Dr. Leslee Stradford And Cullen Washington Jr. At Keyes Art

On Saturday, June 3, Keyes Art in Sag Harbor opens an exhibition featuring the work of Leslee Stradford and Cullen Washington Jr. The show opens with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m.

Dr. Leslee Howes Stradford is a descendant of John Batiste (J.B.) Stradford, who was an attorney, entrepreneur and the owner of the prestigious Stradford Hotel in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

A prominent community member, he managed to escape in the aftermath of the 1921 Black Wall Street Massacre but those terrible events marked him and his family. Using a collection of family documents and photographs, Stradford has created a series of works on silk that depict the sophisticated and prosperous lives of the African-Americans in Tulsa before the riots and the destruction that followed.

Stradford is an artist whose work is best known as abstract expressionism, has undertaken the challenge of exploring a dark side of American culture. Her work documents the devastation of a prosperous enterprising African American community and challenges the dismissive assumptions that have sometimes overlooked the abilities of Blacks whose diligence has transformed cities through hard work and determination.

As an artist, her practice includes social, cultural and historical documentation. It straddles figuration and abstraction. Using new technology, photographic research and drawing, she creates digital images, painted canvases and printed silks.

Her work is currently in the collections of Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Parrish Museum in Southampton and the California African American Museum: CAAM.

Cullen Washington Jr. will show paintings from his “Primers” series of black color field paintings, which are a record of the history of Black skin, wounded, scarred and amended.

“The surface of the painting is collaged paper. As I mend the papers together, they mend wounds. The wounds become keloids — an area of irregular fibrous tissue formed at the site of a scar or injury more prominent in Black skin,”explained Washington in an artist’s statement. “The keloids become amendments, the 13th Amendment and the 14th Amendment.

“The work is also about space and the underlying beginning of matter and light hence their title, ‘Primers,” he continued. “The atmospheric surfaces are comprised of graphite, charcoal, ground mineral pigments and ink, a primordial mixture using the basic element carbon found in most natural phenomena. The richness of my blacks are a mixture of cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks, the process colors in printing processes used to make all other colors in the printed spectrum.”

Washington is a native of Louisiana and received his BA from Louisiana State University and his MFA from Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. He lives and works in New York and has exhibited in group and solo shows nationally and internationally including The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Massachusetts and many others.

Both artists’ work will remain on view at Keyes Art through July 4. The gallery is at 45 Main Street in Sag Harbor. For more information visit juliekeyesart.com or call 631-808-3588.