Often, there’s a sense in Oliver’s paintings of imminent or recent death, as in Nisan Morning (2004), which features an animal carcass hanging between theatrical curtains, or Holofernes (1983), which presents a disembodied head on a platter next to a tray of peaches. The musician’s gift of transient beauty is further symbolized by ripe flowers and a book of illustrations of fruit at the bottom of the frame. The musician will have to lift his instrument and play if he hopes to tame back the abyss. Here, Oliver has simplified that typical scene to just one animal, the tiger, who seems set on tearing into Orpheus. The title references the hero from Greek mythology, best known for his passage through the underworld to recover his lost wife, but also famous for playing his lyre to tame wild animals-a common subject in seventeenth-century European painting. Consider his striking 1997 painting Orpheus, featuring an accordion player with a wandering eye staring out at the viewer from a pitch-black background where a massive tiger pounces. Many of Oliver’s paintings move Black figures, sometimes likenesses of himself or his family members, through these stations of life. Courtesy of Cody Willins/Highline Photography
Meanwhile, on Oliver’s canvases, even more farfetched scenes play out.Ī Meadow Lark Carols Saint Ceres Before the Sacred Silos (2021). It portends a meaningful role for visual art as part of Waco’s Magnolia-driven downtown revival. Art Center Waco’s brand-new exhibition space, a down-to-the-studs renovation and a relocation from its crumbling former home at McLennan Community College, is on South Eighth Street near the Silos shopping complex. It’s all the more disorienting to find this in Waco, a city not known for its thriving art community. Walking into the expansive “Kermit Oliver: New Narratives, New Beginnings,” on view at Art Center Waco through December 17, feels like stepping through a portal to a more rarefied plane of reality and perception, a place where Oliver has been living on his own these past few decades, which we are only just now permitted to visit. Several of his works have never been displayed outside his house. His mature career as a painter has been marked by reclusiveness and monklike craftsmanship in his home studio. Though his early career put him on a path to art-world prominence-in the early seventies, he was the first Black man to be represented by a major Houston gallery, and a decade later he became the first American artist to design scarves for Hermès-Oliver abandoned Houston in 1984 for a quieter life in Waco and a job with the U.S. Those were memories that once were, and somehow even that has gotten erased.Kermit Oliver is perhaps the least well-known of the great living Texas artists, and that’s largely by his own design. If we look at fashion history, it’ll inform you how free people used to be. People who were identifying as men were wearing heels and skirts. Once you start learning about colonization, Indigenous communities, two spirits, about life before slavery, we were thriving. “That’s what we were doing before all of this. Smith said she was struck by the book’s queer, Black women living their best lives. But it wasn’t until Monáe became an artist that she learned about musicians like Sun Ra and writers like Octavia Butler - Black artists who pioneered the Afrofuturism genre. She recalled a short story she wrote in elementary school about a plant and an alien who communicated through photosynthesis and kicked her grandmother out of her home. “I love worlds,” said Monáe, who grew up reading R.L. It began at a young age, almost unconsciously.
“It’s not necessarily a genre that’s designed for Black people.” “But how did you get into Afrofuturism and science fiction?” Smith asked Monáe later.