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Sunday, September 24, 2006

Louisville artists, gallery owners get national attention in book

By Larry Muhammad
lmuhammad@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal

For 20 years, it's been a leading African-American art gallery and sponsor of the Philadelphia International Art Expo, which attracts 150 artists and 50,000 patrons and collectors from across the country in a weekend.

Now the Philadelphia-based October Gallery has published "Connecting People With Art," a 500-page coffee-table book that showcases scores of artists and industry professionals -- including Louisville gallery owners Cathy and Walter Shannon and artists C.J. Fletcher and Eugene Thomas.


 
"The book is amazing," said Walter Shannon, who owns The Famous E&S Gallery, 108 S. 10th St., with his wife, Cathy. "I think it does a great job of researching black art into the 21st century, and helps expose a lot of newer artists, and a lot of dealers who have made these artists successful. It gets into Alonzo Adams and William Tolliver and Paul Goodnight but also has Joshua Johnson, Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence."

The Shannons are pictured in the book in formal dress, about to leave their home for a Kentucky Derby event. Also included in the book are paintings by Fletcher ("Real Men Pray," of a man kneeling in a bed of flowers) and her husband, Thomas ("Against the Wind #2," of a woman clutching a bundled baby), in addition to photographs of each artist.

"We started doing the Art Expo back in 1998, and it opened a whole new world for us," Fletcher said. "Our agent had told us that prominent artists were in it so we submitted work, were accepted right away and there were collectors and celebrities coming through, people from across the country. Every year we make a profit."

October Gallery, situated on Philadelphia's gallery row, was founded in 1985 by Mercer and Evelyn Redcross, college sweethearts from Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn., who married after dating nine months.

He became a bank officer, she a journalist. They were both art lovers and decorated their home with works by Salvador Dali and Giovanni Battista Moroni.

Frustrated by the difficulty of finding art by black artists, they sought it out and opened October Gallery, exhibiting Romare Bearden collages, paintings by Cal Massey and Ernest Barnes, portraits by Charles White and sculptures by Elizabeth Catlett, among other works, and promoting them to the African-American art-buying public. They did road shows and workshops with artists and held education seminars for schoolchildren.

"We wanted to engage you and teach you and make you a lifelong customer," Mercer Redcross said in a telephone interview. " 'Connecting People With Art' -- that was our mantra, our vision, and we didn't want any barriers."

The gallery also publishes Paint Magazine, a quarterly news resource and buying guide that circulates 20,000 copies in the northeastern United States. It conducts online art auctions on its Web site, www.OctoberGallery.com, has a weekly radio show and plays host to performance art every second and third Friday of the month.

The marketing helps promote art buying by people not just in the upper and middle classes.
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Top, Louisville artists C.J. Fletcher, Eugene Thomas and The Famous E&S Gallery owners Cathy and Walter Shannon are featured in the book, "Connecting People With Art."


"Art used to be so stuck-up, you had to carry yourself a certain way and had to have 'blue blood' just to look at it. Otherwise you couldn't possibly understand what was going on," said Evelyn Redcross. "We wanted to destroy that notion, break this art thing down so that everybody could be part of it."

October Gallery also has worked to promote art as a smart investment.

A 9-by-12-inch Bearden watercolor that sold for $500 in 1985, for example, sold for $17,000 in 1997, and is potentially worth thousands more today.

Said Walter Shannon, "We just delivered about $35,000 in artwork to a dermatologist and his wife, an executive in the medical field, who we met through Mercer and Evelyn. They're great clients, been buying from us for years."

Shannon met those clients at October Gallery's Art Expo, a free festival that will mark its 21st year Nov. 10-12. More than $2 million in art typically changes hands at the expo each year, at individual prices ranging from $5 to $50,000.

The expo, held at the Liacouras Center at Temple University, showcases black art in all mediums from the United States and elsewhere -- Costa Rica, Ghana, Haiti, Kenya, Puerto Rico, Brazil and Nepal. There are fabric collages, abstract oils, computerized graphics and pop-culture images such as Buffalo Soldiers, the black Jesus Christ, Muhammad Ali, Oprah Winfrey and rapper Jay-Z.

"We've reached a lot of people up along the eastern seaboard and from overseas going to that event, and Temple University has come to acquire a couple of my paintings in their collection," Thomas said. "And we've come to know Charles Bibbs, Poncho Wright, Paul Goodnight and just a number of artists because we would be at the same hotel. So we get a chance to interact and fellowship, and it's always a reunion."

The communal aspect of black art inspired the book, Mercer Redcross said: "For our 21st year, we thought it would be a good idea to do something different, and about two years ago, we said 'OK, let's put together a book.' And the concept for it wasn't just to write the October Gallery history, but to use the same model we used to build the Expo, to include our patrons, include the public that made October Gallery, and we decided to solicit those people and ask for their personal statements about African-American art."

Available from the gallery and at the Art Expo this November, the book has a name-dropping photo diary showing the Redcrosses with Will Smith, Dick Gregory, playwright Ntozake Shange, Isaac Hayes, Danny Glover, Eartha Kitt, and many others -- plus testimonial letters from former President Bill Clinton, radio host Tom Joyner and artists and art dealers from around the country.

"October Gallery is a community," said Cathy Shannon, "and we felt good about being a part of it."

Reporter Larry Muhammad can be reached at (502) 582-7091.