January 2 - February 28, 2009  Flomenhaft Gallery, LLC
547 West 27th Street (Chelsea) New York, NY 10001
The exhibit, “African American Art and Life,” is an extravaganza of the Flomenhaft Gallery collection, and also two invited artists, Camille Billops and photographer, Builder Levy.  Artists’ works from the gallery collection include Emma Amos, Benny Andrews, Romare Bearden, Beverly Buchanan, Jacob Lawrence, Faith Ringgold, Charles Lloyd Tucker and Carrie Mae Weems.

With skill and glee, Camille Billops uses racial caricatures to lure us into a nasty place as in “Old Black Joe – the Friendship,” “Who’s Dat Nigga Dar a Peepin,” and “KKK Boutique.”  In the latter work, imagine the Ku Klux Klan coming into a black boutique to purchase their silly cloaks and ridiculous headpieces. Billops says that her art and the Hatch-Billops Foundation are about “victory over obscurity and ignorance, and confirmation of herself.”

As a young artist in the early 1960s, Builder Levy discovered that with photography, more than any other medium, he could express the inspiration he felt in response to the richnessand vitality of African American life and culture.  His richly gold-toned gelatin silver print photograph, March on Washington, 1963, an intense and beautiful candid portrait of a woman framed within the multiracial multitude of that momentous demonstration of hope, embodies the enduring humanity of 400 years of the African American freedom struggle. Read More