Louisville’s Black Avante-Garde: William M. Duffy at The Speed Museum
Published September 25th 2024
By Eileen Yanoviak
View of William M Duffy’s Exhibition Courtesy of the Speed Museum
William M. Duffy’s solo retrospective at the Speed Art Museum is the second installment in a series of exhibitions called Louisville’s Black Avante-Garde. The concept behind this series originated with research done by Sarah Battle of the National Gallery of Art who was researching artist Kenneth Victor Young, a Louisville-born and raised artist that gained notoriety after moving to Washington D.C. What Battle uncovered was that Young was part of a loose collective of Black artists in the 1960s that were professionally pursuing a career in visual art by honing their skills, developing audiences, and building an artistic community despite racial barriers.
Battle’s research has been generative–leading to a series of exhibitions researched and curated by Dr. fari nzinga, Curator of African and Native American Collections at the Speed Art Museum. The series began with an exhibition of works by Professor Robert L. Douglass, founding faculty of the Pan-African Studies Department at the University of Louisville and a practicing artist. He was a graduate of the Hite Art Institute at UofL, and a classmate of Sam Gilliam, Bob Thompson, and Kenneth Victor Young. These students graduated from UofL in the 1950s in the midst of school desegregation laws enacted by Brown vs. the Board of Education in 1954. While the school was arguably more progressive, the community was not, and there weren’t any galleries or systems of support for the graduates to make a living. Alongside Fred and Anna Bond, Douglass founded the Louisville Art Workshop in the 60s. Together with other prominent artists G.C. Coxe, Ed Hamilton, and Young, they established and grew the Workshop to include many creatives and a debut exhibition in 1966. They knew that their key to success was cooperative action, creativity, and economics.
Despite the collective efforts of the Louisville Art Workshop, Black artists in Louisville were denied professional opportunities and excluded from representation in major local cultural institutions. As the Speed Art Museum approaches its 100th anniversary, and under the historical lens and call to action precipitated by the murder of Breonna Taylor, Dr. nzinga says that the Speed acknowledges, “We hear you. We have been stodgy. We have been racially exclusive. We have been elitist. We have been male chauvinists...the museum wants to be able to say, ‘we're different now’.” The series of four Black Avant-Garde exhibitions will culminate in a group exhibition that will highlight the incredible breadth and legacy of artistic production of Louisville’s Black artists who remained unrecognized by the establishment for decades and now usher in new generations of artists.
View of William M Duffy’s Exhibition Courtesy of the Speed Museum
The genesis of the exhibition is critical to understanding the gravity of this humble, intimate, and personal gathering of objects. William M. Duffy was born in 1953 in Louisville’s storied West End. As a young man, he experimented with many media, including painting, silkscreen, and drawing. As the story goes, he collected marble from a building damaged by a car accident and taught himself how to carve. After receiving a BFA in 1976 in painting, he became a full-time sculptor in 1980 and joined the ranks of influential Black creatives in the community that grew out of the Louisville Art Workshop. More than four decades later, his influence as an artist, educator, and visionary impacts the Louisville community’s arts ecosystem in meaningful ways.
While the individual objects on view are subtly powerful, the exhibition as a whole is a proclamation of the endurance of Duffy’s legacy, investment in craft, and evolution as an artist within that broader narrative. The objects represent almost five decades of artistic practice and experimentation in a variety of materials, subjects, and approaches, from realism to non-objective formalism.
View of William M Duffy’s Exhibition Courtesy of the Speed Museum
There is something pedagogical about the small exhibition, which is appropriate because Duffy was an arts educator for decades in the Children’s Fine Arts Classes (CFAC) at Louisville Visual Art. Because the exhibition highlights process, it feels as much like a classroom as it is an archive of his studio practices and creative evolution. One section features his early work, experimenting with paint and form as a student in the 1970s. Another section includes a realist model figure drawing from 1973 alongside abstract sketches of figural busts from 2005 that would later be the basis for sculptures. The implication is that drawing is foundational. It is easy to imagine Duffy as a teacher explaining to a student why drawing and sketching from life matters, even to an abstract sculptor.
Duffy is most well-known for his abstract figural busts. Isolated from his oeuvre, these busts may seem to be an outgrowth of the Modernist movement, employing the visual vocabulary of white European artists like Constantin Brâncuși and Henry Moore. Moore’s Reclining Figure is echoed in Duffy’s Lyrical Repose (2023). Dreadlocks (about 2000) and School Girl (about 1990) employ the geometric structures of Brancusi. However, placed in the context of Duffy’s artistic production, it is clear that he goes back to the sources of Modern abstraction at the turn of the century–among them the African masks that informed the likes of Picasso. His 2010 drawing African Heads and numerous interpretations of Someone to Watch Over Me reveal an ongoing engagement in the historical precedent of African masks as part of the narrative of Modern Art.
Duffy also engages the history of Modern Art, a discourse arguably focused on white Western male artists, through his use of found objects and assemblage techniques, but with a distinctly local source and deeper meaning. Many of the items he used in works such as Mask for the Cat Man (1980) and Boat Folk (1975) came from the local junk dealer, Bootsy, who would bring scrap metal to the studio he shared with Ed Hamilton.
View of William M Duffy’s Exhibition Courtesy of the Speed Museum
One way Duffy distinguishes himself from his Modernist counterparts is a sentimental and personal connection to his work. Resisting a strict formalism, Duffy’s sculptures employ archetypal forms to portray issues that were personal to him, from the Vietnam War to the beauty of familial relations. Nocturnal Care (1994) is a gorgeous black basalt sculpture that depicts paternal dedication to caring for children in the night. The father is depicted embracing his daughter in abstracted form while she drapes over his shoulder. His reverence for family is evident in the beautiful renditions of mother and child, such Cradled (1990). While these are very personal reflections for Duffy, who openly adores his family, they are universal human experiences. The abstraction allows us to see ourselves in the smooth stone.
There is an earnestness that comes through in Duffy’s modest, but poignant, retrospective. He is an artist that worked for fifty years to establish a career and garner recognition in a city that often failed to recognize the efforts of Black artists to achieve financial success and creative acknowledgement. The breadth of Duffy’s practice, the diligent efforts to understand the potential in all media, from painting and digital to assemblage and sculpture, reveal an ongoing and iterative learning process that honed his craft and ultimate mastery of sculpted form. In these polished abstractions are the universal themes of humanity–love, community, and family.
William M Duffy‘s work is on display through September 29th. More information can be found at the Speed Museum.