Viewing the art of the past is a way to travel back in time, but the cultural and political context of the present is always there, like the force of gravity. It tugs at how we see and interpret any work of art.
This is certainly true of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s compelling new exhibition of black-and-white etchings, lithographs and linoleum-cut prints made by Black Cleveland artists affiliated in the 1930s and ‘40s with Karamu House, America’s oldest producing Black Theater.
The show, which opened March 23 and is on view through Aug. 17, gives fresh attention to the long-underappreciated excellence of the Karamu printmakers, whose works speak of Black aspirations and hardships during the Depression and World War II in ways that resonate powerfully today.
Founded in 1915 as a cultural settlement house on East 38th Street, Karamu was a project of white sociologists Russell and Rowena Jelliffe. Their goal was to aid majority-Black neighborhoods surging with newcomers fleeing the Jim Crow South in search of jobs and opportunity. Karamu’s name is Swahili for “a place of joyful gathering.”
Now located at 2355 E 89th St., Karamu is thriving after a recently completed $5.2 million renovation as a theater and provider of arts education and community programs in Cleveland’s Fairfax neighborhood.
In the early 1930s, before moving to its current home, Karamu launched an innovative graphic arts workshop that aimed to engage the surrounding community and the art world in general. Artists, including Charles Sallée, William E. Smith, Hughie Lee-Smith, and Elmer Brown, formed a collective called Karamu Artists, Inc., to share and promote their creations.
“They really had a mission,’’ said Britany Salsbury, one of the museum’s two prints and drawings curators. “They saw themselves as doing something completely new. They had this idea that art should be a product of the community that surrounds it.”
The exhibition includes more than 60 works by 11 professional artists and a handful of art students. The prints are compact, vivid and beautifully drawn. The Karamu artists created dignified and tenderly empathetic portraits, along with vibrant scenes of nightclubs, sporting events, gambling and family life in ramshackle housing. Rare woodcuts by Harlem Renaissance poet and playwright Langston Hughes, a onetime Karamu student who befriended the Jelliffes during his teen years in Cleveland, are part of the package.
Typical of the show’s impact is “Artist’s Life No. 1,’’ a 1939 lithograph by Hughie Lee-Smith (1915-1999), a sublimely gifted artist who spent much of his career in Detroit and New York after leaving Cleveland in the 1940s. The print depicts a stage-like, semi-surreal landscape with realistic vignettes of a nude female model, a young Black male artist teaching a female student to draw and a policeman beating a factory worker with a baton. The Terminal Tower rises in the distance, marking Cleveland as a city of yearning and danger.
In today’s context, the Karamu show coincides with the abrupt rightward lurch in American politics led by President Donald Trump, whose second term started just two months ago. Trump’s initiatives include a crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion programs (DEI) across society and government that flourished under Joe Biden, his predecessor.
This would seem to cast the Karamu show as a form of resistance to Trumpism, but the show’s timing is a coincidence. It was planned and scheduled before Trump prevailed in last November’s elections.
Salsbury said she conceived of the show in late 2019, near the end of Trump’s first term. She later joined forces with co-curator Erin Benay, an associate professor of art history at Case Western Reserve University, and with researchers at Karamu.
Salsbury and Benay co-curated the show and edited and co-authored its lavishly illustrated catalog. The exhibition and the catalog are the biggest and most definitive statements to date on their subject, and one of the museum’s deepest dives into Cleveland art history in recent years.
“There hasn’t been any substantive project on their work,’’ Salsbury said of the Karamu printmakers. “Nothing that placed them within a bigger-picture history.’’
Even though the show was driven by scholarly curiosity more than politics, it includes images of suffering and injustice that obviously raises questions about America’s progress toward racial equality.
Examples of such works include “Ol’ Peckerwood,’’ 1939, by Elmer Brown, which depicts the pistol-packing white overseer of a chain gang. The work is based on Brown’s experience after having been sentenced at age 15 to three years on a Tennessee chain gang for riding a freight train. “I have never hated anyone so much in my life,’’ Brown later wrote in a statement about the overseer, quoted in the show’s catalog.
The exhibition also includes numerous images of Black beauty and pride, such as Sallée’s quietly dignified 1938 portraits titled “Almeda,’’ “Bertha,’’ and “Ermetta,’’ named after the models who posed for them.
What comes across most strongly in all of the works on view is their concentrated visual power. They squeeze a lot of punch into their relatively small formats; they generally measure about nine by six inches. Their mastery makes them feel transcendent and universal.
The catalog and the exhibition connect the history of the Karamu artists to more recent developments in Black art history and Cleveland art. This includes the work of former Karamu students such as Cleveland Institute of Art graduate Curlee Raven Holton, founding director and master printer at Raven Fine Art Editions, a private printmaking studio in Easton, Pennsylvania.
The catalog also connects Karamu to the emergence of a local art market for works by Black artists, led in part by the former Malcolm Brown Gallery in Shaker Heights, active from 1980 to 2011.
The museum sees its ongoing embrace of works by outstanding Black artists, including the Karamu printmakers, as part of its mission to grow its collection of more than 60,000 objects covering more than 5,000 years of human history from every corner of the globe.
As a place with diversity in its DNA, the museum always feels above the fray but also relevant to issues of the moment. That’s exactly the case with the Karamu show.
