Ellington

Rising art-star Kori Newkirk is unassuming. The Los Angeles resident doesn't dress like an "artist," yet his clear responses give a false impression of the complexity of his work.

Newkirk is tall and good-looking. Security guards would often mistake him for a student of the barricaded high schools of South Central L.A., where he taught art until last year. The hairstyles of some of his students as well as the beaded curtains of his youth prompted him to start making art out of pony beads, the kind that Venus and Serena Williams string in their hair. He constructs elaborate beaded curtains -- strung bead by bead -- that depict landscapes and quiet, slightly sinister suburban scenes.

"I used to think I was all mean and nasty," said Newkirk, sporting a huge silver "ANGRY" belt buckle. "Now I make these big pretty landscapes."

These subtle-seeming constructions, far less obviously confrontational than his earlier work, abound with juxtapositions. His curtains often depict areas that are inhabited mostly by white people, yet they're created out of pony beads, strong cultural symbols of the predominantly black inner city. His beaded curtains are usually snapped up before he's even finished making them and before the buyer knows what the curtain will look like.

"It's very painful to think that I make landscapes, after growing up looking at trees and cows," said Newkirk, who was raised in rural New York after his birth in the Bronx.

At the Henry Art Gallery, where he is the artist in residence for 2002, he has paired one of his beaded curtained images of trees above water with two ornately framed old-school 19th-century landscapes. Even before you see the construction of beads, Newkirk's image looks different, almost digital. The beads seem to break apart the picture into pixels. Newkirk brings a new set of eyes to landscape painting, a genre that was once almost exclusively the domain of dead white men.

A self-portrait looks even more digitally broken apart than his beaded curtains. It is a painting for which he imagined how he would look if he were on the TV show COPS.

"It's the only time I saw people that looked like me on TV," Newkirk said.

Ironically, his face appears the same as all the other black men on the show, a blob of blurred darkness. By turning his face into something that is barely human, Newkirk has created a powerful visual reminder of the inhumanity of racism.

Police helicopters figure prominently in Newkirk's work, another result of COPS. He has made several stark murals where menacing white helicopters spill searchlights over a shiny dark wall covered with a mixture of Murphy's hair pomade and black paint.

"I absolutely loved teaching," said Newkirk, who still receives invitations to party with his students. "It's very nice to come home from work and realize you didn't put money into somebody else's pocket."

Newkirk was comfortable being seen as the "uncle, big-brother type of teacher," yet resents the fact that for many people his height brings to mind visions of basketball courts.

"I'm a tall black guy so everyone automatically thinks I play basketball," said Newkirk who hates basketball and can barely make it through a game of HORSE.

Newkirk had a friend photograph him in the gymnasium of the Los Angeles high school at which he taught. He sat on the bleachers in a basketball uniform with his head bowed in shame, his face hidden from the camera. Newkirk described the photograph as an imaging of him as a star basketball player who had just lost a vital game for the team. The photograph could also be viewed as a parody of a personal admission of guilt; Newkirk should be ashamed that as a big black man he doesn't want to play basketball.

All of Newkirk's work is highly evocative and personal. Yet he believes that the understanding that viewers walk away with all depends on, in his words, "who they are and where they are coming from."

A review from a recent show at UCLA said that Newkirk's "paintings suggest that one's understanding of history, landscape and social conflicts shifts according to where one stands." It's interesting to wonder whether the dignified and usually elderly crowd at most museums knows what pomade is. If not, what do Newkirk's sprawling wall paintings made out of the stuff mean to them?

Hopefully, people see the unique materials utilized by Newkirk as a stepping-stone to understanding his work, not as a stopping point. His beaded curtains, paintings and installations aren't only about pony beads and pomade. His work deals in part with what people feel when they see art made out of things that have strong cultural connotations. Yet Newkirk's work connects on a personal level even if the culture he is referring to is an unknown one.

Just as Newkirk wishes people would look past his basketball-player physique, gallery-goers shouldn't dismiss his work as culturally specific and move on. His work has something for all of us.