Visionary Vibes: A Blog by Aberjhani

A Hidden American Treasure Comes to Revelatory Light (part 1 of 3): Geography & History

9/9/2019

Title-art graphic featuring artist Suzanne Jackson in conversation on stage at the Telfair Museums' Jepson Center for the Arts. (Art graphic by Aberjhani)

Anyone on June 27, 2019, attending the opening of the Suzanne Jackson Five Decades retrospective at the Telfair Museums' Jepson Center for the Arts in Savannah, Georgia (USA), or involved in its production prior to that historic evening, could tell something exceptional was happening. In addition to the mesmerizing kind of vibrant textiles and stunning canvases one might expect to discover at such an opening for a contemporary artist, there were seven vitrines (display cases) filled with family photographs, vintage 1960s flyers advertising a "Revolutionary Art Exhibit," sketchbooks, program notes, letters, photographs, and other revealing archival materials from different chapters of Jackson's, and America's, life stories.

The items made available went beyond career highlights to illuminating an artist's considerable immersion in a significant historical moment: the 1960s-1970s Black Arts Movement as it rooted and flowered in Los Angeles and San Francisco, California. For those observers of African-American history who contend America's West Coast contributed much less to the Harlem Renaissance than other regions because it lacked, during the 1920s-1940s, a heavy representation of the traditions and institutions then associated with Black culture in the South, the 1960s may be considered the bridge which connected history and geography.

Ideas of how and why that might be the case, within the context of Five Decades, first struck me as apparent while listening to the on-stage conversation between Jackson, fellow artist Alonzo Davis, and Telfair Museums curator Rachel Reese. Jackson's and Davis's stories of establishing art galleries in downtown Los Angeles, building a sustainable cultural arts community, and balancing commitments to careers and political struggle with commitments to family life were not completely unlike what we find in the life stories of East Coast predecessors like Lois Mailou Jones and Augusta Fells Savage.

This observation does not contradict the contexts of ecowomanism and black feminist ethics contexts in which the brilliant essays by Reese, julia elizabeth neal, Melanee C. Harvey, and Tiffany E. Barber place Jackson's work in the forthcoming Five Decades catalog. It simply acknowledges one more powerful aspect of the place she now occupies as an influential contemporary artist of historical importance. In her foreword to the catalog, artist Betye Saar alludes to the significance of Jackson's role as someone whose art and advocacy have bridged gaps:

"In the 1960s, black artists in Los Angeles were struggling to be recognized. Some public venues had integrated exhibitions, but generally speaking black artists were ignored... Suzanne made a concrete imprint when she opened Gallery 32 on Lafayette Park Place..." (Appropriately enough, work by the 93-year-old Saar herself is currently undergoing a kind of revival with forthcoming solo shows at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.)

After Jackson's, Davis's, and Reese's dynamic conversation, the feeling when walking among the dozens of artworks hung with dazzling appeal in the Steward North and Kane Galleries, absorbing the full impact of the actual exhibit, was like glimpsing a long-hidden priceless American treasure. Those who have yet to treat themselves to the experience still have until October 13, 2019, to do so at the Jepson. Just as importantly, the exhibition catalog is due out September 25 and orders for it are being accepted now.

Continental Crossings & Fortuitous Connections

Artist Suzanne Jackson (right) speaking with librarian Mark Darby (left) at historic 2004 "Harlem Renaissance in Savannah" book signing and lecture presented by Aberjhani (center) at the Carnegie Branch Library in Savannah, Georgia (USA). (Photograph Bright Skylark Literary Productions Collection)

My journey toward the almost magical evening of June 27 actually began on August 28, 2004, when Ms. Jackson attended my "Harlem Renaissance in Savannah" lecture and book signing at the Carnegie Branch Library in Savannah. Since relocating to the city eight years earlier, she had been surprised to discover the African-American cultural arts scene was as vibrant as it was and included someone who had co-authored (with the late Sandra L. West) the groundbreaking Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance.

I was surprised and impressed to learn she had lived on the West Coast--just as I had in San Francisco--and now taught at the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD). If I'd had the slightest prophetic clue of the visual marvels that would be revealed 15 years later, I would have been flat-out amazed.

Mounted wall screen showing video images from life and career of artist and educator Suzanne Jackson. The video was part of the opening for Jackson's Five Decades Retrospective at the Telfair Museums Jepson Center for the Art in Savannah, Georgia, on June 27, 2019. (Bright Skylark Literary Productions photograph by Aberjhani ©2019)

That early meeting was genuinely fortuitous because in those days my responsibilities as a caregiver had already started to limit participation in public events. I nevertheless did make it out occasionally and during the years which followed the lecture our paths crossed enough for an acquaintance to become a friendship. As it turned out, we had more than the cultural arts and California in common. We had both also spent time in Fairbanks, Alaska--she as a child growing up there and me some years later as a U.S. military journalist.

We came to know many of the same creatives and shared enthusiasm over their triumphs. Grief, too, demanded acknowledgement when experiencing the loss of such individuals as painter Allen M. Fireall (1954-2014), his fellow artist and friend Luther E. Vann (1937-2016), and author-educator Ja A. Jahannes (1942-2015). More personal, more blood-connected losses inserted themselves into the stories of our individual lives as well, both stalling and fueling painted poems and poemized visions that would manifest in coming years.

NEXT: A Hidden American Treasure Comes to Revelatory Light (part 2): Jazz, Art, & Partying

Aberjhani
author of Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah
and Songs from the Black Skylark zPed Music Player

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Elemental's 10th anniversary inspires mindful reflections and renewed hopes (part 1 of 2): remembrance

5/2/2018

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May is Elemental the Power of Illuminated Love Month at Bright Skylark Literary Productions. (Title art graphic collage by Aberjhani)

"He used the word 'nourishing' to refer to Vann's work. And the more I looked through the work seriously, and took my time, that term [seemed] quite apropos. The art and poetry of Elemental nourishes the soul, the mind, and the aesthetic."
--Ja A. Jahannes (from remarks delivered May 29, 2008 at Celebration of Release of Elemental: The The Power of Illuminated Love)

Every now and then I get a good sense of what it might feel like to be a phoenix waking up as a pile of ash and bones which suddenly burst into new flaming life. It was kind of like that recently while continuing my ongoing recovery from the hurricanes of 2016 (Matthew) and 2017 (Irma) to prepare for the 2018 stormy-weather season.

In the course of going through yet another pile of unsorted thumb drives, DVDs, CDs, and mini cassettes, I discovered a lost treasure: a DVD filmed by the gifted polymath Benjamin Bacon (known to friends and colleagues as BeBe) labeled "Elemental, Early Morning Light Productions, by Luther E. Vann, Final Cut, Jepson Gallery, Savannah, GA, May 29, 2008." It is not something which will ever challenge the global impact of director Ryan Coogler's game-changing Black Panther film, but it has added immeasurably to the 2018 10th Anniversary Celebration of the publication of Elemental, the Power of Illuminated Love (ISBN 9780972114271).

The video, shot just as YouTube and social media were developing their considerable digital muscles, captures in raw fashion a singular moment in the history of cultural arts in the United States. The program that evening included my friend Luther's debut effort as a videographer, a short bio-documentary titled Coming Home, in which he recorded me reciting the poem from which the video took its title, and chronicled his days in New York City pursuing his craft while living in the basement of a friend's apartment on Washington Square.

Artist Luther E. Vann honing his skills in the basement of a friends apartment in NYC circa 1973. (Photo by Chris Torres. Bright Skylark Literary Productions Collection)

In addition to Luther, program participants included: Dr. Ja A. Jahannes, musician Travis Biggs, The Telfair's Friends of African-American Art (who did so much to make the evening possible), its then director Steven High, curator Harry DeLorme, and many patrons, supporters, and fans. They all combined intentions and resources to demonstrate art's ability to endow a diverse community with a single beautiful purpose. That potential is one which has eluded too many in 2018 as educational institutions and organizations like the National Endowment for the Arts have seen their budgets butchered at a time when what creatives gift to society possibly has never been more needed.

The current political assaults on freedom of the press and individual expression make it even more important to savor the kind of rarity represented by Elemental's launch ten years ago. Moreover, the event takes on greater and greater significance because some of the key geniuses who made it happen are no longer with us on the physical plane and others have taken on new missions in different cities or countries. Vann died April 6, 2016, and Jahannes on July 5, 2015. (I last communicated with violinist Travis Biggs a few months before Luther passed but since then have not received any responses to phone messages or emails).

Sensory Brilliance

Dr. Jahannes' contribution to the celebration remains particularly memorable because with his eloquent, insightful, and often humorous comments on the art and poetry of Elemental he both "stole the show" and gave it back to the audience as a perfect gift. He had been asked to introduce the Coming Home video precisely because of his familiarity with our work both as individuals and as a team. In his words:

"Aberjhani and Luther Vann have dynamic synergism in their poetry and their paintings...'Luther Vann's paintings will enrich our community for years to come,' said Steven High in a preface to Elemental. So will the poetry of Aberjhani..."

He spoke with infectious ease when comparing Luther's work to that of painters as diverse as the Norwegian master Edvard Munch and the iconic Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh. He did the same when pointing out parallels between it and musicians such as the classical composer Antonin Dvorchak and giants of jazz John Coltrane and Miles Davis. An accomplished photographer himself, Jahannes further described as Vann as "a remarkable storyteller" and "a sensory artist" whose images engage viewers' attention on multiple levels:

"He's a master of sensory brilliance. His work is visual, captivating, and viscerally engaging... If you look at these paintings, you can almost hear them. They are auditory. There are voices emitted by color and arrangement. They're kinesthetic. Energy [is] generated by the arrangement of pulsating hues... They are tactile. You can almost feel the texture by the way he layers and juxtaposes color and arranges symbols and images..."

These observations have since helped various scholars and art lovers to more fully understand what they are viewing when going through the pages of the book, or standing in front of Luther's work at the Telfair Museum of Art or elsewhere.

The Deep Road to Infinity

Long before Elemental made cultural arts history in Savannah, I had become an admirer of Dr. Jahannes's poetry and essay collection, Truthfeasting. For that reason, I felt more than a little honored by his generous comments on the body of my published works and was thrilled to hear him recite the following passage:

We take the deep road to infinity.
From the silence to the sound
to the cross to the mosque
we bleed through the hidden tunnels of history
tapping the jingle of empires and chains
to the beat of memory gone astray.

We take the deep road to infinity...

(from the poem "More Than You Know," Elemental, p. 16)

His willingness to lend his voice in service to something greater than either of our individual ambitions was a large part of what defined Elemental's thematic substance. It brought to mind the great Lucille Clifton’s famous dictum that when it comes to identifying yourself as a poet and actually writing poetry, "One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated."

The celebratory evening of May 29, 2008, marked the culmination of an almost two-decade campaign to breathe life into a project which had survived, and in part been shaped by, the turbulence born of two creative individuals' private, social, political, and professional lives. The luxury of having finally reached a point of relief nearly overshadowed the excitement of having achieved a long-sought triumph. We soon realized we had completed only one more stage of a perpetually interactive process which would, much like the book, continue to unfold in layers of color and sparks of revelation.

NEXT: Elemental's 10th anniversary inspires mindful reflections & renewed hopes (part 2): illumination
Aberjhani
©May 2018

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The Birth of Elemental, the Power of Illuminated Love

11/15/2016

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"The universe said, 'Let me show your soul something beautiful." quote by Aberjhani from ELEMENTAL, the Power of Illuminated Love. (Postered Poets Art Graphics)

The edits on my current book in progress were close to complete when Hurricane Matthew came to town and rearranged my priorities. President-Elect Donald Trump, at the time still a presidential candidate, contributed his fair share of distractions as well but that’s another blog for another time.

Along with its unexpected destructiveness in my hometown, Hurricane Matthew also delivered a few gifts. One of the most important of those gifts for me was the rediscovery of research materials in the form of notebooks from the 1990s long thought lost in the shuffle of previous relocations. The material turned up while storing and salvaging valuable to keep them safe from the hurricane.

The discovery of the notebooks themselves became part of my account––now included in the previously-noted book-in-progress–– of surviving Matthew. One of those notebooks contains an unvarnished story of the birth of ELEMENTAL, the Power of Illuminated Love. Because of the death of Luther E. Vann, my co-creator on the project, earlier this year, the notebook was a startling find.

Discussing the Possibility

Had he lived, Luther would have turned 79 on December 2, 2016, so it seems appropriate that notebooks and early recorded recitals of poems from ELEMENTAL should have started popping up at this time. The excerpt below is taken from notes dated September 11, 1992, more than a year after I first met the painter and sculptor.

At this point, I had been experimenting with writing poems based on his art but this was our first time discussing the possibility of working on a book together. Also during this period, comparing our developing friendship to the meeting between Jalal al-Din Rumi and Shams Tabrizi helped me visualize the possibility of working with an artist who had been practicing his craft much longer than I had been plying mine.

Detail from "For the Love of the Poet" painting by Luther E. Vann featured in Elemental the Power of Illuminated Love.)

Called Luther around 8 tonight to make an appointment for our interview next week. As with the week before, I found myself extremely nervous about calling but then realized I was allowing silliness to impede our mutual progress. When I did call, he greeted me with uninhibited enthusiasm and all of my reservations vanished in the sudden light of his pleasure.

He took the opportunity to thank me for the poem [“For the Love of the Poet” based on painting with same name] I left him and Sandra last week.

“Man,” he said, “that was really beautiful. I don’t know if Sandra told you or not, but the idea we came up with—because your words seem so spontaneous, from a gut level––was to do a book together. If you can do something that spontaneously for all the pictures in the book, that would be just great.”

I repeated my tired line about my genius not matching his.

“I don’t know about that. Like I said, the poem has a strong spontaneousness and it has that same multidimensional quality as the picture.”

“Well, it really is an extension of the portrait because when I saw it, the words started writing themselves. In fact, all of the pictures and sculpture inspired me so strongly that I just started composing poetry right then and there.” [At an exhibition of his work]

Could it be we were really having this conversation? How many times had I sat or walked or worked while imagining the possibility of the very thing we were now discussing. The first time I saw his work, it seemed the most natural thing in the world that I should compose a poetic commentary to match the images. What astonishes me more than anything else is that he seems to view my work the same way. How can that be?

Whereas in the recent past I’ve allowed myself to indulge in comparisons between my meeting Luther and great historical personalities meeting with the same, lately I’ve tried to refrain from doing that. But there seems to be in it some appropriateness independent of my own speculations. Shem Friedlander wrote of my two favorite Sufis that theirs “was a friendship based on the discovery of God through each other at a time when both beings had a lesson to impart to one another.” I think possibly it would have been more accurate to say that an overwhelming affirmation of God is what Shams and Rumi experienced through their friendship…

Luther has made a psychospiritual transition which I have, in a way, only casually reached for, while I as yet possess a sense of focus and drive (a bit weakened thought it may be) which seems to have atrophied within himself (quite understandably so give his spiritual disposition). Ours is, I believe, meant to be a true and good partnership. [end of excerpt]

Concluding and Beginning Anew

This post concludes with Carol Phelan Aebby’s poem, The Young Poet and the Painter, which is a rare kind of homage to my work with Luther written in the bibliographic profile acrostic form originated by Andre Emmanuel Bendavi ben-YEHU. The poet’s voice captures a lot of the mystery and wonder that many artists experience when striving to honor a difficult but ultimately rewarding task.

Aberjhani
© November 2016
Bright Skylark Literary Productions

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Something More Dynamic than Tear-flooded Woe

5/10/2016

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"History & Erasure: Chronicling Legacies of Black Artists in Savannah (part 1 of 3)" 2016 essay series by Aberjhani. (Postered Poetics image of artist Luther E. Vann by Aberjhani)

It took a while for me to think about writing anything in reference to the death of my friend Luther E. Vann last month because when it occurred I was already working on a different kind of essay about his life and art. Slamming the breaks on that project, going into a tailspin of grief, and then finally regaining focus took some work.

These days a lot of people––maybe too many people––know that feeling of sanity-shattering loss. Surely, even as I type these words, the tens of thousands fleeing the inferno in Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, can feel the pain of it.

So can others around the globe who find their attention directed toward the news of a toddler killed while fleeing a war zone with siblings not yet in their teens, a mother or father lost to yet another mass shooting, or a pestilential outbreak that suddenly changed with no warning whatsoever the spiraling course of human history.

Psychic Interiors, Cityscapes, and Multiverses

It is because of examples parallel to the ones just given that I could not write a simple mournful remembrance of Luther. Like the psychic interiors, cityscapes, and multiverses painted in his work, he would have preferred words that reached beyond sorrow centered on him to communicate something beneficial to others.

Consequently, I had to wait. But soon enough it became apparent that, more than anything else, he would have wanted an article (or two or three or more) that extended our conversations on the pitfalls and triumphs of living lives immersed in pursuits of inspired creative visions.

Chronicling Legacies of Black Artists in Savannah-Georgia

Considered a classic of feminist literature, The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing significantly influenced aesthetic theories employed by artist Luther E. Vann.

The thought of extending previous conversations in the form of an essay was enough to stimulate the beginning of a paragraph. It soon developed into an outline for a new three-part series based on highly-accomplished creatives who, owing to one reason or another, are often excluded from official forms of recognition. The three installments currently scheduled, barring any technological issues forcing title edits, are as follows:

The scope is expansive and inclusive because Luther’s work was the same. In my attempt to communicate something more dynamic than tear-flooded woe, the essay presents a view of the artist’s life and work through multiple lenses. They place in context issues like the erasure of history (a.k.a. erasures of history), and the cultivation of different creative influences.

Counted among the latter are the late novelist and Nobel Prize for Literature winner Doris Lessing, especially where the impact of her novel The Golden Notebook is concerned.

The essay also examines the role that the music of iconic masters of jazz like piano virtuoso Thelonious Monk played in Luther’s creative processes.

Background Color Schemes

Finally: I did feel it important to at least try to incorporate within the three-part series a visual component other than the videos posted with each installment. Toward that end, I created a set of original images to employ as art graphic title panels. The series is called Savannah Silhouettes and the taller human figure within each panel is Luther E. Vann.

The different background color schemes of yellow-gold (seen in the art graphic for this blog post), purple (presented with the second installment), and black (the third) are not arbitrary. In addition to being important to his uniquely-applied craftsmanship, they were also important to what he called his “particular language of painting,” the one that made it possible for him to say what he needed to say about humanity, about the mysteries of the cosmos, and, about himself.

Aberjhani
© Bright Skylark Literary Productions
May 2016

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Painting Poems and Living History at the Jepson Center for the Arts

3/9/2016

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Title graphic with image of French artist Claude Monet's 1890 painting "Champ d'avoine" (Oat Field) in background at the Jepson Center for the Arts in Savannah, Georgia. (photograph by Aberjhani)

When the doors of the Jepson Center for the Arts opened to the public in Savannah, Georgia’s, downtown Historic District on March 10, 2006, it served as one more important reminder that the city is much more than a time-capsule filled with unique Civil War memorabilia. It is also home to many creative progressive thinkers eager to see a more sensible social and political balance than those presently evident.

This week marks the 10th anniversary of the most avant garde facility within the complex of the Telfair Arts Academy museums. The Center’s cultural and educational value to Savannah since its opening has been demonstrated many times over. It proved especially momentous to this author personally when the publication launch for ELEMENTAL, the Power of Illuminated Love (co-created with artist Luther E. Vann) sponsored by the Friends of African-American Arts, was held there May 29, 2008.

Sonic Revelations Painted Abstract Divine

The following year I returned to the center on March 22 with the intention of reporting on an exciting multi-media event taking place there. It featured a group of visual artists referred to as the Creative Force Artist Collective creating abstract paintings and sculpture while jazz saxophonist Jody Espina performed with a live band and audience members danced to the free-flowing vibes. The energy was so intense that I stopped jotting the notes I had been taking to write my story. Instead, my pen joined in with the flying paintbrushes, wailing music, and dancing souls by spontaneously writing the poem titled “Sounds Scribbled Mixed-Media Platinum at the Jepson Center 3/22/09.” The following is an excerpt:

A man sitting monkey-like
on the rooftop of his brain
calculating the precision
with which sunbeams
seduce moonlight
is only as spectacular maybe
as a river passably scatting
red-wine imitations of Louis or Ella.

But a man leaning un-harnessed
over the blue-diamond cliffs
of his jazz-baptized soul
as he weaves southern adagios
and spur-of-the-moment riffs
into new millennium bebop Mozart suites
makes for a different order of musical flora:
worthy of sonic revelations painted abstract divine.

––Aberjhani (excerpt from Sounds Scribbled Mixed-Media Platinum at the Jepson Center)

The complete poem was later published in The River of Winged Dreams. For me, the event that inspired it and the poem itself came to symbolize one of the ways that the Jepson Center for the Arts had come to exert a powerful regenerative influence on the city’s evolving cultural identity.

Claude Monet and Esteemed Company

Flashing forward to January 2016: I took a trip to the Telfair Museum of Art and Jepson Center for the Arts to conduct some field research for my current book-in-progress. The first surprise as I walked through Telfair Square toward the Telfair was discovering that it undergoing heavy-duty maintenance and repairs. The building was surrounded by scaffolding and the museum’s iconic trademark statues were sheathed in plastic. It would seem administrators wanted the senior museum at its best in time for the younger gallery’s birthday.

The Telfair Museum (as seen from Telfair Square in Savannah) undergoing repairs and maintenance in early 2016. (photograph by Aberjhani)

Inside the Jepson, I was fully prepared for the splendor that greeted me as I viewed the Monet and American Impressionism exhibit in the Steward Galleries. Given the combination of how French artist Claude Monet’s (1840-1926) singular brilliance had defined, and transcended, an entire era in art history so powerfully that its impact was celebrated in the Southeastern United States two centuries later, breathtaking splendor was about the only thing anyone could have expected. What I had not been prepared for were two different but equally-stunning exhibits in the form of photographs by Jack Leigh and the captivating oversized collage canvases of Mickalene Thomas.

The Evolution of
Photographer Jack Leigh

Readers of the book The American Poet Who Went Home Again know that I had the great honor calling John David "Jack" Leigh II (1942–2004) my friend. He was one of those to whom the book was dedicated and also the subject of the essay titled Bound Moments: Jack Leigh’s Beautiful Southern Adventures. To this day, I still find myself fascinated by the story of how he evolved from a disciplined athlete into an inspired photographer:

“…That was my secret life, my night life. My real life was playing football and being an all-American kid and doing things that fulfilled the image of a young southern boy. The art aspect remained a latent dream but it did guide me to where I was going.”

– (from The American Poet Who Went Home Again)

In truth, I had forgotten that he spent time documenting the construction of the Jepson and turned the labors of its creation into printed black and white art. Jack Leigh was a master at extracting beauty from the mundane and framing the ordinary within angles that revealed the extra-ordinary. His “Building the Jepson Series” of photographs were not in an exhibit room on the day I visited but lined along the hallway walls leading to and from the second-floor elevator, where they were sure to capture the attention of anyone walking that way.

It was fitting that I should have encountered Jack here because one of our last recorded interviews had been about The Land I’m Bound To (2000), a 25-year retrospective of his work at the Telfair commemorating W.W. Norton’s publication of his book of the same title.

Mickalene Thomas and the Art of Honoring Beauty

The inclusion of the Mickalene Thomas at Giverny exhibition across the hall, in the Levitt and Varnedoe Gallery, from the Monet paintings in the Steward Galleries deftly demonstrated art’s capacity to transcend boundaries and connect diverse human stories. It also highlighted the artist Mickalene Thomas’s passion for honoring beauty in classic and innovative settings with stringently-applied standards and techniques.

Mounted video of artist Mickalene Thomas, whose work was on display at the Jepson Center for the Arts in Savannah, Georgia, at the same time as French artist Claude Monet’s. (photo by Aberjhani)

Few might imagine that a 21st-century African-American woman artist would find as much inspiration and motivation as Thomas apparently did during her stay at the 19th-century French artist Monet’s famous home. But they would discover, eventually, that the discourse sustained through her visual and verbal meditations on the impact of Monet’s aesthetic standards is an important one elevating both discussions on contemporary art and (some would argue) the quality of it.

Thomas’s supersized canvases of reclining Black Women in juxtaposition to her studied interpretations of Monet’s home present beauty, tradition, and intellectual daring as self-defining aesthetics in and of themselves. To walk into a gallery and suddenly view Mickalene Thomas’s depictions of Black Women in particular is a psychologically jarring experience. For African Americans in particular, a chasm of divided awareness can crack open and you find yourself inside shaded regions simultaneously celebrating triumphant legacies of the past and mourning destructions of Black Life and Beauty in the present.

The Promise

With the range of creative talents that have been able to find expression and representation at the Jepson Center for the Arts since 2006, any and all tributes in honor of that fact are fully appropriate. And yet, more exciting than what the facility’s administrators, docents, patrons, and visitors have accomplished thus far is the promise of what may yet be accomplished in the years to come.

Aberjhani
© 3/9/2015
Bright Skylark Literary Productions

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A Hidden American Treasure Comes to Revelatory Light (part 1 of 3): Geography & History

Continental Crossings & Fortuitous Connections

Contact the Author

Elemental's 10th anniversary inspires mindful reflections and renewed hopes (part 1 of 2): remembrance

Sensory Brilliance

The Deep Road to Infinity

The Birth of Elemental, the Power of Illuminated Love

Discussing the Possibility

Concluding and Beginning Anew

Something More Dynamic than Tear-flooded Woe

Psychic Interiors, Cityscapes, and Multiverses

Chronicling Legacies of Black Artists in Savannah-Georgia

Background Color Schemes

Painting Poems and Living History at the Jepson Center for the Arts

Sonic Revelations Painted Abstract Divine

Claude Monet and Esteemed Company

The Evolution of
Photographer Jack Leigh

Mickalene Thomas and the Art of Honoring Beauty

The Promise

Aberjhani

Archives

Categories

A Hidden American Treasure Comes to Revelatory Light (part 1 of 3): Geography & History

Continental Crossings & Fortuitous Connections

Contact the Author

Elemental's 10th anniversary inspires mindful reflections and renewed hopes (part 1 of 2): remembrance

Sensory Brilliance

The Deep Road to Infinity

The Birth of Elemental, the Power of Illuminated Love

Discussing the Possibility

Concluding and Beginning Anew

Something More Dynamic than Tear-flooded Woe

Psychic Interiors, Cityscapes, and Multiverses

Chronicling Legacies of Black Artists in Savannah-Georgia​

Background Color Schemes

Painting Poems and Living History at the Jepson Center for the Arts

Sonic Revelations Painted Abstract Divine​

Claude Monet and Esteemed Company​

The Evolution ofPhotographer Jack Leigh

Mickalene Thomas and the Art of Honoring Beauty ​

The Promise​

Aberjhani

Archives

Categories

Chronicling Legacies of Black Artists in Savannah-Georgia

Sonic Revelations Painted Abstract Divine

Claude Monet and Esteemed Company

The Evolution of
Photographer Jack Leigh

Mickalene Thomas and the Art of Honoring Beauty

The Promise