A Nuyorican Artist Whose Art Is "Evolving In All Different Areas"

The following unpublished interview with the artist Armando Alleyne (born in 1959) was done in 1984.

Over a cup each of unsweetened peppermint tea, Armando Alleyne, an Afro-Latino artist, and I sat facing each other in his tiny studio apartment on Convent Avenue in Harlem. We discussed his work, travels, and ideas. On the walls were paintings and wood sculptures he had exhibited at two local art shows.

Alleyne also created three paintings for inclusion in the art collection at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library system. "They're from the Cloud Series," he explained. "It is a series that deals with the sky and how it changes. They are abstract representations of the sky that would have other things blended into them." For example, continued Alleyne, one painting is "also a collage. There are stamp images of Martin Luther King stamped onto the sky. There are flowers and sometimes colors."

His gay artwork has appeared in the first and second issues of Blackheart, a black gay literary and graphic arts magazine, and in the New York Native, the gay weekly newspaper. In the summer of 1977, Fag Rag, published his poem, "Cute." Those publications no longer exist.

                                                Portrait of Nina Simone by Armando Alleyne (The Jazz Series).

                                                 

Alleyne, a graduate of the City College of New York, where he majored in painting, is of Puerto Rican/Barbadian heritage and is one of eleven children.

[Today, forty plus years later, Alleyne has received much recognition from the New York art world and has published A Few of My Favorites, a collection of artwork, photos, and poetry. The book was published in 2021 by the Swiss publisher, Edition Patrick Frey. Full disclosure: I was the book's proofreader.]

I asked him during the interview about his travels to other countries.

Armando Alleyne: I'm thinking of going to Mexico in January [1985] for a month or two to take some more lessons in ceramics. When I was in Africa, I was given a chance to study all these different wood sculptures. In Senegal I saw a lot of different wood carvings. I also went to Guinea-Bissau and Mauritania.

Charles Michael Smith: Did you feel connected to Africa in any way?

AA: Africa, I feel, has given me a more international scope of  black people, to see Africans, first of all. It showed me there's always space for learning new things about different people and different cultures. I enjoyed it.

Militarily, over there, around certain army bases, governmental buildings, they get very touchy. They don't want you to take pictures of the governmental areas, like the capital buildings, the palace where the president of the country lives. They figured you might try to do a bomb plot and that's what you might use the pictures for. The same rule is also true in Guinea-Bissau. I can understand that. That's how they feel. I still enjoyed myself. I took pictures of a lot of things. I took pictures of the churches and of different people, fishing and farming.  They basically lived off the land, either fishing or growing rice and plantains.

CMS: Where have you exhibited your work?

AA: I have already exhibited works from the Expectation Series at the Rainbow Studio Collective Anniversary Party art exhibit [June 16, 1984] and at the World Hispanic Fair [New York Coliseum, August 3, 4, and 5, 1984]. The exhibit had pieces from the Warrior Series and pieces from the Ancestral Series at that fair. It was a wonderful fair. There were 13, 14 artists altogether. They all had a sign saying the country that they were from. I had a sign saying "Nuyorican." I was going to put "Barbados" [on it] but they got into such a racket because they were saying Barbados is a British colony and "We don't want no British colony," quote unquote, "there." It doesn't matter to me. British or Spanish, it's the same colonial system.

CMS: The New York art world has, as you probably know, many gay artists in it.

AA: Yeah. I see myself as evolving in all different areas. I don't see necessarily the point of art only being placed in one particular area. I try to exhibit my art in whatever different areas I can. This is important because in a place like New York City, there are so many different audiences you can respond to and reach with your art.

The World Hispanic Fair was an excellent opportunity for me to share my work with other Latin artists as well as getting an aspect of all the different Latin countries performing and doing their thing and showing all the Indian-ness in their culture and the African-ness and the European-ness mixed into that culture.

Different people would come over. Some people would give donations because they were impressed. Other people would ask me questions like "Where did you learn your skills?," "How long did you study your art?" Some people there were saying that my work was very strong, really strong enough to continue doing what I was doing.

CMS: What are your future plans?

AA: What I want to do is make my own designs using stencil for sweatshirts and sell them in the fall. I really feel I could make a lot of money doing that. I have all the equipment ready for it. I have the dyes ready. It's the type of dye that when you put it on cotton, and once the picture is dry, you just have to iron it and it's permanent. Within the next three years I see myself doing sculptures for buildings, doing murals for buildings and corporations and family home units while still working on my prints and ceramic work. And all the time doing paintings, at home or in the studio. I visualize myself as having a house. Moving from a loft space to a house.

Harlem Renaissance Art Comes To The Met

If there were such a thing as a time machine, I would gladly get in it and travel to the 1920s, to my favorite historical period, the Harlem Renaissance.

It would be a thrill to brush shoulders with the likes of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and sundry other writers, musicians, painters, and sculptors. Since that's not possible, the next best thing would be to visit the upcoming exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, slated to run next year from February 25 to July 28. It will be called "The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism."

According to an article in the Arts section of the New York Times ("Met Announces Harlem Renaissance Show," August 23, 2023), the show will be "New York's first major survey in nearly 40 years dedicated to one of the most influential artistic movements to have originated in the United States."

The Met will display artworks by African-American artists that will be on loan from historically black colleges and universities such as Clark Atlanta University and Howard University.

Included in the exhibition will be photographs by another Harlem Renaissance notable, James Van Der Zee.

I'm excited about this event. God willing, I don't plan to miss it.

Visiting The "Gay Gotham" Exhibit

I recently visited the "Gay Gotham" exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York. I viewed the exhibit, which was on two separate floors, three times this week. I'm looking forward to doing a blog post on it.

New York's Gay Art World

I'm looking forward to seeing the Museum of the City of New York's upcoming exhibit, "Gay Gotham: Art and Underground Culture in New York." It opens on October 7th and explores gay and lesbian influence on New York's art scene over the past few decades. It closes on February 26, 2017. I hope to do a report on it for this blog.

New York's Museum Mile Festival

I'm looking forward to the annual Museum Mile Festival when all the museums along Fifth Avenue in Manhattan are free (for one day), from 6 pm until 9 pm.

On that day, Fifth Avenue, between 82nd and 106th Streets, is closed to traffic, making the street pedestrian-friendly.

 This year will mark my 9th year attending the festival, which takes place on Tuesday, June 14, rain or shine.

 I usually start my tour at the Museum of the City of New York and end at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, my favorite museum. If there is enough time left, I visit one of the other museums, like the Jewish Museum. Unfortunately, there is only so much that can be seen in three hours.

 As I walked down Fifth Avenue during past festivals, I encountered many pleasant sights and sounds: outdoor musicians, food vendors, magicians, adults and children writing messages on the street in colored chalk.

I hope this year's festival will bring with it good weather. One year it rained, preventing any outdoor activity which is part of the fun of attending the festival.

An Art Gallery Blooms In Harlem

The current gentrification of Harlem has been labeled as "the second Harlem Renaissance." But it is a misnomer; the first Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s, was an artistic movement out of which came such luminaries as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Countee Cullen. What's happening in Harlem today is all about real estate, not art. If there is a second renaissance in the making, Casa Frela, a new gallery located on West 119th Street in the Mount Morris Park Historic District, is helping to spearhead it.

Casa Frela, which means "your house should be a walk in the park" (containing one word from Spanish and one from the language of the Yaqui Indians of Mexico) is in a brownstone designed by the Gilded Age architect Stanford White. Lawrence Rodriguez, an openly gay man of Mexican descent (both parents were Yaquis), owns the four-story building in a neighborhood with many gay and lesbian artists in residence. When he moved to Harlem more than three years ago, the Fashion Institute of Technology graduate's intention was to buy a building, not start a gallery. But when he showed the work of an artist who lived down the street, that exhibit put the gallery on the map. That first year, Rodriguez did one show a month. This year he plans to have three large shows and six small ones.

Rodriguez, who receives a 30 percent commission for each artwork sold, says that his gallery can sell anything that's priced under three thousand dollars. But because of his location and the state of the economy, Rodriguez does not deal with anything priced above that. He explained that galleries on 57th Street and in Chelsea were more established and that Harlem is an up and coming art venue. Plus, the other galleries were more centrally located in Manhattan, making them easier to get to from the jobs of art lovers.

Rodriguez, despite being openly gay, does not plan to handle gay-themed artworks exclusively; he envisions Casa Frela as a place where Latino artists will get a chance to be represented.

Another vision of his is to open a smaller gallery in Houston, Texas, to be called Casita. He wants to open it in about two years.

In October of this year, Casa Frela will be the starting point of the annual open house in which Harlem artists turn their apartments into mini-galleries and allow visitors to view their artworks.

During this event, Rodriguez will conduct a five-minute lecture on New York architecture in which he will reveal to visitors such things as how they can find a picture of their buildings, how to look up a deed, how to find out who lived in their apartments, and other useful and interesting information.

Whenever Rodriguez opens a show, which requires months of preparation, it turns into a major learning experience for him. Or as he terms it, "a Cliff Notes version of an artist's work."

For Rodriguez, the foremost goal of Casa Frela is to act as "a vibrant magnet for the art enthusiast."

This is an excerpt from an article that was originally published in the Gay City News (July 17-23, 2008 issue).

Risking All For Freedom

As I stood at the corner of 125th Street and Broadway in Harlem, on my way to Fairway supermarket, a city bus turned the corner. On the side of the bus was an ad for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The ad included a very striking  work of art: a lone black man in a wooden rowboat surrounded by hungry sharks and threatening ocean waves. This painting was a very dramatic and memorable depiction of a man (Haitian, perhaps?) putting himself at great risk for the sake of freedom. (I would love to know the name of the artist and when the painting was created.)

At a time when immigrants (illegal and otherwise) are vehemently demonized, this portrait is a reminder of how precious and desirable freedom is.