Art: 'Mixing Metaphors': African American art that inspires

As Bank of America expanded in recent decades by absorbing other banks, it built up a substantial collection of art once owned by those banks.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art recently exhibited one such constituent collection, a group of watercolors by the 19th-century painter Alfred Jacob Miller.

Through the end of the year, the African American Museum in Philadelphia is featuring another aspect of Bank of America's art holdings - paintings, works on paper, and a few sculptures and mixed-media pieces by African American artists.

This exhibition, "Mixing Metaphors," is both larger and more ambitious than the Miller show, which focused on a group of images produced during and after an extended visit to Indian territories beyond the Great Plains.

We might have expected Bank of America to simply pull out the big names from its African American collection and present these as evidence of what black artists have contributed to American culture. But this has been done so often that there would be little point in doing it again, especially in a museum devoted to black history.

Guest curator Deborah Willis, a photographer and historian of African American photography, has instead assembled an exhibition that attempts to say something about the political, social, and aesthetic dimensions of African American culture.

She organized the more than 90 works by 36 artists into three thematic sections: Reflection and Likeness, Constructing Place, and Rituals of Existence.

Each section includes its share of big names - Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Gordon Parks, Lorna Simpson, and Faith Ringgold are typical examples - but big names aren't really the point, which is refreshing.

Museum educator Richard Watson, who installed the show, made a pointed observation about it that's key to its appeal: It is devoid of conflict, hostility, or polemical posturing.

It is a body of work that celebrates the importance of community and family relationships, the significance of place in black life, and the wide range of aesthetic strategies that black artists have used, particularly abstraction.

"This is one of the most inspirational shows we've done in a long time," Watson said. I agree, and not because the art is sentimental or maudlin but because generally it communicates the variety, strength, and vitality of the African American experience.