Giuseppe Perone and George Sams have created a mini-gold mine of collaborative visual art and spoken word performance in the heart of Midtown St. Louis. The Metropolitan Gallery continues to bring in artists of the highest quality and expose them to an audience that does not regularly get this kind of creative jolt.
The whole idea of collaboration is to bring different audiences to a specific place and let the supporters of one kind of genre see and support the art to which they have become accustomed and at the same time encounter work, ideas and expressions that are new or least unfamiliar to them.
In this kind of setting and with this kind of thinking, you ideally get international, national and local creators of high accomplishment together and let them go for it. The results are always interesting and sometimes can reach the level of memorable and even breathtaking.
These things happen all the time in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. The Nu-Art is the only game in town when it comes to quality and diversity at this level.
This coming weekend Perone and Sams continue the ongoing series “Jazz and the Visual Arts,” a three-part visual art / spoken word / music program.
“Dangling Participles and Shady Syllables,” a spoken word performance by celebrated poet / playwright / novelist Ntozake Shange, will be hit on Saturday, April 4, from 3-6 p.m. Ms. Shange, one of the three or four most important American playwrights now working, came to prominence with her choreo poem, For Coloured Girls … She has deep St. Louis roots and always performs powerfully when she visits.
The collaborative element in the air here is the powerful swell and technical mastery of Hamiet Bluiett’s baritone saxophone. Bluiett is inarguably one of the greatest baritone players in the history of jazz. He is from Lovejoy, Illinois, making him a “roots maan,” as Jamaicans would say, sprouting from St. Louis soil.
Think about it: two internationally acclaimed, award-winning African-American artists performing right down the street, in the community, at their leisure for your pleasure. How can you go wrong?
The root runs even deeper when you consider that the opening light for Ntozake and Bluiett will be JBMG, the grandchildren of Fontella Bass and Lester Bowie.
Let’s step back a few feet, some 20 hours and one day.
Friday night an exhibition of photographs and paintings by St. Louis artists Adelia Parker and James Seitu Smith will go up in the gallery. They will hang from April 3 through May 15.
Seitu and Adelia are both artists whose work can be called undiscovered treasure. Adelia Parker has been working a lifetime in the mediums of photography, sculpture and multi-media. Her photographs have accessed cultural links, promontories, exchanges and transformations from St. Louis to Senegal, from the Indian sub-continent to the Fiji Islands. Her acute sense of seeing can be deciphered in a shot of a dance-like director of traffic in a Dakar, Senegal intersection, or in the mysterious unlined face of a West African elder whose eyes are the only element that might betray her age.
James Seitu Smith is a painter and something of a St. Louis mystery himself. It’s a mystery to me why this man is not famous! His work comes closer to pure jazz painting, in my mind, than anyone in this part of the country. His subtle mastery of gesture, tone and color diffusion in apparently realistic portraiture is especially compelling. Although there are other artists successfully working in this genre and style, his uncanny mix of casual stroke and serious subject is continually a bright moment to behold. This man can really paint!
The Metropolitan Gallery is located at 2936 Locust Street, St. Louis. It can be reached at 314-535-6500 or Nu-artseries@charter.net.
