Painting With Light: The Art of Bunch Washington

The first and lasting impression made by the art of Bunch Washington, an obscure but multi-talented African-American visual artist, is its deep luminescence.

Washington (1937-2008), whose work is now on exhibit at Franklin & Marshall’s Phillips Museum, tinkered and experimented for years in his home studios in Brooklyn and Poughkeepsie, NY, until he found the right formula of resin and pigments.  These he would pour and mix, gradually building up, layer by layer, adding color and dropping in objects both random and specific to be in encased in the fluid radiance of the cured solid blocks he would call  “transparent collage.”

The artist Bunch Washington in Brooklyn
photo: Jerry Jack, courtesy Valentine NY

A dozen of these, including two bas relief sculptures that were antecedents along the artist’s path of developing his technique, are on display around the perimeter of the Phillips’s Dana Gallery.  They surround a room filled with the man’s lifetime memorabilia and an odd assortment of unprepossessing, mid-century diner furniture meant to evoke the Lower East Side soul-food restaurant Washington ran that was a haunt of Charles Mingus, Dick Gregory, Kathleen Neal, Sun Ra and other nonpareils of New York’s mid-Sixties African-American cultural flowering during that fertile moment.

Regrettably, though perhaps necessarily, the transparent collages are illuminated artificially from behind rather than by the natural light that Washington created them for.  Like the windows at Chartres, these pieces were made to change and interplay with the movement and constant variations of sunlight.

Eastern Beauty, year unknown
photo: Melissa Hess

The impermanence of experience emanating from within the confinement of these meticulously constructed blocks of kaleidoscopic colors and talismanic objects – jewelry and fabrics, charms, coins, leaves and flowers, an occasional photograph – amply represents Washington’s searching and often turbulent life.

McCleary Bunch Washington was born fatherless into a poor Philadelphia family.  His innate talent and creativity were identified by a public school art teacher early on, earning him formal training at the Fleisher Art Memorial, the Philadelphia Museum School and the Barnes Foundation.  The restaurant was his entry point into the New York scene, where he then turned his rich knowledge and strong writing skills into a breakthrough scholastic volume about Romare Bearden, a giant of African-American art in the last century.

Bearden befriended him and they developed a mentor-protégé relationship that propelled Washington’s own artistic journey.  He never received great recognition and was financially stressed most of his life.  He also suffered periodic bouts of mental illness that sent him hurtling off-track at various times, and in his later years he lapsed into drug addiction and homelessness.

Washington’s daughter (and the curator of the Phillips exhibition) Elizabeth de Souza believes it is possible her father’s psychological disturbances were rooted in the neurotoxicity of the materials he worked with.  Whatever its origins, he remained to the end a man of gentle manner, engaging, humorous and curious.  In his stretches of lucidity, he was given to compose poetry, much of it informed by the precepts of the Baha’i Faith that he embraced early in adulthood.

The struggles of a black American man buffeted hard by life’s storms, creating beauty and meaning while trying to make his way in New York’s remorseless art world, reveal themselves in Bunch Washington’s transparent collages.  But they reveal themselves without rancor or recrimination.  They reveal themselves in the play of the light, the external light captured within the box, and the light then transformed and refracted outward toward the viewer.  In the process, the artist – somewhat miraculously – conjures serenity.

Pearls, 1998
photo: Melissa Hess

Get up and go:

The exhibition “Painting With Light: The Art of Bunch Washington” will remain at the PhillipsMuseum of Art through Oct. 31, 2014.  The museum is located in the south wing of the Steinman College Center and is open to the public, free of charge, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, 11:30 am – 4:00 pm, Thursday 1:00 pm – 4:30 pm, and on weekends, 12:30 pm – 4:30 pm.

The exhibition features a number of special events, notably a gathering Fri., Oct. 17, 1:30-4:30 pm in the gallery that will combine music and discussion to explore Bunch Washington’s art and its relationship to mental health, culture and social conditions. Participants will include Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Les Payne, long one of the nation’s most prominent African-American journalists and a dear friend of Washington’s.

All images subject to copyright laws and used with permission herein.