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“James G. Pappas: Relative to Music,” which opens today at SUNY Buffalo State’s Burchfield Penney Art Center, features a selection of paintings, drawings, silkscreens and photographs that span the prolific career of the professor emeritus of the UB and internationally renowned visuals. artist.
It is on view in the Corridor Gallery, Margaret L. Wendt Gallery and R. William Doolittle Gallery until May 1.
Pappas’ practice draws a strong influence from music – he listened to jazz from an early age – as well as architecture, color theory and design composition. Taking a page from the avant-garde process of jazz greats like John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, he employs techniques that start from an understanding of its foundations and go from there to destroy, deconstruct and create freely something completely new from the original.
This simple yet nuanced process reflects an intuitive, improvised rhythm and harmony that brings the heart of jazz into the visual realm. Pappas’ screen prints further illustrate this experimentation, moving through the media in new ways to push the boundaries of the process. His drawings, with intermittent lines, recall notes that move in space; his photographs document some of the most influential jazz icons in real time.
Pappas’ abstract expressionist style is representative of the strong influence of jazz, while simultaneously confronting the artist’s experience of the socio-political realities of American life for black communities. Moving to Buffalo to attend UB in 1959, the growing momentum of the civil rights struggle, the burgeoning black arts and black power movements of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as Pappas’ own prior experiences with the racism in the south would inspire him all. to contemplate the ways in which art can be a tool for social change.
Among the founders of UB’s Department of Black Studies – now African and American Studies – Pappas served as department chair for 13 years, and was also director of Black Mountain College II, a collegiate unit offering degree programs. visual and performing arts for the general student body at UB. At the same time, he was co-founder and director – along with other artists Allie Anderson, Clarence Scott, Hal Franklin and Wilhelmina Godfrey – of the Langston Hughes Center for the Visual and Performing Arts, a space for the centre’s youth to explore. -City of Buffalo. creativity and self-expression.
The legacy of the Langston Hughes Center’s formative years and the influence of each of its founding artists are explored in depth in the exhibition “Founders: The beginnings of the Langston Hughes Center for the Visual and Performing Arts”, In parallel with“ Relative to Music ”in the West-end Gallery of BPAC.
Exhibitions are co-curated by Tullis Johnson, Curator and Exhibitions Manager, and Tiffany Gaines, Curator and Digital Content Associate. Gaines is also a full-time first-year master’s student in the Visual Studies program in the Art Department at UB.
Pappas, who retired from UB as an associate professor in 2019, has received numerous awards for his work and community service. He has been a consultant on numerous projects and has played an important role in promoting the arts in New York State as a member of numerous boards and committees including the City of Buffalo Arts Commission, the New York State Council on the Arts, County of Erie Arts in Public. Places Board, Niagara Frontier Airport Art Selection Committee, Burchfield-Penny Art Center and CEPA Gallery.
His works have been exhibited in the United States, Canada and Europe.
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