When Michael Marshall came home to St. Louis last year for an art opening, he explained the new direction in his art, moving from painting to monoprints. He explained that his Art Department at the University of Hawaii – Hilo lost a charismatic leader, the printmaker Wayne A. Miyomoto. Rather than accept a diminished role for the department in the wake of Wayne’s loss, Marshall stepped up to lead the Hilo printmaking studio. “We are not going to do less,” Marshall decided. “We are going to do more.”
Marshall is a man of his word.
What this “more” will mean for the Hilo Art Department was made clear with the Poetry & Blues Project that Hilo kicked off in early February. This was an extraordinary set of happenings in two senses: it’s extraordinary what a wide range of artistic talent Marshall brought together on the island, and it’s extraordinary how many of these artists are African-American men from St. Louis.
The project’s featured artists were Quincy Troupe and Kelvyn Bell, poet and guitarist, both black men from St. Louis now based in New York City (and no strangers to collaboration). They performed their carefully orchestrated arrangements of poetry and blues on a stage designed by Marshall and inspired by a remark made by Oliver Jackson, a visual artist from St. Louis who was then Artist in Residence at Hilo. Marshall, who produced the overall event, created the performance environment with help from Jackson and others.
Wayne A. Miyomoto was more than a force at the Art Department. He also was a close friend of Marshall and an influence on his work. Marshall dedicated the Poetry & Blues Project to his late friend, who put the Hilo Art Department on the international map.
Marshall came a long way to take over leadership of an art department at a university in Hawaii. He grew up in North St. Louis, across the street from Beaumont High School. He also attended Beaumont before his mentors in the Honors Arts Program, which Marshall described as “the first magnet school program for the visual arts in the St. Louis public school system,” helped him gain admission to John Burroughs School on scholarship. From Burroughs it was on to the University of Illinois–Champaign, an MFA at Yale University and a successful career as artist and academic.
It was not a stretch at all for Marshall to reach back towards Black St. Louis to organize a multi-disciplinary art production. As Paul Carter Harrison and John-Gabriel H. James point out in their program notes, all of the featured artists from St. Louis “share a deep memory and relationship to the highly celebrated Black Artist Group formed in St. Louis back in the mid-Sixties.” In BAG, the notes continue, “artists of diverse disciplines collaborated to collectively perform staged events with poets, musicians and artists.” Younger artists like Bell have been brought along into this St. Louis legacy.
As an example, the notes mention the African Continuum event that featured Jackson, St. Louis composer and saxophonist Julius Hemphill, and Senegalese drummer Mor Thiam. Fittingly, the lead producer of African Continuum, Donald M. Suggs, traveled from St. Louis to Hilo for the Poetry & Blues Project. He was joined by another black man from St. Louis, photojournalist Fred Sweets. In Hilo they worked with yet another black St. Louisan, Theo O’Neal, general manager of University Radio Hilo, which broadcast performances by Troupe, Bell and Hawaiian musician Brother Noland.
As Brother Noland’s contribution makes clear, African-American artistic traditions that originated in St. Louis were at the heart of the Poetry & Blues Project, but Marshall organized a lot of other energy around that center. Poetry slam champion Bridget Gray, Hawaiian author Lois-Ann Yamanaka, African-American playwright Paul Carter Harrison and several of Marshall’s diverse colleagues at Hilo all contributed.
Paul Carter Harrison and John-Gabriel H. James – who are not from St. Louis – make an eloquent case for the historical artistic importance of St. Louis, and especially Black St. Louis – a case made in much greater detail by local scholar Kevin Belford in his seminal illustrated history Devil at the Confluence.
In St. Louis, Harrison and James write, “the confluence of blues and urbanity was channeled through the Mississippi River.” In the interplay of Troupe and Bell, these two brothers from St. Louis, they hear “improvisational techniques such as vamps and repetition, rhythmic breaks, and the call and response of trading fours, at times mindful of the spontaneity of Charlie Parker, the lyricism of Smokey Robinson, the cool tonal ferocity of Miles Davis, the driving force of James Brown, and the ancestral grace of Julius Hemphill.”
The only thing you can say to that is, “Amen.”
For videos, see the YouTube channel of the Hilo Art Department, http://www.youtube.com/user/UHHiloArt.
