THE WAREHOUSE GALLERY in collaboration with the Community Folk Art Center (CFAC) announces the opening of Songs of Hearth and Valor, Recital in 8 Dominions, After Bessie Smith by New York artist Terry Adkins.

I consider my work to be a perpetual choir of beckoning gestures that transcribe the formal limitations of mere visual encounter. The relationship of music to art for me is an inverse muscular communion wherein sculpture is as transient as music and music approaches the visceral suggestion of matter. ~ Terry Adkins

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Gallery Statement

Terry Adkins is an artist, activist and revolutionary. He is a creative rebel, pushing the conventional boundaries of art and blurring the lines of production by combining unique aural and visual forms of expression. In Songs of Hearth and Valor, he continues his ongoing quest of reinserting historically transformative figures to their rightful place in the landscape of regional and world history.

Inspired by narrative gleaned from Bessie Smith’s vast repertoire, Adkins weaves a variety of media into a phenomenal totality, ministering realms of grandeur, illicitness, love and violence – replete with allusions to ancestry, vernacular, folklore, and artifact.

Songs of Hearth and Valor creates an environment that challenges us to engage Bessie Smith beyond her status as legendary blues artist and performer. Terry Adkins has resurrected her as a creative deity whose stage has now become a temple and whose viewers are transformed into devotees as they enter the space.

~ Jeffrey Hoone, Interim Curator

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Download PDF invitation | Download PDF Press Release

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Artwork Samples

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Opening and Closing Performances

Arthur Flowers
Lone Wolf Recital Corps will perform with Arthur Flowers on April 24, 2008 during the opening reception which runs from 5-8 p.m. Performance begins at 6 p.m. Arthur Flowers is a Vietnam veteran, blues singer, and co-founder of the New Renaissance Writer's Guild. Flowers considers himself a contemporary griot, referring to the storytellers of ancient African societies who passed on the history of their people to future generations through the oral tradition. Flowers, a professor in the English Department at Syracuse University, is a self-proclaimed "literary hoodoo man." Using spellbinding "performance poetry", Flowers accompanies his presentations with African instruments. Visit our Facebook and Flickr accounts for photos of the reception/performance night! Performance available on YouTube - see below for part of the footage!
Bessie Smith at Newark’s Orpheum Theater, November 1925 Text read by Dr. Kheli Willetts during performance on April 24, 2008 As the curtain lifted, a jazz band, against a background of plum colored hangings, held full stage…he hangings parted and a great brown woman emerged. She was at this time the size of Fay Templeton in her Weber and field days, which means very large, and she wore a crimson satin robe, sweeping up from her trim ankles, and embroidered in multicolored sequins and designs. Her face was beautiful with the rich ripe beauty of southern darkness, a deep bronze, matching the bronze of her bare arms. Walking slowly to the footlights, to the accompaniment of the wailing, muted brasses, the monotonous African pounding of the drum, the dromedary glide of the pianist’s fingers over the responsive keys, she began her strange, rhythmic rites in a voice full of moaning and praying and suffering, a wild, rough, Ethiopian voice, harsh and volcanic, but seductive and sensuous too, released between rough lips and the whitest of teeth, the singer swaying slowly as is the Negro custom: “Yo’ brag to women I was yo’ fool, so den I got dose sobbin’ hahted Blues.” Celebrating her unfortunate love adventures, the Blues are the Negro’s prayer to a cruel Cupid. Now, inspired partly by the expressive words, partly by the stumbling strain of the accompaniment, partly by the powerfully magnetic personality of this elemental conjure woman with her plangent African voice, quivering with passion and pain, sounding as if it had been developed at the sources of the Nile, the black and blue crowd, notable for the absence of mulattoes, burst into hysterical, semi-religious shrieks of sorrow and lamentation. Amens rent the air. Little nervous giggles, like the shattering of Venetian glass, shocked our nerves. When Bessie proclaimed, “it’s true I loves you, but I won’t take mistreatment any mo’, a girl sitting beneath our box called “Dat’s right! Say it, sister!” After the curtain had fallen, Leigh Whipper guided us back stage where he introduced us to Bessie Smith and this proved to be exactly the same experience that meeting any great interpreter is likely to be: we paid our homages humbly and se accepted them with just the right amount of deference. I believe I kissed her hand. I hope I did. Carl Van Vechten, from "Nigger Haven"
Bill Cole
	Lone Wolf Recital Corps presented a closing performance on May 30 at 6 p.m. with special guest acclaimed musician, composer, and educator Bill Cole. Listen to performance online - click here. Bill Cole is an American jazz musician, composer, and educator. Cole specializes in non-Western wind instruments, including the Ghanaian atenteben, Chinese suona, Korean hojok and piri, South Indian nagaswaram, North Indian shehnai, Tibetan trumpet, and Australian didjeridu. Cole is the founder and leader of the Untempered Ensemble and has performed with Ornette Coleman, Jayne Cortez, Julius Hemphill, Sam Rivers, James Blood Ulmer, and Fred Ho. He records for the Boxholder label. He served as professor of music at Amherst College from 1972 until 1974 and Dartmouth College from 1974 until his retirement in the 1990s. He currently teaches in the Department of African American Studies at Syracuse University.

Both opening and closing performances are free and open to the public.

LONE WOLF RECITAL CORPS

Lone Wolf Recital Corps is a musically based performance collaborative with revolving membership. Terry Adkins is the founder and only full-time member.

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About Terry Adkins

Terry Adkins has been exhibiting internationally since 1980. He is Associate Professor of Fine Art at the University of Pennsylvania where he recently installed Darkwater: A Recital in Four Dominions, a tribute to W. E. B. Du Bois at the Arthur Ross Gallery. Adkins has published numerous essays and has completed several significant public commissions. In addition to being a highly respected artist and sought after guest lecturer, his artworks have been placed in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, among other significant museums and collections. He received his B.S. from Fisk University and his M.F.A from the University of Kentucky.

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Gallery Guide Essay

In an essay that accompanies the exhibition Dr. Kheli R. Willetts, academic director of CFAC and assistant professor in the department of African American Studies at Syracuse University writes, “Adkins’ work creates an environment which challenges us to engage with Smith beyond her status as a legendary musical performer. He has resurrected her as a creative deity whose stage has now become a temple and the viewers are transformed into her devotees as they enter the space.”

To download essay click here.
Complete Gallery Guides available in the gallery. Pick up your copy today!

Dr. Kheli Willetts

Dr. Willetts is an assistant professor of African American Art History and Film in the Department of African American Studies at Syracuse University, and academic director of the Community Folk Art Center. Prior to joining the faculty at Syracuse University in 2002, Willetts worked with a number of arts organizations including the Studio Museum of Harlem, the Wadsworth Athenaeum, the Connecticut Historical Society, and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. Willetts is also an artist and is currently completing a new body of mixed media work. She holds an AAS in Studio Arts from F.I.T, a BFA in Studio Arts, an MA in Museum Studies, and a Ph.D. in Art Education from Syracuse University.