I went to the Armory Show at the Piers in NYC yesterday and was really taken by a 54-piece work from by Whitfield Lovell, beautiful portrait drawings combined with vintage round playing cards.
"The importance of home, family and ancestry feed my work entirely," says Whitfield Lovell, known for his large-scale images of African Americans, drawn in charcoal on weathered wood planks. "African Americans generally were not aware of who their ancestors were,
since slaves were sold from plantation to plantation and families were split up." Lovell says
Many of Lovell's drawings are based on studio portraits of formally dressed African Americans, dating largely from the early 20th century. "Any time I pick up one of these old vintage photographs," he says, "I have the feeling that this could be one of my ancestors. These images are stand-ins for the people I don''t know about."
