Vision and Sound brings work by African American artists in Arizona to the overwhelmingly white town of Sedona, Arizona.
Vision and Sound
February 1–28, 2023
Sedona Arts Center
According to recent United States census data, the population of Sedona, Arizona, is 78 percent white (88 to 93 percent, claim other sources), which is reason enough for the Sedona Arts Center to host Vision and Sound: An African American Experience, says Sedona Arts Center CEO Julie Richard. Norma Cunningham, who founded Vision and Sound with her husband Michael Cunningham in 2015, agrees. “Because of the town’s demographics, this is a perfect place to get the conversation going about African American lives and art,” says Cunningham.
Vision and Sound is “an educational experience and environment that broadens the understanding and appreciation of African American art, music, film, and literary works for multigenerational and multicultural audiences,” according to the organization’s website. “We strive to build supportive relationships to encourage cultural equity throughout Arizona and beyond—recognizing that professional American artists of African descent are too often overlooked.”
In its early years, the Cunninghams focused the event in the West Valley of Phoenix. But in 2021, they met with Richard and formed a Vision and Sound partnership. This year, in addition to an art exhibition at the center with compelling work in an array of media by eight Arizona artists, the center hosted the symposium “Understanding Culture and Race Through the Arts” with a keynote by L’Merchie Frazier of SpokeArts in Boston, and a workshop on “Race, Culture, History and the work of Art” facilitated by Lois Brown, Arizona State University Foundation professor of English and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at ASU.
Other events included musical performances at the center and in Goodyear, Arizona; artist lectures at the public library in Glendale, Arizona; and workshops and an exhibition in Goodyear. The symposium and exhibition in Sedona, says Cunningham, worked brilliantly in tandem, as “the discussions we had helped attendees better understand the history and stories behind the art. This year’s Vision and Sound was really unbelievable in what it accomplished.”
The exhibition, now closed in Sedona but with a display of other works by the same artists online through March 31, 2023, included some of the best work recently shown at the center, including Patricia Bohannon’s Dream, in which she masterfully constructed found materials into a remembrance of homes lost, found, and carried. Her elegant mixed-media ladder sculpture, Persevere, incisively inverted “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mythology through the African American experience.
Jenita Landrum’s series of U.S. flags reimagined through collage, Invisible Man from the We the People series, most powerfully portrayed the continuing violent erasure of African American men. The artist repeated the image of a man (holding a photo of, perhaps, his younger self in his palm) behind the red and white stripes (bars?), with the same image covered in blue paint behind his white-covered and X’d-out portrait (the stars). The entire work was bound in police caution tape.
Jacqueline Chanda’s oil painting The Davy Tunnel hauntingly recreated her memory of walking through a white neighborhood. A young Black child, alone under trees stripped of leaves, his face a mask of fear, vulnerability, and humility, holds his hand held up in placatory greeting as a group of children—rendered in grays—approaches.
Bob Martin’s oil paintings, saturated with feeling, Joe Willie Smith’s jazzy abstractions, Guggenheim fellow and photographer Stephen Marc’s large-scale photos of right-wing ideologues, and Shoreigh Williams’s side-eye self-portraits of awareness in micron, color pencil, and acrylic additionally brought not only diverse media but diverse points of view to the exhibition.
Aaron Allen Marner, in talking about his kinetic portraits, brought the meaning and message of the symposium home, however. Comprised of energetic lines and textured swaths of paint laid down with a palette knife, the portraits’ vigorous technique urgently contrasted with the subjects’ closed eyes. The way he rendered his subjects, Marner explained, reflects the pain of African American people—just one of the many provided insights that deepened attendees’ understanding and appreciation of the artwork, as well as the lives of the artists. Not only in February, Black History Month, but every day throughout the year.
