Radcliffe Bailey at David Beitzel – Brief Article

by Calvin Reid, ART IN AMERICA

Radcliffe Bailey creates lavish, painterly homages to black American experience in the form of socially inflected, somewhat elegiac sculptural wall assemblages. The pieces, which are made of mixed mediums on wood and are often shaped, function as platforms for Bailey’s ruminations on culture and history. Offering a wide range of African-American sensibilities, events and personalities, they map a black American core within the circumference of American social and cultural history. The works’ formal qualities — loosely patterned painterliness, Pop cultural borrowings and idiosyncratic surface applications — suggest the conceptual conundrums characteristic of early Johns or Rauschenberg. But it’s Bailey’s evocation of a kind of mystic urbanism, his use of rich expressive color, as well as plentiful allusions to Southern black folk culture — also characteristic of the work of African-American artists such as David Hammons, Betye Sear and Jean-Michel Basquiat — that provide both improvisational bravura and an extravaganza of eccentric symbolism.

Four and One Corner - South, 2005

Bailey often uses broad, seemingly still-liquid strokes of indigo to define and accentuate a network of brighter colors and painterly gestures. Very often antique photographs of African-Americans — seated formal family shots, ancient baseball games, dignified individual portraits — are collaged into the lyrically grid-locked painting surface amid other fetishistic decoration such as African dolls and felt ribbons. The paintings are scarred and marked with dates, numbers, names of cities and places that allude to an historical undercurrent.

The scale of the works is routinely imposing, but Mound Magician, shaped like a baseball diamond, dwarfs the other works. Mound Magician is a tribute to black baseball and seems to evoke distinguished figures such as Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson of the Negro Leagues. In the painting the battery positions (pitcher and catcher) are covered with pieces of Plexiglas beneath which are affixed two uniform numbers on felt (the traditional material of old-time baseball uniforms). The “infield” is covered with densely painted canvas. Antique photographs and baseballs (which have been painted a solid color and numbered) dot the work. Names of places saturated with black historical lore — Louisiana, Birmingham, Mobile, Angola, Sierra Leone — are combined with briskly painted phrases and filigreed brushstrokes.