Barbara Bullock: Fearless Vision
About the Exhibition
Woodmere Art Museum is pleased to present Barbara Bullock: Fearless Vision, a retrospective of the artist’s illustrious career. Fearless Vision showcases Bullock’s development over sixty years of creative practice, from the paintings and drawings of the late 1960s and 1970s to the cut, painted, and sculpted works in heavy-weight paper she is known for today. The exhibition demonstrates the artist’s participation in a national movement in the arts to strengthen Black identity through explorations of African art, music, and dance and the impact of her extensive travels through Africa and the Caribbean.
Socially-driven artists are accepted as part of the mix in the arts today, but this was not always the case. Bullock stands out as a pioneering figure in Philadelphia whose work extends outside the studio and into the city, especially into the city’s Black communities, with an embrace of African art as inspiration, declaration of strength, and path to reclaiming an ancestral cultural identity. Forcefully, but gently with the beauty of her art and teaching, Bullock takes a stand for social justice, working in the cultural and educational spheres of Philadelphia. Fearless Vision shows how Bullock’s studio practice evolved in dialogue with her work as both educator and social activist, exploring the cross-fertilization of ideas about art and social healing.
Bullock worked in K-12 schools, museums, community organizations, senior centers, and public spaces. Her long-term leadership of the art programs at the Ile-Ife Black Humanitarian Center (1971-1975) and Prints for Progress (1980-1993) were seminal experiences in her creative practice. The exhibition will include many of the objects that Bullock made to inspire students and participants in community projects such as game boards, pop-up books, hats, fans, boxes, altars, and miniature theaters. They share a vocabulary of figurative elements, animal forms, patterns, textures, and colors that characterize Bullock's studio practice.
Woodmere collaborated with independent art historians and curators Leslie King Hammond and Lowery Stokes Sims in preparing an oral history with Bullock that is transcribed as a central element in the accompanying catalogue publication. The catalogue includes a chronology of education projects that follows the artist’s archive and lesson plans donated by Bullock to Woodmere’s historic archives of Philadelphia’s artists. The catalogue is available at the Woodmere Art Museum Store and through Amazon at Barbara Bullock: Fearless Vision: Art Museum, Woodmere, Wei, Tess, Brown, Elbrite, Valerio, William R., Bullock, Barbara, Sims, Lowery, King Hammond, Leslie, Pieri, Diane, Tow, Hildy: 9781888008104: Amazon.com: Books.
Support for Barbara Bullock: Fearless Vision is provided by The Edna Wright Andrade Fund of the Philadelphia Foundation, the William M. King Charitable Foundation, Robert and Frances Kohler, the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art, The Dorothy del Bueno Endowed Exhibition Fund at Woodmere, the Nixon Family on behalf of James V. Nixon, Jr., and other generous contributors, including those who wish to remain anonymous. Woodmere thanks the Lomax family and WURD, who are the exhibition’s media partners.
Patricia Likos Ricci will trace the developments in women’s art from a feminist perspective over the past fifty years, demonstrating considerable changes and expansion of issues. Barbara Bullock and Violet Oakley – with exhibitions currently on view at Woodmere – will be highlighted, as will the work of other Philadelphia-area women in Woodmere’s collection and those involved in the citywide Focus '74 and the current (re) Focus 2024 at Moore College of Art and Design.
The civil rights movement gave women of color more attention and the gay rights movement has made it possible to openly display LGBTQ artists and express their issues. In the context of current museums reckoning with race, Ricci will focus particularly on women artists of color and LGBTQ artists. She will discuss the rediscovery of women artists in response to Linda Nochlin's seminal article "Why have there been no great women artists?" of 1971.
Patricia Likos Ricci, PhD is Distinguished Professor of the History of Art, co-advisor of the Architectural Studies program and an affiliated member of the Women and Gender Studies faculty. She teaches courses in European and American Art, World Architecture, and a seminar on the Italian Renaissance. Her research focuses on American Renaissance murals and architecture and the interface between the arts and sciences.
Releasing the Energies: Choral Music in Dialogue with the Art of Barbara Bullock
The choir at St. Thomas, Whitemarsh consists of trained choral singers and volunteers who love singing. Drawing on three themes and titles from Barbara Bullocks' artwork, this program features the human voice singing texts that amplify or comment on titles of various artworks. The first theme, "Stories my Grandmother Told Me," is a collection of works including Nigerian folksongs, songs about intergenerational connectedness and community, and texts drawn from Pennsylvania Dutch samplers. The second theme, "Most Precious Blood," features music that speaks to police violence towards Black men as well as the Christian concept of the sacredness of Jesus's blood. Finally, in "Spirit House", we explore themes of the afterlife, spirits, ancestors, and housing security.
Gallery Talk with Barbara Bullock and art historians, Leslie King Hammond and Lowery Stokes Sims
Artists' Talk on Barbara Bullock 10/21/23 2:00 pm Speakers: Syd Carpenter, artist; Andrea Packard, artist; director, Swarthmore College Art Collection & Curator, List Gallery