Today we talk about

Mark Steven Greenfield

One of the most interesting personalities in the LA art world : Mark Steven Greenfield is a poet of visual art and a fighter too. Artist, curator, teacher and mentor he was applied and worked as director and curator of many Los Angeles cultural institutions like the Watts Towers Art Center, the Municipal Art Gallery at  Barnsdall Center, the Korean American Museum and as president of LA Artists Association/ 825 Gallery. Greenfield came to Napoli, Italy as guest of ART1307 Cultural Institution in the occasion of his shows Latitude34/40 and Blackatcha.
His work deals with the African American experience and has focused on the effects of stereotypes on American culture stimulating much-needed and long overdue dialog on issues of race.

 

Let’s explore his website

He has the special ability to say very tough things with hilarity and levity.
Apparently his works seem to play with the viewer as in cartoons and many of his characters are cartoons; but if you give a deeper look at them, they slam on your face the violence of the abuses and the brutality of racial problems  that still now pervade some contemporary societies.
Racism as a way of thinking and behaving.
Greenfield never stopped to denounce abuses and violence; his work is a declaration against any form of  racism or malfeasance or intolerance and discrimination.
Some works talk about violence in the subtle form of a nice , pretty smiling cartoon surrounded by fireworks that are in reality nothing else then bombs exploded in the wars.

 

 Mark S. Greenfield interview

In other works, the famous white gloves of Mikey Mouse, are wore by actors and minstrels ; the blackface minstrel act was a very popular form of entertainment in 19th-century America used mainly to amuse the parterre of an exclusively white audience; the white gloves become emblems of a racial system expressed also on the stages and they were a highly racist depiction of African Americans.  Greenfield’s “minstrels” with black faces invite us to  reflect on the theme of the stereotypes that dominant cultures create towards other cultures in order to subdue them and exercise their power. The creation of totally false prejudices and preconceptions towards a cultural group or an ethnic group or race serves to create around it a sense of mistrust and lack of credibility so as to allow the dominant culture to exercise its power even through an intellectual paradigm that justifies its action.

His last series is dedicated to the stereotype of “Madonna” as depicted in the classic, mainly European painting of past centuries.
Without any aspect of blasphemy, and without any religious accent, Greenfield reproduces works depicting classic “motherhood” portrayed by the great artists of the past, transfiguring them into “black Madonnas”; by depicting violent scenes in the background of the same painting, Greenfield denounces racial violence in the history of humanity. These are acts of denunciation of the violence suffered by black people; the Mother / Church inert before the massacres, the Church’s message of universal peace remained unheeded.

Never as at this moment of our common history, Greenfield’s voice needs to be heard.