In the Powerhouse Arts District, Two Feisty Shows
“A Longer Table” is a look at how simple things can be. “Warriors,” on view one block to the west at Art House Productions (345 Marin Blvd), exposes how complex things currently are. The show isn’t a big one — it’s only got a dozen pieces in it — but each delivers a haymaker, and each one rewards close, open-hearted engagement. Curator Andrea McKenna has brought together three of the region’s most celebrated African American female artists (and another we’re sure to hear much more from soon) and coaxed portraits from each of them. Though these four warriors swing their swords and cast their spells in different fighting styles, the human beings they’ve summoned have much in common. They’re all tough, they carry history in their eyes, and they’ve been sanctified.
Visitors to the Morris Museum will recognize Theda Sandiford’s watchful “Wonder Woman,” a tapestry that, at ten feet high and nearly as wide, occupies the entire north wall of the Art House gallery. The Wonder Woman was, for awhile, the guardian spirit of the Museum, staring down at visitors in the entry hall, battle-ready, impassive, and equally evocative of images from fashion magazines and Egyptian deities. A handsome face and single outsized eye are ringed by a gigantic Afro comprised of cut-outs from comic books, stickers, fabric flowers, trinkets, and beads in the sort of plastic globes spat out by mall vending machines.
Painter Armisey Smith’s everyday wonder-women wear somewhat more traditional halos: theirs are red circles, Valentine-colored holes knocked out of tempestuous golden skies for troubled heads to rest in. “Mwikali Words,” a portrait of a friendly but wary woman, possesses the combination of sweetness and apprehension that characterized the side-eye paintings in “In Time and In Tide,” her early 2022 show at Aferro Gallery in Newark. Mwikali grins at us, but the heavy, shield-like folds of her blue dress suggest elusiveness, and maybe protectiveness, too.