‘’ Making It’’

As a child my mother always asked me, what are you doing in there?

I will always say, "I am making something.’’

This exhibition ‘’ making it,” a retrospective show with group of works spanning my career as an artist creating drawings, painting, and sculptures over a number of years from four series of works.

I have attempted to share my compelling commentary on contemporary American social cultural issues and humanity. My drawings, painting, and sculptures reflect powerful often spiritual expression and visual language from my African American experiences. In my ‘’ contemporary Urban realism series,” I combined figuration and Neo-Expressionism using spontaneous gestured lines, forms and coloration with eloquent expression of movement, bold-intense coloration using tactile marks-making brush work to create each figure. This series of works addresses plight of urban youths; their hopes, dreams, successes, and goals radiate every emotion of human condition.

The ‘’ Urban target practice series,’’ employs the target as a symbolic and metaphorical image. It isolates the issues that intersect with current social justice and cultural problems. I began in 1992 creating art works with an African American narration by placing a red, white, and blue target on the African American male figure standing, sitting, running in imagined inner-city or urban environment. The target appears as a beacon to pose a question or reason. What inspired and motivated me to make sculpture using metal and heat? I can remember Jenkins Jr. High School art teacher Mr. Brooks Huggins had one his bronze cast sculpture in class that fascinated me.: In the school’s library I read Ebony Magazine’s article on the life and works of African American Sculptor Richard Hunt; later my encountering an exhibition of African Benin bronze sculptures in a museum in New York before my post-graduate studies in Italy.

My abstract sculptures in ‘’ Tetramorphic and Formation series’’ depict pronounced concepts of futurism as seem through biomorphic and organic forms interacting with geometric shapes expressing the contrast between the use of mark-making texture forms with highly smooth polished forms.

The ‘’ Technocratic, Cyberometic , and Techno-morphic series” contemporary depicting and expressing the human form integrated with advance machine forms. We are living in advance modern technological age. The sculptures addressing my concerns about the intersection of art, science, technology and humanity. The series of heads and figures are Visual language expression of powerful and spiritual presence in bronze rooted in my diasporic Africanism and machine imagery of 20th century Futurism in the creative process used to make them.

Winston A. Wingo