The stands overflow, packed with black kings and queens dressed in their Sunday best. Everyone knows that the next pitch, if delivered accurately, could be the final throw of the game.
As the stone-faced pitcher in the foreground begins his wind-up, he calmly looks over his shoulder to see if the baserunner has strayed too far from his safe haven. The crowd waits forever for the hurler’s next move, which has been permanently frozen in time by artist Lonnie Powell.
Powell’s painting, entitled “Looking Him Back,” is one of 35 works of art that make up Shades of Greatness, a traveling art exhibit inspired by Negro League baseball. Baseball fans, art buffs and historians alike will have the opportunity to view the exhibit at the Portfolio Gallery and Education Center, located at 3514 Delmar Blvd. in the heart of Grand Center, from this Saturday, February 12 through April 4.Â
Powell said he is “old enough to have gone to a Kansas City Monarchs game.” He lived just six blocks from Kansas City Municipal Stadium, where the Monarchs played home games, and remembers sneaking into the park to see them play.
“What I tried to do with the piece was to take all of those images that I can remember and put them into one piece. The pitcher is actually a conglomerate of all the pictures that pitched so well in those days,” Powell said.
“This is a conceptual piece that hit the mood of what I felt when I started looking back on those days. I had to see it through young eyes. It is a reflection.”
Interestingly, the gallery in which Powell’s piece will be displayed for the next several months n Portfolio n was founded and is directed by his brother, Robert Powell.
In 1989, Robert Powell decided that he heard enough African-American artists in St. Louis simply discussing the problem of not having enough outlets in the area to show their works without doing anything to improve their situation, so he opened up his own home to them as an exhibit space. From this simple act, Portfolio Gallery was born.
Soon, Robert’s passion for art and his commitment to bringing works by African-American artists to the masses led him to expand from his home to the gallery’s current location just east of Powell Symphony Hall.
“As an artist, you just take a blank canvas, or some raw material, and you create something,” said, Robert Powell, who is also a wood sculptor.
“In creating Portfolio, I n along with my counterparts n created something like that. It wasn’t here before.”
To borrow a baseball comparison from fiction, Powell and his “counterparts” built it, but the public can’t always be trusted to come.
“People still feel like they have to go away to see good things,” Robert Powell said. “I want people to know that we are here and we have great art.”
Since its inception, the gallery has provided opportunities for local and national artists to share their creative talents with thousands of visitors to the gallery.
Shades of Greatness was developed by the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, in partnership with the Ford Motor Company, to showcase an array of original artwork depicting the history of the Negro Leagues.
Its showing at Portfolio Gallery is sponsored by St. Louis Area Lincoln-Mercury dealers, St. Louis Cardinals Baseball, D&D Concessions, LLC, Merisant and the St. Louis American.
Other artists featured in the exhibit include Leroy Allen, Norm Bannister, Terry L. Beavers, NedRa Bonds, Eric Brace, Bonnye Brown, Henry W. Dixon, John Ferry, Raylee Frazier, Rob Hatem, Anthony High, Ed Hogan, Kevin Hosley, Robert Hurst, Jared Kraus, George E. Morris, Steve Musgrave, Kadir Nelson, Frank Norfleet, Ramon Olivera, Johne Richardson, Keith Shepherd, Ken Stanford, Veronica Sublett, Cortney Wall, Larry Welo and Steve Wilson.
Selected, limited-edition lithographs from the exhibit are available for sale at $50 each.
The Portfolio Gallery and Education Center is located at 3514 Delmar Blvd. For information, call 533-332 or visit www.portfolio-stl.com.
