Portraits of U.S. Artists in the Southeast: Jerome Meadows (Part 1 of 2)

While many American artists find themselves battling frustration over attempts to obtain public venues for their work, sculptor Jerome Meadows had made a home for his art in cities across the United States as well as in two shows currently exhibiting in his city of residence, Savannah, Georgia.

The artist teamed up with members of the Telfair Museum of Art’s Friends of African-American Art to launch the first Savannah Area Artists Fine Art Exhibition July 12 at the city’s historic Beach Institute, a facility first established in 1868 as a school for former slaves. Scheduled to run until July 31, 2009, the exhibition also features art by: Peggy Blood, Madeline Cory-Thomas, Amiri Farris, Suzanne Jackson, William Kamena-Poe, Ligel Lambert, John Mitchell, David Smalls, Wendell Smith, Phil Starks, Luther E. Vann, Roosevelt Watson, Napoleon Wilkerson, George Worthy, and Maria Smith Williams.

Artist Jerome Meadows in his studio. (photo by Russ Byant)

In addition to the Savannah Area Artists Fine Art Exhibition, Meadows’ is featured as both an artist and a guest curator in his acclaimed Reframing a Perceptual Paradigm installation, which debuted at the Telfair Museum of Art on April 24 and is scheduled to run until August, 2, 2009. The installation is notable not only because of Meadows’ dual role but because it occupies several galleries in the Telfair includes work by a range of past and contemporary fellow artists, plus select objects from the Telfair Museum’s considerable collection of rare fine art.

The ease with which Meadows has seemed to link his singular genius to that of other artists in Savannah has been admirable to witness as it serves to help enhance Savannah’s reputation as a city rich in the cultural arts and increases the visibility of the artists themselves. Yet he would be among the first to admit with some humor that achieving a unified front among artists is not a simple task to accomplish. “We’re typically in our studios, and then other people come into the picture for the purpose of a show,” said Meadows. “Creating and designing and conceiving as a group is not really what visual artists do.”

That humble observation probably would have been a tough sell to anyone attending the opening of the Seeing Sounds exhibit at the S.P.A.C.E. Gallery in Savannah on March 6, 2009. For that particular event, seventeen members of Creative Force Artists Collective (Meadows among them) teamed up with jazz musician and Soundpainting conductor Jody Espina to stage one of the more spectacular multi-discipline creative arts performances ever to hit the “coastal empire.”

For that exhibition, the work of the artists was fully represented in one room by traditional painted canvases hanging on the gallery walls but also by oversized found art sculpture designed to be played as musical instruments; and, by an extended serpentine wall comprised of different sections of art that either symbolized some form of music or, again, actually functioned as a musical instrument. Next to the main gallery, inside the Black Box Theatre, one group of artists painted and sculpted in response to musical directions provided by Jody Espina at the same that he conducted his jazz ensemble and played the saxophone. “What was so fantastic for me that night is that people were experiencing the force of creativity,” said Meadows. “I mean how many times does the average person get to sit there and watch a painter or sculptor creating [that way]. There was nothing timid about that.”

The rapturous attention and spontaneous burst of applause from the crowd indicated they too had entered the exploding zone of creative forces and very much liked what they discovered there. Confirmation of Seeing Sounds’ dynamic appeal came in the form of an invitation from the Telfair Museum of Arts to present an encore at the Jepson Center, which the musicians and artists did March 22, 2009, as part of Savannah’s much celebrated annual Music Festival.

NEXT: More on Jerome Meadows plus an interview with the artist

by Aberjhani