Michael Dixon Paintings:
“Sambo Scratches His Navel and Watches His Crazy Sister”
December 5, 2008 through February 8, 2009

On December 5 West Valley Art Museum opens an exhibition with the longest title inits 28 year history. Michael Dixon’s show entitled “Sambo Scratches His Navel and Watches His Crazy Sister” will be on display in the Museum’s four mini-galleries.
Michael Dixon was born in San Diego, CA, in 1976. His single mother and grandmother raised him for most of his early life along with his younger sister. He spent the majority of his younger years in a diverse neighborhood called North Park.
After his mother remarried, the family relocated to Yucca Valley, CA. This was where Michael attended and finished high school. Dixon graduated high school in 1994 and attended college at Washington University in St. Louis. Ending up at Arizona State
University, he was influenced by friend and mentor Beverly McIver. Dixon graduated in 1999 with a BFA in Painting and Drawing. He spent the next year in Phoenix painting
and working as a graphic designer. The next couple of years were spent back in San Diego before he was accepted into graduate school at the University of Colorado at
Boulder.

Michael graduated with his MFA in Painting in 2005 and was invited to move back to
Phoenix and teach part-time at Arizona State University by his mentor. He taught at
ASU for a year and spent another year and a half at Phoenix Community College.
Michael is now an Assistant Professor at Albion College in Albion, Michigan.
Michael Dixon is predominantly a figurative painter and explores the personal,
societal, and aesthetic struggles of belonging to both "white" and "black" racial and
cultural identities, yet simultaneously belonging fully to neither. During his school
years, the town and high school were predominantly white, and he experienced his first
instances of direct racism while living in Yucca Valley.
The works of artists such as Robert Colescott, Beverly McIver, Michael Ray Charles,
Glenn Ligon, and Kerry James Marshall have influenced his work. While making art is
Michael’s full time passion, he is also a musician and has played with several bands in
San Diego, Boulder, and Ann Arbor. The artist is also an avid gardener and enjoys
cooking.

Curator, George Palovich remarked: “We often hear of the advice given to young
writers to ‘Write what you know’; Dixon very emphatically paints what he knows. The
experience of being bi-racial is no more profoundly explored than in Michael’s paintings.
The present series is based on the dance performance of Onye Ozuzu of the “Minstrel
Mask” at the Boulder, CO Fringe Festival in 2005. Since then Dixon has been in
communication with the dancer and the two plan a collaborative work. Viewers may
feel some discomfort at the imagery in these paintings. Depictions of the dancer’s makeup
make the body feel violated much as racism over the years must make its victims feel.”
Dixon has gone to great length to create gallery notes that help to explain his position
and viewpoint as a bi-racial artist. A glossary of terms on display also helps to explain the
meaning and origins of such words as “Sambo”, “Blackface” and Minstrel Show.”

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Rhonda “Shakur” Carter: The Many Faces of Me
November 28, 2008 through March 1, 2009

Carter’s works defy classification as they can be called painting or sculpture. Elements project from the surface, cutouts play exuberantly across the picture plane and rectangular constraints do not seem to matter to Rhonda as she quite happily lets the shape grow into what it will be.

Born in Los Angeles, Shakur enjoyed creating from an early age. She built stage sets in Elementary school, attended USC’s Summer Art classes for the gifted and drew from television, magazines and her sweet grandmother’s face. Her grandparents and their friends including actress Beah Richards, often told her old stories of history, describing scenes, smells and strange whispers through the trees. Those moments and stories inspire her to create her present works in wood today.

Her exhibitions have included the Afro-American Art Museum, William Grant Still Museum and the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles. She has created her own wood puzzles and was asked to sell and display them at eh Early Education Center where children of Denzel Washington, Jamie Lee Curtis, Magic Johnson and Jack Nicholson attended.

Of her work she says, “Expression through art has always captured me in regards to life, the marriage between the two, and the wonder of many interpretations . . . I admire those organizations that make way for artists to be seen and heard. Participating in those communities (such as yours) does good for everyone. I enjoy creating from anything I can get my hands on, and in that creation I like to share what I have done with others. I’ve been so inspired by many other artists and life situations, there’s always something new and exciting to see and perhaps think of in a different light or view. I believe that children and adults deserve indulgence in a ‘soul release’ or the ‘spirit that flows within’. That type of freedom is very important for us all.”

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“Digital Retrospection: A Dozen Years of Photography”
The photographs of Joseph Labate
September 12 through December 14, 2008

Joseph Labate is the Chair of the Photography Division in the School of Art at the
University of Arizona. Labate’s artwork and his teaching focus on the use of digital
technology as applied to the medium of photography. He has a B.S. in engineering
from Clarkson University, a B.F.A. in photography from Massachusetts College of
Art, and an M.F.A. in photography from the University of Arizona.
Labate is a recipient of a Visual Arts Fellowship from the Arizona Commission on
the Arts, an Artist’s Grant from the Contemporary Forum of the Phoenix Art
Museum, and an Artist’s Grant from Polaroid of Tokyo, Japan. He has exhibited
and taught photography nationally and internationally. His work is in many private
and public collections including the Center for Creative Photography, the Tucson
Museum of Art, the Snell Wilmer Collection, the Streitch Lang Collection, the Weeks
Gallery and Roussenski Lom National Park in Bulgaria.
In talking about his journey through photography, Labate says: “I learned
and practiced photography in the era before the introduction of photographic digital
technology. I exposed film in a camera and then proceeded to my darkroom to
develop the film and make prints. I studied the art of photography at university
programs learning theory and critical thinking based on the medium as we then
understood it. I immersed myself in that world and as an artist, was challenged to
explore its potential. Then along came PhotoShop. A few years ago, after long and
serious deliberation, I closed down my darkroom and sold my darkroom
equipment. I replaced the darkroom with a computer, software, inkjet printer, and
various other new digital wonders and set off to explore their impact on my
practice of photography. I am fortunate to have a history with chemical darkroom
photography and now have available to me this new digital technology. I have a
foot in both worlds.
I am most interested in that space between the traditional definition of
photography and the imagery of the newly emerging digital arts. I am not trying to
replicate traditional photography with the now available digital tools but yet am
trying to maintain some connection to it. My work draws on both the history