On view as part of Curlee Raven Holton’s solo exhibition Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Spirit at William Busta Projects in Waterloo this fall, the modest size serigraph relief, A Dance of Joy and Pain (2024), summons the unusually spectacular autumn gracing Cleveland this year. Orange-crimson burns like a flame against a shrinking azure expanse, glow emitting a boundless, jubilant, and incredible sensation—precisely such because it shall end all too soon. The leaves will fall and winter, dressed in its bare bones and the lunge of its chilly winds, will arrive momentarily. Yet as the sun goes down, revelers take in the light and life, blissfully ignoring the embrace of darkness that will follow and perhaps also, the darkness within. In such animated, compositionally dense but formally reductive works, Curlee Raven Holton seems to consider our shared human experience or more specifically, the notion that we are essentially ethereal beings living a physical experience.

Gathered as a small but spectacular solo exhibition, the prints and paintings comprising Mr. Holton’s exhibition, Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Spirit present other-worldly kind of scenes in which protagonists drift and dance, take shelter, or stand captivated. Mr. Holton’s work is a powerful sort of art that taps into the quiet, subliminal idea of Art as a mighty oracle. This is a world in which artists act not as mere reporters but more like sages. And in this realm, Art, with a capital A, is like science—a great experiment indeed—in which observations, hypotheses, and conclusions arrive no doubt, though in no specific, prescribed order.

In Things That Won’t Let Go (2022), a dark, silhouetted figure runs off the edge of a cliff, grappling hooks in her back. Fingers and arms outstretched as if screaming, she drags the weighted stream of three effigies behind her. She leaps from a red rippling rock that sizzles and flows like lava. Here incised lines buoy the outcropped stone, propping up its form against the dusty, rose-colored horizon. Across the entire run of this compact, layered, composite print (which reads more like painting), vibrations mark the surface like writing, like words spoken by the earth and sky, or the rock beneath our feet.
For some, regret looms large in life, tearing peace and resilience away; for others, such hooks never stand a chance—life’s proverbial baggage weightless and easily discarded. On the night of his opening at Mr. Busta’s gallery in mid-October, the spark in Mr. Holton’s eyes suggested he might know something of both these borderlands, his pictures a testament to humanity caught between such opposing stances—between here, there, and the beyond.

It is this liminal space to which the lines of Mr. Holton’s pictures speak. Wrapped up as a single moment, many of Mr. Holton’s pictures ponder flashing visions. Yet Mr. Holton’s works are accessible, brimming with irony, sadness, and humor, even; the black and white, silvery surfaces of A Different Mask for a Different Fear I & II, for example, embody theatrical sensibility, like a scene from a folktale or familiar childhood story.

Elsewhere in Mr. Busta’s second floor gallery space, Mr. Holton’s titles play narrator to mythological-like action. In A Boat of Demons (2022), a figure pulls the amorphous weight of their world through a thick sea of waves that lap and kick and kiss. This picture, like others in the suite, point to the idea that sometimes we cannot see what holds us or weighs us down. In Chasing Fire (2022), people run after and alongside that which burns, chars and destroys, or distorts the path ahead.

Born in DeKalb, Mississippi, Mr. Holton arrived in Cleveland by train as a baby in his mother’s arms. His mother still resides in the city and Mr. Holton is no stranger here. Recalling his first elementary school trip to the Cleveland Museum of Art, he has described how “… [it] was like going to another country. We had to cross the West Side Bridge, a structure that divided the predominantly white West side from the predominantly black East side.” [1] In his childhood and youth, Mr. Holton’s academic milieu was mostly white, and it was stylish track coach, the artist Nelson Stevens, who initially ignited his turn towards art in junior high. [2]

As it turned out, the CMA would play no small role in Mr. Holton’s life. In his own words, during his youth it was at the CMA where he “saw art from around the world and interacted with other students and artists from the community.” [2] Coming of age in Cleveland, Mr. Holton worked in the auto industry and served in the United States Army. Early on he met painter and sculptor Edward Everett Parker while studying art at community college on Cleveland’s west side, joining him and other local African American artists in his East Cleveland studio for informal classes. There he met the late artist and art historian Michael D. Harris and the Harlem photographer James Van Der Zee. Mr. Holton soon enrolled at the Cleveland Institute of Art nearby, earning a BFA in drawing and printmaking by 1987 after eight years of attending part and full classes while also supporting his family. It was during these years that he exhibited his work at Karamu House meeting photographer Gordon Parks and artist Romare Bearden. [3]

At CIA, Mr. Holton studied with Moe Brooker, the only professor of color at the Institute at the time, and soon moved on to Kent State University where he earned an MFA in printmaking and painting by 1990. As Bill Busta emphasizes, Mr. Holton’s trajectory as an artist corresponds intimately with his teachers and their legacy, a lineage including such figures as H.C. (“Carroll”) Cassill at CIA (whose development is in turn tied to his teacher, Mauricio Lasansky, a foundational figure in American printmaking). Noel Riefel at Kent also left an impact on Mr. Holton and today, a distinguished fellowship in Mr. Holton’s name at the University will bring national and international artists to campus to interact with KSU’s art department and community.

Around the time Mr. Holton completed earning his MFA from Kent, CMA’s legendary May show stretched toward the end of its life cycle as the museum looked toward more community-based events like Parade the Circle, which began in 1990. The museum director at the time, Evan Turner, continued to showcase fine art from throughout region in such shows as The Invitational: Artists from Northeast Ohio, the first iteration curated by Tom Hinson in 1991. By Mr. Holton’s own admission, this exhibition for him at the CMA in ’91 was a turning point in his career. After his work was purchased by the Cleveland Museum of Art (at Mrs. Tuner’s urging, as Mr. Holton tells it), he was invited to participate in a national fellowship in New York City at Robert Blackburn Print Workshop. And from there, the rest is history, as the saying goes. Mr. Holton left Ohio that same fall to work as Assistant Professor of Art at Lafayette College in Easton, PA, where he would earn rank as David M. and Linda Roth Professor of Art, one of the first three endowed African American professors in the United States. Five years after his arrival at Lafayette, he founded the Experimental Printmaking Institute (EPI) in 1996, working with such legendary artists as Faith Ringgold, Emma Amos, Grace Hartigan, David C. Driskell, Richard Mayhew, William T. Williams, among so many more. By 2006, he founded Raven Fine Art Editions in Easton, PA, with an inaugural project featuring the renowned artist and scholar David C. Driskell. Less than a decade later in 2014, Mr. Holton was named executive director of the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland.

The rhythm of coming of age here in Cleveland and then moving east shaped Mr. Holton’s scholarship and approach to leadership; Raven Fine Art Editions remains a megalith in the field of collaborative print making. And Mr. Holton, as Michael Harris would later write, came to embody the “rhizomatic presence of the African diaspora and its presence in the contemporary world.” [4] Summing up Mr. Holton’s artistic and intellectual disposition, Harris has described Mr. Holton as one who has “Mississippi roots, a midwestern industrial urban youth in Cleveland, Ohio, New York City, and the post-War art world, an African communal spirit, Blues music and through Bob Blackburn and David Driskell, connection with the Harlem Renaissance through the end of the 20th century and into the 21st.” [5]

And so, what is we see of Mr. Holton’s constellation in this suite of works on view at William Busta Projects this fall? Mr. Holton’s lyricism holds court at Busta’s gallery this season, especially his ability to weave drawing, printmaking, and painting into one cohesive picture. Arguably more recognized and celebrated in print than paint, Mr. Holton’s drawings remain the mainstay of his layered work as a solo artist. These sinuous underlayers resonate in particular as respect for the figure, the portrait, and the person—the physical incarnation of one’s soul. Sometimes this arrives as the raven’s call, etched on the wind. Other times, Mr. Holton’s figures and portraits feels like powerful incarnations of our most natural state.

Mr. Busta, who has long since represented and admired Mr. Holton’s work, wrote a short introduction about Mr. Holton’s work for an exhibition at the Chartre Oaks Culture Center in Hartford in 1994 saying, “Part of the power of Holton’s work is its inclusivity.” [6] And so yes, inclusivity—the idea that we can each see ourselves in Mr. Holton’s work—abides in these pictures but timeliness, too, an uncanny kind of zeitgeist, is at work as well. Three large scale acrylic-on-board paintings and one large preparatory sketch belonging to the Deluge Series on view at Busta Projects this fall feel cast from the Earth’s shadow itself. Survival (2019) serves up a premonition—a young boy has captured a fish in his mouth during what looks like a monsoon; we connect and disconnect with him. The little boy throws up his hands, expectant and reverent at once, as family photos fly in the storm around him.

In Resilience, a woman stands pensively on the raised rock—a little nest in the current of things—as her home and the surrounding world appear to wash away. Deep breath, she seems to say. Am I more than the circumstances surrounding me? It is in works such as these that a deep sense of survival, and transformation from one state of being into another and against all odds, prevails with clarity. Mr. Holton seems to confess that he too, ponders just such questions, perhaps even how the death one existence might be like life, i.e. we fall through one existence and come out on the other side, alive again.

Many of Mr. Holton’s works on view at William Busta Projects this autumn suggest that old adage, “no way out but through.” Resolve and self-inquisition—an honest appraisal of the self and one’s environment—seem to matter most here. And so, if at times Cleveland is itself a liminal space, Curlee Raven Holton’s work fits seamlessly with the roots of this here city. Though we know nothing yet of what happens after the flood, something about these pictures stays with viewers long after they leave. Mr. Holton’s work feels deafeningly silent in ways, like answers that bring only more questions, but his pictures are broad, searching ones, images to lean on, and to lean into—ones that grant a great view of all that lies beyond here.

Endnotes
[1] Curlee Raven Holton, “The Making of an Artist,” David C. Driskell Homage, Raven Fine Art Editions. August 7, 2019. accessible online here. Originally published in Black Art in America, May 2019. Accessed online, November 1, 2024.
[2] Ibid. As Curlee Raven Holton describes, “It was during junior high school I met my first black artist, Nelson Stevens, who happened to be my track coach. I was not aware of the role of black artists and our cultural life but I did recognize his pride in his appearance. He wore handmade Italian shoes and starched shirts and a tweed jacket. He walked with a graceful glide that some referred to as a pimp’s stroll.”
[3] Ibid.
[4] Michael Harris quoted in Michelle Talibah, Curlee Raven Holton: Deluge-Rebirth, A Retrospective, 1993 – 2021. Baltimore, MD: New Door Creative, 1993.
[5] Ibid.
[6] William Busta, “Introduction,” Cultural Currents, New Paintings and Prints by Curlee Raven Holton, with text by Lawrence Taylor, PhD; on view at William Busta Gallery (April 1 – 30, 1994) and Chartre Oaks Cultural Center, Hartford, CN (May 18 – June 3, 1994).

WILLIAM BUSTA PROJECTS
15517 Waterloo Road, Suites 2 and 4
Cleveland, Ohio 44110
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Open noon-5pm Thursday, Friday & Saturday during scheduled exhibitions

Indra K. Lācis, PhD, is a curator and historian of contemporary art. She currently teaches Museum Studies to MA students in the Case Western Reserve University / Cleveland Museum of Art joint program.