For Press Release: Chelle Barbour Angela Bassett has been a client of Terrell Tilford’s since around 2004. She has collected works by several artists we represent: Charly Palmer, Greg Breda, Elizabeth Catlett, and Olivier Van Zeveren amongst others. That was with my previous art gallery, Tilford Art Group (1999-2010). Originally founded in New York City, (TAG) produced shows throughout the SF/Bay Area, DTLA and in venues throughout NYC. We opened our first flagship in 2003. During that time, we would take afternoons and really discuss the ideal of collecting and procuring and what the relationship of gallery to client to artist was all about. She had a sincere and genuine interest in learning how we chose the artists that we worked with. She wanted to know what the studio visit process might look like.

Fast forward to 2018.

In 2015, Tilford Art Group was re-branded and launched as Band of Vices and began doing pop-up exhibitions in DTLA loft spaces and in the West Adams arts district of Los Angeles. When we finally found our new permanent location here on a burgeoning corner in the revitalized West Adams, I knew we had something special. Our first show in our new space, Made In Space, a solo exhibition that centered around Afro-Futurism by the Bahamian artist April Bey was a critical success and produced a sold-out show. Artillery Magazine featured April's work on the cover of their May/June issue. The show was also covered by Art Cake, LA Weekly, Supersonic Art, The Jealous Curator, Forth Magazine and Culture Hog. April will now be speaking at Art + Practice, founded by Mark Bradford and Eileen Norton in early November.

Our second show, Process and Materials was an abstract show by mid-career artist Sharon Louise Barnes. The show featured hanging and wall sculptures comprised of found materials, as well as roofing paper, harp and organ chords. There were also several paintings on display, as well. An attraction of interior designers, KCRW highlighted it as one of five design things to do and LA Weekly quickly covered the work in two articles: 10 Art Galleries That Don't Care About Your Low-Key Holiday Weekend and West Adams is L. A. 's New Gallery Row.

So when it came to our upcoming third exhibition, Chelle Barbour's solo show You IS Pretty! Surrealism and the Black Imaginary, I thought it would be a significant gesture to ask one of our most astute art collectors, the "Queen of Wakanda", a cinematic reference of Afro-Surrealism herself, I knew Angela Bassett would be the perfect Guest Curator. As the matriarch in Black Panther of this fictitious society, her daughter is the chief information technician that values women leaders in science fiction, technology and cyberculture, thus advancing many of the ideals and aspirations that Barbour addresses in this body of work.

She was in the middle of promoting the new Mission Impossible film with Tom Cruise and back to filming her television show 9-1-1, so her time was limited. But she was thrilled at the idea of discovering a new lane for herself, now as an art curator.

Angela and I discussed the significance and symbolism of Barbour's work, which she connected with immediately and together, we began to cull works from the artist's oeuvre of pieces that we thought would be a great exhibition. Angela was very involved in how things should be placed, giving works the needed breadth for people to experience the work.

Angela Bassett has said this about Chelle Barbour’s work:

“ Chelle Barbour has the rare artistic gift of being able to elevate a people, in this case, the Black woman, to heights of majesty and complexity that is so often overlooked in society and our everyday lives. ”

“By embracing Afro-Surrealism & Afro-Futurism in this corpus of photo-collage images, Barbour is placing her imprimatur and adding her voice to these artistic movements. Barbour serves as a visual witness who is documenting the ideals & aspirations of a people, in this case, black women. While Barbour stands on the shoulders of civil rights and feminist leaders who came before her such as Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, Elizabeth Catlett, Octavia E. Butler & Alice Walker, to name just a few; she is part of a newer generation of advocates of the black women’s movement including such scholars and thinkers as Kimberle Crenshaw, Moya Bailey, Britney Cooper, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ava DuVernay & Amanda Stenberg. In these collages, Barbour is arguing on behalf of black women for their genius, their humanity, their beauty, their dignity, their intellect, their independence, their curiosity, their imagination and the endless possibilities that these qualities engender regarding their very existence. ”

Barbour is channeling black feminist thought and scholars as she contemplates these women in her collages. Bell Hooks explains that “ No other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have black women... When black people are talked about the focus tends to be on black men, and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women. ” Thus, says Kimberle Crenshaw in “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex”, ‘Black women’s Blackness or femaleness sometimes has placed their needs and perspectives at the margin of the feminist and Black liberationist agendas. ” Barbour has had enough of black women being relegated to the sidelines, thus she has placed them as the main protagonists.

Barbour conjures up images of the fantastical and the surreal, of otherworldliness, disjointedness and disorientation, of the inexplicable wedded to the unfamiliar – worlds in which the black woman is armed with warrior-like alligator skin as we see in “Don’t Get It Twisted’ (2018); or, in “Becoming” (2018), she asks us to imagine that a caterpillar will metamorphose into a butterfly then transform itself once again into a black woman. Barbour’s point is that the reality of the black woman’s life experience is very different from the mainstream and she is attempting to capture that stark difference in this body of work.

Chelle Barbour says about her work: “I have created a corpus of artwork that engenders questions about agency and beauty through layering visual metaphors across an iconography of black women that evoke Afro-Surrealism. ” This group of images “reimagine and celebrates hybrids of black female identity as mighty warriors, protagonists, sages, and interlocutors, the images portray females who are alluring, confident, and regal, whose mystique envelops and ​ draws you in while simultaneously disrupting the notion of black women as unattractive, threatening, and lacking economic value. These fictional beings are compelling, yet feminine and non-binary as well as vulnerable, and resistant to trauma. ”

At a private reception held for a select group of collectors the other nite, Angela and Chelle had a chance to meet and talk. With obviously a mutual fondness and respect for each other's artistic discipline and rigor, it was immediately apparent that these two shared an emblematic embrace of redefining the aesthetic of what is means to be a modern-day Black woman.

The title You IS Pretty! Is derived from the idea that Black women are pretty too, but are often marginalized as having a beauty that is less than the American standard of beauty which is thought to be European. There is also sarcasm in the title with the use of the word “is” instead of the proper English grammar usage of “are”. It is a term that is both colloquial and familiar among Black women.

You IS Pretty! Surrealism & the Black Imaginary by Chelle Barbour. Our Guest Curator is Angela Bassett.

Terrell Tilford & Melvin Marshall serve as curatorial consultants. Opening Saturday, September 15, 2018 on view thru October 13, 2018.