CCH POUNDER

African Millennium Foundation(AMF) – in partnership with grassroots organizations, works to create sustainable livelihoods by empowering communities in Africa. AMF seeks to target poverty, hunger and disease at its very root by providing African women and children with the necessary tools for achieving self-sufficiency. If you would like to lend your support or send a GIFT on behalf of African Millennium Foundation. An acclaimed film and television actress, CCH Pounder has taken a vested interest in the efforts of the African Millennium Foundation. She directly supports the Tilla children that have been affected by the AIDS pandemic in Mozambique. This is a large group of children living on their own after losing their parents to the disease.

"You too can help a family of children orphaned by AIDS through donations to Reencontro. Your help will allow these children to lead lives with the rights deserved by all children."

To be honest, abstract works of art had never been part of my life in terms of viewing, collecting or interacting with artists who worked in that genre. I, like thousands of c ollectors, longed for the black image we roamed museums and galleries for years coming across so few of these images that when in my lifetime I saw them emerging on the grand scale there was a new frenzy of collecting and histories to be learned. There was a network of discoveries of those long in the art trenches who were finally getting their due and many just in the nick of time and others an ignominious end, their relatives having removed their works from attics, garages and storage bins to the rubbish heap. Only when living part time in Senegal did I see, with any frequency, abstractions in art. Perhaps because Islam prohibits the human image other forms of art decor remained prominent. Perhaps because it was a French colony the figurative image was later provided. Perhaps because it was a country where animism exists, fetishized works of wood, sand, bronze and clay also exist in an abstracted way.  The idea to show works neither fully abstracted or fully based in realism offered me anopportunity to look at the pervasiveness of my colonial cultivation. The leftover vestiges of imposed customs we do not need started with a barrister/lawyer painting of Greg Bailey’s from Jamaica and took me on this journey of abstracted realities of works chosen from the diaspora. Holding a mirror up, from abstraction such as Greg Wiley Edwards' piece of what I see and imagine, to many of the other works showing what I did not or could not see.

- CCH Pounder, Curator