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Whitfield Lovell is a New York-based African American artist who explores and documents
the lives of black men and women, primarily in the rural American South. Lovell's recent
artwork-multipart installations incorporating portrait drawings on wood and numerous
household objects, such as bottles, cooking vessels, lanterns, and chairs-began as
autobiographical exploration using family photographs, many taken by his father. Inspired
by studio portraits of his grandmother's relatives, Lovell soon began searching for studio
photographs of other African Americans in thrift shops and at flea markets. These further
informed his use of charcoal portraits as centerpieces for his art, which along with found
objects create narratives about largely undocumented lives.
At Neal Middle School, Lovell used more than two hundred old family photographs,
primarily of African American and Latino families, which he collected from flea markets. The
eighth-graders made several charcoal drawings based on photographs they chose and
composed written pieces to accompany them. Working in small groups the students
incorporated found objects-such as screen doors, old ironing boards, and flowers-into large
installations that drew on their feelings about the photographs while evoking portions of their
own memories.
3 ARTISTS
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