The Art of John Biggers: View from the Upper Room [Hardcover]

Alvia J. Wardlaw (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A pioneer in translating the heritage of African life into American art, Biggers developed potent spiritual symbols and geometric techniques to create a pictorial mythology. Born in 1924 in North Carolina, he began his career with realistic evocations of the black Southern experience and with murals in the Regionalist tradition of Thomas Hart Benton. After traveling widely in Africa in the late 1950s, Biggers welded archetypal motifs?e.g., Great Mother, masks, combs, water, drums?into a cosmic symbolism, producing an impressive body of paintings, drawings and sculpture that reflects his belief in the human community and its mystical interaction with the natural world. His lithograph Upper Room (1984) depicts two Southern women carrying on their wrapped heads a building?house, school, church?while alongside them a boy and girl climb toward the future on a vine?a hopeful narrative of solidarity and faith. Assembled by a variety of art scholars, this richly illustrated monograph documents a traveling exhibition that opened at Houston's Museum of Fine Arts.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

One of America's major black artists, Biggers is the subject of a traveling exhibition organized by the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. This catalog documents nearly 50 years of his work in a variety of media, including paintings, murals, drawings, prints, and sculptures. It is lavishly illustrated with 55 color and 105 black-and-white reproductions and even several of the artist's photographs taken while traveling through Africa. A major essay by curator Wardlaw (Black Art?Ancestral Legacy: The African Impulse in African American Art, LJ 12/92) summarizes the artist's career and comments on a number of works illustrated here, while additional essays by three scholars of African American art place the artist in context. Taken as a whole, this is an appealing and accessible work on an often-overlooked American artist. Recommended for collections on American modernists.?Margarete Gross, Chicago P.L.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 184 pages
• Publisher: Harry N Abrams (March 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0810919567
• ISBN-13: 978-0810919563
• Product Dimensions: 11.3 x 9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,802,929 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a beautiful volume on one of this country's finest painters, August 23, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Art of John Biggers: View from the Upper Room (Hardcover)

John Biggers came to artistic maturity in an academic setting far from the art centers of New York. He was repulsed by the New York art scene that had so summarily dismissed black art when he had participated in a MOMA black student art exhibit. Perhaps his avoidance of the centers of art commerce were as responsible for the late acceptance of his genius as was the segregationist mindset in the United States during Biggers's early career. As well as producing important paintings, drawings, and sculpture, Biggers is one of this country's most important muralists, creating more than twenty major murals in fifty years. His life has been dramatic in both content and context. Wardlaw draws a clear portrait of African-American life in the black section of a sharply segregated Gastonia, North Carolina, where Biggers grew up in the 1930s, and the rich family and community life of rural black America of the time. The other essays, written by noted scholars, trace the history of Biggers's artistic career through a careful study and analysis of his body of work.