Artist Research: Radcliffe Bailey

Radcliffe Bailey, a contemporary multi-media artist and Professor of Painting at the University of Georgia, uses personalized found objects as well as family photographs to create work that explores issues of race, heritage and memory. He draws inspiration from both African and African-American cultures and will often include images of ritual objects and the lyrics of slave spirituals in his art. Bailey's paintings and installations often refer to ideas of migration (both physical and spiritual), and they also reference family. In one series Bailey uses the vintage photographs of his ancestors and collages around the pictures dried flowers, sheet music and other artifacts. On working with personal family heirlooms Bailey says, "Growing up I spent a lot of time with my grandparents and great-grandparents and I feel like that's lost in most family's today. In my art, I try to restore some of the lost kinship between people". In a 2005 exhibit at the Jack Shainman Gallery in N.Y., Bailey showed a series of work that explores the experience of the Middle Passage Journey. The collages incorporate images of African symbols, model ships that have been painted black, drawings of ships and water, piano keys, flags and archival images of people in bondage. In the piece "Door of No Return, 2007" the artist has taken a photograph of the ocean and covers this with a sheet of black paper coated in glitter, which refrences the universe. He then cut out of this top layer a hole so the viewer can only see a square of ocean as if to say, "look, this is how an entire history is constructed." In one of Bailey's most recent works, which is a site-specific installation, an antique model ship lays on it's side and would appear to be wrecked among the debris of wooden planks. Although only one ship is visible the hundreds of wooden planks that lay scattered in a pile bring to mind the hundreds of ships that it actually took to make slavery possible and the countless number of lives that were claimed by this holocaust.