Vision Festival Celebrating Wadada Leo Smith / Oliver Lake

Vision Festival Art Show  Celebrating Lifetime Achievements: Art of Wadada Leo Smith / Oliver Lake 

Curator: Patricia Nicholson

Artists: Wadada Leo Smith • Oliver Lake • Amir Bey • William Parker • Patricia Nicholson

Gallery: LES Gallery

Dates: June 16th - June 27th 2022

Opening Reception: June 16th, 5-9pm

Arts for Art presents the Vision Festival

Dedicated to great creative black music and multi-arts since 1996, Arts for Art brings the arts together to broaden the creative possibilities.   

Featuring Indoors in the LES Gallery:  Wadada Leo Smith’s Ankhrasmation Symbolic Art-Score(s) & Oliver Lake’s mixed media paintings and sculptures

Outdoors in La Plaza: Amir Bey’s metal sculpture and Totems by William Parker and Patricia Nicholson

This year we are celebrating the LifeTime Achievement of two critical musicians and artists, Wadada Leo Smith and Oliver Lake.  We are excited that The Clemente will be our partner for this exhibit in the LES Gallery & in La Plaza. The artworks speak collectively and together they reflect the radical optimism that comes from a lifetime of creativity shared across the globe through art and sound. 

Wadada Leo Smith makes a distinction between his ankhrasmation art scores and other works of art. He considers his art scores to be incomplete if one engages the work only as a visual object. The only true representation of his inspiration as a creative artist occurs when the visual and the auditory are experienced as one phenomenon. When both the exhibition and performance of the scores have been realized, the score as a musical work and as an art object is authenticated.

Twelve of Smith’s Ankhrasmation scores will be performed on his LifeTime Achievement night, June 21, at Roulette Intermedium (509 Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn). 

The ankhrasmation symbolic language scores are constructed on cotton paper with ink, acrylic and other sources of hues and systems of reproduction. Smith’s art scores have been exhibited in a number of major museums, such as The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago and The Kalamazoo Institute of Arts.

Oliver Lake

“I pick up the brush as part of my meditation. I work with oil and acrylic paint, pencil, collage - often mixing media. I like to work with vibrant colors exploding against one another. I am a painter, usually on two dimensional surfaces such as paper and canvas, but at times I find myself painting on three dimensional found objects, and these paintings become sculpture. Over the years I have been creating Talkin' Sticks - found natural sticks painted and decorated to tell a story, break a spell, power a dream. The themes in the work come from a long collaboration with my African, Choctaw and American roots, exploring and expressing who I am, and how I see the world. 

In 2010 I was commissioned by City of Asylum/Pittsburgh to design a house and garden for Sampsonia Way in Pittsburgh, PA. I designed the exterior as a painting, and the interior as a series of paintings and sculptures. There is a painted saxophone that is linked to the doorbell, playing several selections of music upon activation. The house has been completed and has already hosted literary artists by City of Asylum.Though I have received much recognition as a saxophonist, composer and bandleader, I have continued to engage in the merging of artistic disciplines. 

Amir Bey is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work involves both visual, performance arts. As a multidisciplinary artist, he is engaged in mixed media sculpture, carving, silkscreen on fabric, sumi ink paintings and scrolls, art writing, installation, performance art, set design.  Lovers In State, one of his Celebrants from his Equinox Celebration Tarot, represents the final state of a relationship between two entities, whether personal or otherwise. It is also a percussive instrument, with high resonance.  Amir Bey is also creating 4 headdresses for Oliver Lake’s composition Africa. Each one was approached differently to be worn by dancers performing on June 26, 2022. The headdresses art titled:  Red Lion, River and Earth, Antelope Spirit, and Hair Dance.

William Parker and Patricia Nicholson began creating spirit totems to celebrate the Vision Festival in 2021. They are continuing to develop these totems in honor of the creative spirit that is both ancient and contemporary. In La Plaza they will design a sacred space with a grove of Totems that is designed to lift minds to spirit and speak to the importance of community, compassion and harmony. William Parker has been making art pieces often involving the instruments that he plays or as scores or illustrations in his books and during the pandemic he made a series of paintings.  Patricia Nicholson is best known for her role in AFA and as a dancer. She has expressed her visual art primarily in terms of her performances, designing and making costumes and body paint and set design.

About Arts for Art:

Arts for Art is dedicated to the exceptional creativity that originated in the African American multi-arts jazz culture that utilizes improvisation to express a larger, more positive dream of inclusion and freedom. Arts for Art is dedicated to the promotion and advancement of FreeJazz -- preserving its legacy and ensuring a vital future through its re-imagination by new generations of artists. AFA presents performances throughout the year that are designed to deepen engagement with a growing community of diverse artists and audiences. To further AFA’s goals of diversity and accessibility, we foster education initiatives that are free to all of our students while focusing on those in need.