Artist Napoleon Jones. Henderson has been working with textiles and
other media for more than 50 years, and his spirit and artistic prowess
are now on display at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.
Special correspondent Jarrod Bowen of GBH recently met Jones Henderson
at his home. It's part of our arts and culture series canvas.
Have got surely six or 7000 books throughout my library here, if
ever there was a home built on passion and fueled by art, this is
it. Napoleon Jones. Henderson has lived here for 47 years.
It's a living sculpture, housing a lifetime of his, not to mention
all other matter of artwork. You have different working spaces.
No. Well, yes. Each room is a different working space, and I would
call it an aesthetic and intellectual resource. That's what this
house is for me and the spirits run deep here.
Jones. Henderson's Greek Revival home is known as the Edward Everette
Hale House. Hale was an abolitionist who advocated for the education
of Freed, enslaved people. I'm sure
As an abolitionist and all of the activities that he was engaged
in people such as Tubman and Douglass. They've all tiptoe through
this house. So in a way of speaking, I'd see it as responsibility
of mind to continue that.
That kind of energy. It looks like you're not somebody who separates
your work from life. Oh, no, it's all one thing. My work is my life
and has been for half a century.
In 1968 Jones. Henderson was one of the founders of the Chicago artist
Collective Africa, Cobra or the African commune of Bad relevant artists.
And now at Boston's ICA, the decades of work in textiles he produced,
According to Africa, Brazil Aesthetic principles fills this retrospective.
That manifesto, which drove our work is the elevation of the humanity
of African people and to project
If you will always positive images and works that reflect the beauty
and the Majesty of African people. They asked themselves the question.
What is the role of the visual artist as part of the civil rights
movement, and Jeffrey deploys the show's curators, and says Jones,
Henderson's work has always been in dialogue with the community.
Reflecting the culture in language and music. Cobra outlined that
they would use language in a particular way, as you see in Napoleon's
work often things that come from the community saying to be free
or lyrics drawn from black music like from a Stevie Wonder song.
At other times an individual work that's dedicated to a body of work
by a musician like going to the sacred concerts. So it has various
iterations in his work, But there is a sense of rhythm and musicality
throughout.
And it's woven in Jones. Henderson studied textile weaving at the
Art Institute of Chicago, but well before that, it was family practice.
It really starts out with my grandparents and my aunts and all the
women in my family, because quilting and
Patching the holes in your pants after they wore out and
Tucking up occult Lee because there was a little bit too big for
you. When they got passed down over decades, he scooped up roll after
roll of fabric from New England's once thriving textile mills.
And in 1974, he came across a room full of reflective yarn once used
for flapper dresses, which he still uses the element of the Africa
over a aesthetic and philosophy of shine.
Became fully available to me the aspects that one can find and medieval
tapestries and so forth where they have to gold and silver threads
in there.
It's the very same thing and the shine accents a palette of what
Jones deliciously calls Kool Aid colors in the late sixties and early
seventies. I know in Chicago in particular.
You saw brothers walking around the neighborhood and street with
these wonderful Kool Aid color outfits on lime, green, purple, the
strawberry red and so that style is what we saw as an important element
to depict in our visual work and be perfectly honest, Kool Aid is
very close to watercolor.
The artists. Most recent pieces and project he's been working on
for the last 20 years is a series of sculptures titled Requiem for
Our Ancestors.
Their shrines to house spirits and began with his desire to honor
the four girls killed when white supremacists bombed Alabama's 16th
Street Baptist Church in 1963.
Looking at those four little girls and many other
Africans who have died or were killed, murdered and otherwise terrorized.
Who's
Passing
Their spirits were not
Able to be honored.
And health sacred by the people who they were a part of
And the bottom of each shrine, he says, is meant to catch the wind
as derived from a Nigerian tradition. So the stirring of the ads,
the stirring at spirits
And so these structures are spaces for those spirits to have still
been uneasy out here since 16 19 coming forward.
They have a place to be from a museum to a home where the spirits
always move. Napoleon Jones Henderson for the PBS news hour I'm Jared