For most artists, having a storage shed full of their finished art work is not enough to land a one-man show, but that did the trick for John E Rozelle, whose show Survey on Paper opens Thursday, November 8 at 10th Street Gallery (419 N. 10th St.) with a reception from 5:30-7:30.
Rozelle, a St. Louis native who is retired faculty from the Art Institute of Chicago, was in his hometown this summer at a national conference for minorities in the art museum field organized by the St. Louis Art Museum.
He ran into his old friend Solomon Thurman, a St. Louis artist who recently opened 10th Street Gallery with his wife Pat Smith Thurman. Solomon suggested that the gallery host a show by Rozelle, and the artist said he would think about it. He went back to Chicago and “mulled it over.”
“I thought, I have a huge stockpile of work in St. Louis in storage that has been sitting there a long time; a lot of it has never been shown or shown once or twice,” Rozelle said. He suggested to the Thurmans a show drawn from that work in storage, then came back to St. Louis to take the gallery owners for a tour of his storage space.
“We talked a bit, they took a long time looking at the work, and they made the decision that they want to show it,” Rozelle said.
What they will show in Survey on Paper is a wide range of Rozelle’s works on paper, 1991-2012, in many media: monoprints of various types, combined drawings (that is, drawings with little bit of collage), collages, mixed media on paper and mixed media collages.
His most recent show in St. Louis was 2008 in African American Abstraction: St. Louis Connections at the St. Louis Art Museum, a landmark exhibit that also included work by Oliver Jackson and Michael Marshall. He also was part of an installation of work for Black History Month 2009, when the Art Museum mounted Rozelle’s painting from his Barehanded War Series it acquired in 2008 as part of an overall exhibition.
Rozelle’s work certainly belonged in that St. Louis Art Museum art show themed around abstraction, but he also considers African sensibility to be central to his work. Some of the pieces he submitted to the 10th Street Gallery show are from his series Sanga, which names both a region in Mali where the Dogon people live and a style of object decoration the Dogon practice.
Rozelle is a highly decorated and widely exhibited artist in many media. St. Louis audiences are most likely to have seen, without knowing it, his Middle Passage Project he made on commission at the Old Courthouse. He holds his arts degrees locally from Washington University (B.A.) and Fontbonne University (M.F.A.), though he got his first national break through a 1988 residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
He landed what became his career job at the Art Institute of Chicago by attending a College Art Association conference held in New York. He only stayed on in New York long enough to attend that conference because his friend Quincy Troupe, the St. Louis poet, introduced him to Troupe’s good friend, the actor Danny Glover, who had an apartment available and loaned it to the artist.
Rozelle said, “I got very, very, very, very lucky.”
For more information on the show or gallery, visit www.10thstreetgallery.com. For more information on John E Rozelle, visit www.facebook.com/pastedpapers, www.johnrozelle.com, www.pastedpapers.com or www.sanaaproductions.com.
