ReSOURCE

Artists

Mr. Imagination
October 5, 2024
Mr. Imagination (Gregory Warmack). Untitled (Paint brush head), Late 20th Century. Found paint brush, bottle caps, beads, clay and acrylic paint, 5" (W) x 9" (H) x 2.5" (D). Patric McCoy Collection
Mr. Imagination (Gregory Warmack). Untitled (Paint brush head), Late 20th Century. Found paint brush, bottle caps, beads, clay and acrylic paint, 5" (W) x 9" (H) x 2.5" (D). Patric McCoy Collection

Mr. Imagination

Gregory Warmack, more popularly known as “Mr. Imagination” (1948-2012), was born in Chicago, the third of nine children. At the age of 30, Warmack was shot during a robbery, leaving him in a coma for six weeks. This near-death experience, which he described as an out-of-body encounter with visions of ancient cultures, profoundly influenced his creative trajectory and artistic practice. After his recovery, he adopted the name Mr. Imagination and began creating art from discarded materials, such as shattered glass, painted rocks, tossed-away bottle-caps, whittled tree bark, and a variety of other materials. This practice served as a healing experience, and he often involved local children in his creative process to create structures such as the Imagination Grotto, located at the southeast corner of 39th and Michigan in the art garden of the former Elliott Donnelley Youth Center, only one block from the South Side Community Art Center. In 2002, he moved to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, but a devastating fire in 2008 destroyed his home and much of his work. He relocated to Atlanta, Georgia, in 2009, where he continued to create and exhibit his art until his passing. Mr. Imagination’s work includes assemblages, functional structures, sculptures, public art, and wearable objects, all salvaged from materials that fascinated his creative curiosities.

 

Related Artists

Aki (Donald Baker Sr.)
Bethany Collins
Michael Qualls
Robert A. Ferris
Theaster Gates
Fannie Mae Robinson

MIXED MEDIA AND STILL LIFE

Works in EMERGENCE are diverse in their subject matter and media, but a few themes reappear throughout. Working in abstraction or in the traditionally peaceful genre of still life, artists like William Carter, Allen Stringfellow, and Jonathan Green express themes of interiority or sociability, history or modernity. Notably, Stringfellow and Ralph Arnold both experimented with media and materials and worked extensively in collage, which allowed them to combine abstract design, figurative imagery, and on occasion political ideas.

Viewers typically expect Black artists to focus on particular aspects of their social and political identities within their work. Where might those expectations come from? Still life, abstraction, and collage may express many different things about artists’ interior lives and their visual and social observation, whether connected to public manifestations of identity or not.

William Carter’s mid-century still life Untitled presents a group of vibrantly colored bottles that invite the viewer’s gaze, set against a similarly colorful background with floral elements like grapes and leaves. They give evidence of conviviality and might be interpreted as symbols of social gatherings, but they could also just be a collection of pleasing forms. We might put Carter’s still life in dialogue with that of Jonathan Green, who became close friends with Carter while living in Chicago. Green’s close-up view of an eloquently simple composition presents oranges, a pear, and a lemon in front of two vessels. Works like this piece call the viewer to examine the objects the artist chose to include, to consider how they interact with each other like bodies in space, and to reflect on their meaning within the traditional genre of still life painting.

Collage might suggest the piecing together of identity from different components that might not usually coexist, giving room for more expansive imaginations of meaning than a straightforward representational image might allow. It could also just be an inventive way of combining colors, shapes, and textures. Allen Stringfellow’s Untitled, a collage from 1962, brings familiar motifs from still life—fruit and flowers, desserts and glassware—together with imagery of artist’s models and performers. Layered with paint and tissue paper that frustrate the viewer’s attempt to get clarity on the subject matter, the bursts of form and colors hint at the splashy abstraction of Stringfellow’s untitled, textured painting made from house paint and particulate on cardboard. Here the artist tests commonly found materials to create new textures and plays with the creation of colors and finishes that diverge from “Western” academic painting methods.

In The Waiting, Arnold constructs a large collage from different paper components, lace, and paint. In the piece, elements of European and African art are placed in dialogue with one another, while some figures appear alone and isolated, others in large groups. Without giving easy answers, Arnold implies questions about social issues. Who is waiting, and for what? In his Love Sign II, which bears the words “Love is Universal,” Arnold asserts the equal validity of all types of romantic affection and love, utilizing collage to convey a more straightforward political message.