all exploring complicated color relationships.

Clifford Owens is an African-American mixed media and performance artist, writer and curator. Owens was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1971 and spent his early life in Baltimore. Owens is known for his works which center on the body and often include interactions with the audience and spontaneity.

Ralph Humphrey was an American abstract painter whose work has been linked to both Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. He was active in the New York art scene in the 1960s and '70s. His paintings are best summarized as an exploration of space through color and structure. He lived and worked in New York, NY.

Jack Earl is an American ceramic artist and former teacher, known for drawing inspiration from his home state of Ohio to create rural pieces “with meticulous craftsmanship and astute details… to where you could smell the air, hear the silence and swat the flies.” Although his works hint at highly personal, intellectual, and narrative themes in an almost unsettling manner, Earl is “a self-described anti-intellectual who shuns the art world." He is known particularly for using his trademark format, the dos-a-dos : “This art form is like a book with two stories… the two seemingly incongruent images prompt the viewer to fill in the conceptual gap through poetic speculation.” His work often involves dogs or the character “Bill”, who is said to be a combination of Earl’s father-in-law, himself, and others. The titles to his pieces are typically lengthy, stream-of-consciousness narratives that suggest the folk or rural lifestyle. These are intended to add another dimension to the artwork. His work has received a notable response over his decades-long career, especially since he is regarded as “a master at reminding us that within the events we take for granted are moments of never-ending mystery and wonder.” Earl continues to live in Lakeview, Ohio with his wife, Fairlie.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Titus Kaphar</span> American painter

Titus Kaphar is an American contemporary painter whose work reconfigures and regenerates art history to include African-American subjects. His paintings are held in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, New Britain Museum of American Art, Seattle Art Museum, Mississippi Museum of Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and University of Michigan Museum of Art.

<i>African-American Flag</i> Artwork by David Hammons

Untitled is a vexillographic artwork by American artist David Hammons from 1990, combining the colors of the Pan-African flag with the pattern of the flag of the United States to represent African diaspora identity. The flag replaces the red, white and blue colors on the traditional American flags with Pan-African colors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">April Sunami</span> Mixed-media artist

April Sunami is a mixed-media artist based in Columbus, Ohio. Her work has been exhibited in museums, galleries and private collections across the United States, and in both Ghana and Cuba, and is represented in the permanent collections of the Southern Ohio Museum in Portsmouth, Ohio and the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center in Wilberforce, Ohio. She was described in the Columbus Dispatch by Columbus Museum of Art director Nannette Maciejunes as an heir to the legacy of Aminah Robinson. She has served in leadership roles in local arts organizations Creative Arts of Women, Mother Artists at Work and Creative Women of Color, served as assistant director at the William H. Thomas Gallery and was the first board president of All People Arts Incorporated. She is currently featured as part of the "Columbus Makes Art / Art Makes Columbus" tourism campaign as a face of Columbus art. She has a BA in Art History from Ohio State University and a MA in Art History from Ohio University. She is one of the current artists-in-residence at the Blockfort arts building. Her mentors in the world of art include Talle Bamazi, Stephanie Rond, Queen Brooks, and Bettye Stull.

Nanette Carolyn Carter, born January 30, 1954, in Columbus, Ohio, is an African-American artist and college educator living and working in New York City, best known for her collages with paper, canvas and Mylar.

Queen Brooks is an artist from Columbus, Ohio, best known for her distinctive, brightly painted, wood-burned pieces. Brooks has been described by The Columbus Dispatch as "one of Ohio’s best-known African-American artists," and by Columbus Museum of Art director Nannette Maciejunes as "a leading arts elder in our community." Brooks is an influential mentor of many younger artists, including psycheñwelic painter April Sunami. She is a past winner of the Lila Wallace, Reader's Digest International Artist Award, which gave her a fellowship in Abidjan, the capital of the West African country of Côte d'Ivoire.

Adger Cowans is an American fine arts photographer and abstract painter.

References

  1. 1 2 Sandra Grady. "Bamazi Talle". Ohio Arts Council. Retrieved February 19, 2020.
  2. "Artist's Talk Talle Bamazi" . Retrieved February 19, 2020.
  3. Jim Fischer (March 27, 2019). "Arts preview: 'Ohio Black Masters'". Columbus Alive. Retrieved February 19, 2020.
  4. 1 2 "TalleArt: About Us" . Retrieved February 19, 2020.
  5. "Exhibit preview: Talle Bamazi among artists honored by King Arts Complex". Columbus Alive. May 14, 2014. Retrieved February 19, 2020.