Art Basel Miami Beach: Ed Bereal: Disturbing the Peace
Elizabeth Leach Gallery presents a select group of artworks that trace Ed Bereal’s aesthetic and intellectual evolution as a Black man, an important West Coast assemblage/collage artist, and activist artist in performance and video. Represented by the Elizabeth Leach Gallery since 1998, we believe that Ed Bereal is as important an artist for the present moment as he is a major historical figure whose work needs to be seen more broadly in the contemporary dialogue around racism, identity, and the environment.
A powerful, unflinching voice for contemporary Black experience, Bereal’s performance practice and artworks have played essential roles in defining the socio-political landscape of predatory capitalism in which he has created challenging works that expose racism and its brutality in every decade since his appearance on the scene. An activist artist, he uses stark imagery and fierce language to uncompromisingly address racial violence, corporate greed, and complicity in domestic terrorism.
Ed Bereal has been a central figure in the West Coast art scene since his work first came to public attention in the legendary War Babies exhibition (1961, Huysman Gallery) which was the first fully integrated art exhibition in Los Angeles. An active member of the West Coast Assemblage/Collage movement with artists Ed Kienholz, George Hermes, Wallace Berman, Jess, Joe Goode, Bettye Saar, and John Otterbridge, Bereal rapidly distinguished his work through the integration of Expressionist gesture with classical drawing skills, and use of Pop Art references with sharply political racial satire. The 1965 Watts Rebellion (“Riot” in the mainstream media) that was literally outside his studio door, caused Bereal to reassess the early privileged success he enjoyed in the rarefied world of major gallery and museum exhibitions with the emotional need to dig deeper into his own identity as a Black man and the reality of making works in support of political change. I
n the ensuing radical reordering of his practice and imagery, he withdrew from most exhibition opportunities and moved into performance work, video production, community-based street theater, and began to create a confrontational imagery that refused to sit quietly on the wall or pedestal as “high-end luxury goods.” Bereal has observed about this period, “...the deeper I got into the ghetto the further the art scene started to fade."
For Art Basel Miami Beach we offer a through line of significant works that illuminate the artist’s journey of discovery and actualization; revealing iconographic evolution and innovative materiality in his works. Our presentation features a wall of insightful self-portrait drawings (1958-1965) that evidence the artist’s superb draftsmanship and use of an often emotionally-charged gestural line to capture and expose his growing awareness of himself as a young Black artist in the world - from tender realism to bold near- abstraction, each session staring into the mirror reveals another state of being.
The second wall focuses on the evolution of Bereal’s vision and trenchant social commentary in a photographic diptych "mugshot" from 1998 depicting the artist as he parodies American racial stereotypes. The poignant paired images interrogate America's racist history and racial present. At once an accusation and indictment, this powerful diptych peels away layers of historic minstrel farce to reveal a societal root of racial animus that shreds civility and convention.
The final work is the first showing of a newly editioned video piece, Pull Your Coat (1986), which grew out of Bereal’s gorilla theater group the Bodacious Buggerilla. Using the format of a popular television game show, the work is a witty, fastpaced sendup of American racist tropes and actions that pillories the status quo and its foundation of institutionalized racism and capitalism; trenchantly true and painful, the work is as powerful today as it was thirty-seven years ago.
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Drawing, for Bereal, is rhythmic figuration, in which movements of the pencil become like improvisational beats and rhythmic pulses. Verbalizing his drawing technique, he falls into a spoken mimicry of tempos that he associates with jazz and blues. Bereal’s vocal intonations, as articulated in repeated sounds, parallels and analogizes the repeated strokes of his pencil. Consequently, we might say that we listen to Bereal’s self-portrait drawings as much as we behold them.
- Matthew Simms, from Ed Bereal: Drawing Between the Boxes, “Wanted Ed Bereal for Disturbing the Peace,” The Whatcom Museum, Bellingham, WA.
