Louisiana-based artist creates empowering portraits of Black Americans through a revision of historical painting.
On View February 2 – June 18, 2023 | Main Gallery
SECCA is proud to host Vitus Shell: 'Bout It 'Bout It, The Political Power of Just Being, an exhibition of portraits by mixed-media collage painter Vitus Shell. An opening reception with the artist will be held Thursday, February 2 from 5–8pm. Admission is free and open to the public.
In addition to works traveling to SECCA, the exhibition also features a large site-specific mural portrait of Larry Little, the prominent Winston-Salem community leader and founder of the North Carolina Chapter of the Black Panther Party, the first in the American South.
This exhibition is organized by the Hilliard Art Museum, Lafayette, Louisiana and curated by Benjamin M. Hickey, Curator of Exhibitions, Hilliard Art Museum, University of Louisiana at Lafayette. The exhibition is co-sponsored by Blanco Tackabery Attorneys and Counsellors at Law.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Portraiture as a genre holds a grand position within the history of art and has for centuries been employed to glorify White monarchs, leaders, icons, and religious figures. Louisiana-based artist Vitus Shell creates portraits that challenge this tradition, while also sharing a concern for the historical representation of Black bodies. For example, the composition of his portraits includes faux gold gilding and oval or circular picture windows—stylistic trends often found in Byzantine and Renaissance portraiture to indicate power, status, and the eternal. Shell also rejects the convention of framing his works. Instead, his canvases hang in an ad-hoc manner with grommets, boasting waves and slightly curled edges. The presentation implies a quickly wheat-pasted handbill for a trendy nightclub or a banner at a protest rally.
Perhaps more importantly, Shell's sitters are familiar and members of his community. He portrays his sitters as self-possessed, questioning individuals, whose humanity shines. Those depicted dominate the foreground and serve as a counterpoint to a background of collaged newspaper articles and advertisements filled with bigoted or misunderstood accounts of Black American life. The aspirational, thoughtful body language, rendered with authenticity by Shell, stands in stark contrast to the flat, colorless, and stereotype-ridden caricatures of Black bodies found in the largely historical sources he uses for his backgrounds. Presenting his portraits in this fashion empowers his sitters, and by association the Black American community, to reject limited two-dimensional depictions of themselves for ones in which they are interlocutors with their past and present struggles, while being in dialogue with the American Dream on their terms.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Vitus Shell is a mixed-media collage painter born in Monroe, LA, where he lives and works. His work is geared toward the black experience, giving agency to people from this community through powerful images deconstructing, sampling, and remixing identity, civil rights, and contemporary black culture.
He received a BFA from Memphis College of Art in Tennessee, 2000 and an MFA from University of Mississippi, 2008. As of 2020, Shell is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Louisiana Tech University. To date, Vitus Shell has accumulated an impressive list of achievements. He was an artist-in residence at Crosstown Arts, Hermitage Artist Retreat, BemisCenter for the Contemporary Arts, Mass MoCA, Joan Mitchell Center, Skowhegan School of Art, Tougaloo Art Colony, and Masur Museum of Art. Exhibitors of his work include The McKenna Museum of African American Art, New Orleans, LA, Gallery Aferro, Newark, NJ, New Orleans Museum of Art, University of Louisiana at Monroe, LA, Philander Smith College, Little Rock, AR, Cue Art Foundation, NYC, Stephen F. Austin University, Nacogdoches, TX, University of Minnesota at Minneapolis, Tennessee Art Commission Gallery, Nashville, TN, Miami University, Oxford, OH, and University of Alabama at Huntsville. Shell's mural project collaborators include the National Civil Rights Museum's NBA Pioneers exhibit, Indianola City Pool in Indianola, MS, Union Parish Elementary School in Farmerville, LA; and the Memphis Urban Art Commission. Shell has received numerous grant awards including the Joan Mitchell MFA Award and Camille Hanks-Cosby Scholarship.