By Connor Bell
For The Diamondback
As about 200 people from around the Washington, Maryland and Virginia area poured into the David C. Driskell Center in Cole Field House on Thursday night, smooth jazz played in the background before local art legends took the stage.
They entered for the 15th annual Distinguished Lecture in the Visual Arts to hear a lecture from Leslie King-Hammond, a senior fellow at the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation and the founding director of the Center for Race and Culture at Maryland Institute of Culture and Art.
“The purpose is to bring well-known artists or scholars … [or] major contributors to the field of African art,” said Dorit Yaron, the center’s deputy director.
King-Hammond works in Baltimore with students to create artwork, helping them express themselves through different mediums. But she focused Thursday night’s talk specifically on the past state of African-American culture through the use of art and how it has evolved to the present day.
“I was doing the research and coming into the contemporary, then doing the reflections on then to now, and I thought to myself, ‘What’s the difference, has anything really changed?'” Hammond said.
Projected on the wall were different examples of art that ranged from depictions of the civil rights struggle for African-Americans during the 1960s to a present-day painting of a hoodie with no face on it, representing Trayvon Martin.
Hammond’s work with African-American art and children from Baltimore inspired her to work with organizations that would help students continue to express their frustrations and struggles through art, she said.
She had earned such a reputation with her work there that a private organization came to her and said, “We recognize that in your section of Baltimore, there is no structure, no building that would allow the artists a place to work, a place to express themselves, a place to preform, a place to read poetry — you name it,” she said.
Hammond said she then accepted an opportunity to help with that, and a building named “Motorhouse” in Baltimore was born. It houses artists and provides them with tools to create their masterpieces, she said.
David C. Driskell also attended the event, and he commented on how crucial Hammond’s lecture is to African-American culture and art.
“What [Hammond] is doing is giving us an assessment of the field over a period of 15 or 20 years, where [African-American art and culture] is, where its projections might go,” Driskell said.
Driskell also presented the James A. Porter & David C. Driskell Book Award in African American Art History at the event to Christa Clarke, who finished her graduate student program at this university with a focus in African-American art.
“This is an excellent opportunity to present [Hammond’s] work and connect that legacy to the David C. Driskell Center,” said professor Curlee R. Holton, the center’s executive director.
