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.

Charlie's Afternoon

Charlie has to start work in two hours and he really needs a bath. 

Charlie, along with two of his three fellow equine members of the Lancaster Mounted Police Unit, was out the day before with his primary rider, Officer Wayne McVey, splashing in the Conestoga River during a trail ride in County Central Park.

“Yesterday, we just let the horses be horses,” said McVey, as he led Charlie into the Mounted Unit barn in Long’s Park to get him prepped for that evening’s patrol duty.  But oh the mud; caked deep in under Charlie’s bay coat. 

So before even thinking about his bath, McVey pulled the heavy apparatus out of the tack room – starting with the shop-vac.  This was followed by a thorough combing with a hand-held, toothed device that looked like it was modeled after the lower jaw of an alligator.

Finally, a good hose down and brushing and Charlie was ready to dry in the afternoon sun.  He took it with nothing but equine equanimity – in fact, he seemed downright pleased.  “Well, who wouldn’t want a full body-rub before heading out to work every day?” McVey asked philosophically.

Mounted Officer Wayne McVey and Charlie

McVey, who is a 15-year veteran of the unit, knows his mount well.  The grooming is where the horse and rider cement the bond that carries them through the stresses and uncertainties of seven or eight hours on patrol in the city’s streets. 

“All he wants to do when we’re out there is to please me,” McVey said.  It’s the foundation for a beautiful partnership.

Charlie is 11-years old, the newest and, at 2200 pounds and nearly 18 hands tall, the biggest of the four horses in the unit.  Next in size is Duke, 14, as white and imposing as Moby Dick, then Liam, 13, and the smallest, the red, 14-year-old Ozzy.  Liam has been off active duty this summer recuperating from a leg injury

Liam, convalescing

Ozzy

McVey had started his tour in the Mounted Unit riding Zeke, whose death in 2009 broke the officer’s heart and had him considering his options.  Then Charlie arrived from a farm in Kennett Square and training him revived McVey’s spirit.

The horses have a mystical way of doing that, not just for those close to them, but for most everyone they encounter.  Make no mistake, their work is serious and tough, but as much as anything, the Mounted Unit are, as McVey described them, “the city’s ambassadors.”

Founded in 1979, Lancaster’s Mounted Unit is one of only four in Pennsylvania (the others belong to the cities of Philadelphia and Bethlehem and the PA State Police).  The cost, which is considerable, has always been borne by private funds donated to the Lancaster Police Foundation (to make a contribution click here).

Patrol

There’s a good bit of ceremonial work and pageantry involved – parades, honor guards and events taking them across the state and often bringing them to Washington.  There are frequent exhibitions and educational appearances at schools, camps and other organizations.

But the duty side of it entails some of the hardest work a police force routinely performs, like crowd control and traffic enforcement.  The Mounted Unit’s service record includes duty at the raucous protests outside the 2009 G-20 summit in Pittsburgh.

Their most familiar setting, of course, is on the streets of downtown Lancaster, where the animals’ strong, yet placid demeanor in the face of blaring horns, unmuffled motorcycles and belching diesel trucks invites strangers to smile and passersby to stop and, if only for a moment, to be present.

Naturally, children are Charlie’s core constituency.  McVey acknowledges, in a city made up of large minority communities whose relations with the police force have often enough been fraught, it can be the case that the kids come up to give Charlie a hug or a pat on the haunches as the adults keep their distance, vaguely disapproving.

Charlie's new friend

This lazy, late summer afternoon, a ten-year-old named Julian – his mom told him not to reveal a last name – found Charlie and McVey standing post in Penn Square. Julian stroked Charlie’s snout, rubbed his neck, wanted to know how fast he could go.  Julian’s little sister looked on in sheer awe at big brother communing with his colossal new friend.

Afternoon turned into evening and Penn Square went from quiet to nearly still.  Charlie still had four more hours of duty with Officer Wayne McVey and another twenty pounds of police gear on his back. 

“Say we head over to the Barnstormers game?” McVey suggested. 

Charlie didn’t protest.  He turned up Queen Street and clopped off into the gathering Lancaster night.

Chestnut Street Landmark Goes Bronx

It was au revoir last week for a small but well-known piece of public sculpture on the 500 block of West Chestnut Street.

"Urban Regeneration," an aptly named gathering of sedimentary coquina rocks and twisted, weathered steel by Bronx artist Linda Cunningham, was ponderously rolled up into the back of a rental truck and shipped off to a new location in the northeast Bronx neighborhood of Westchester Square, which is itself experiencing a regeneration. 

That Was The View That Was

The last piece awaits loading

The piece now removed from Chestnut Street is no stranger to travel.  Originally much larger, it was exhibited in Knoxville, Tenn., where a Georgia collector purchased a large segment of it. The remainder found an on-loan home in Lancaster, but when the homeowners sold to new occupants who wanted the sculpture gone, the search for a new site commenced.

The artist supervises the deconstruction

Formerly a professor of sculpture at Franklin & Marshall and a determined urban regenerator herself, Cunningham departed Lancaster some years back for the South Bronx, where she established the community gallery bronxartspace.  

The life of a work of art can be as nomadic as that of the artist. We wish both all due success.

Sculptor Linda Cunningham and friend take a moment before the long drive