The mystery of LeRoy Foster: African American artist

Untimely neglect of gay painter
by Charles Alexander

Originally printed 02/07/2008 (Issue 1606 - Between The Lines News)

African American artist Julie Mehretu was talking to a gathering of high school students in one of the several galleries of Detroit Institute of Art devoted to her gigantic "City Sitings" canvases. (It was during the opening week media preview.)

As I listened to her talk to the students I observed from her look and forthright manner that she might be "family", so when the students left I introduced myself, said I liked her work, and asked her how long one of her gigantic canvases might take to finish.

She said it took her and her assistants usually six months to complete a canvas. I then said I was from Between The Lines, that it would be nice to interview her. She told me to wait 'til after Thanksgiving, then asked me if I saw any of the community touches in her paintings.

When I said I hadn't, she led me to Stadia III and pointed out several tiny pink triangles. It was a pleasant and pleasing subliminal touch. There, but not too obvious. A visual "only if you ask, I'll tell," otherwise a visual nuance overlooked by the average straight museum visitor.

Moving along to other gallery spaces devoted to African American artists I found brilliantly lighted works by greats like Benny Andrews, Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Hughie Lee-Smith. Locally there were stunning pieces by Tyree Guydon, Charles McGee, Gilda Snowden, and Alvin Loving (a fellow Cass Technical High School art student).

As I took in the variety and richness of the offerings I realized that the work of someone important was missing from the collections. LeRoy Foster. There was not one picture or print by this Detroit artist, who during the late-40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s was one of the city's most well-known black artists.

Foster, who was born in 1925, studied art at Cass Technical High School, the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts School (now the College of Creative Studies), and continued his studies in Europe at L'Academie de la Grand Chaumeire in Paris and London's Heatherly School of Art.

A fine portrait painter (with many European clients) he was most well known in Detroit for public mural commissions, including "The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass" for the Frederick Douglass Branch of the Detroit Public Library; "Kaleidoscope" for the lobby of Southwest Detroit Hospital, and "Renaissance City," at the old Cass Tech (where in 1986 the picture was vandalized by ink splattering and restored by Foster.)

In 1978, Foster was honored with a City of Detroit Proclamation, presented to him by Mayor Coleman A. Young. Michigan Chronicle columnist Susan Watson wrote of him, "In my time, I've been around a lot of bright, insightful people, but I don't recall ever being in the presence of genius before. I think I would have remembered it, had it happened.

"LeRoy Foster is genius. He is a small, compact man with taut brown skin and eyes that dance in tiny, patent-leather steps. Instead of radiating energy, he draws energy to him like a magnet. Seeing that tiny man, with the tight embarrassed smile, standing beside complex and evocative mural simply took my breath away."

Dr. Charles Wright, founder of Detroit's Museum of African-American History and a good friend of Foster, observed, "He made no compromise. He gave a Negroid appearance to a lot of his paintings ... and that disturbed some black people, but it didn't bother him. He was never free from controversy."

Foster was also gay. (I attended many of his Woodward Avenue studio parties when I was a teenager.) His work exhibits an energetic, masculine, sinewy power that displays the male physique to careful and attentive advantage. (It is perhaps, in our time, a little too obviously the work of a gay artist. Indeed, the Detroit Monitor headlined one of its columns about Foster, "Detroit's Own Michelangelo".)

Hoping to redress the absence of Foster's work in the DIA African American Galleries I spoke to several DIA personnel about him. I gathered a dozen or more press clipping from the Music and Performing Arts Section of the main branch of the Detroit Public Library.

I sent these clippings with a covering note to the DIA's curator of African American Art Valerie Mercer, later e-mailing her to see if she had received them. She never gave me the simple courtesy of a reply.

I last saw LeRoy Foster in downtown Detroit. He was paying a utility bill at the bank. He looked shockingly old, fragile, but he remembered me. (Or, so he said.) He died in 1993, age 67. During his last year of life of he saw no art, his own or others. He was blind.

Sadly, today he's all but forgotten. The DIA (and the Charles Wright African American Museum) shamefully a part of his untimely neglect.

Tracey Reese - Feminine Chic 

Tracy Reese is an American Fashion designer born in Detroit, Michigan, on February 12, 1964; the daughter of Claud, a manager, and Pat, a dance teacher. Her grandmother was her first fashion icon. She was both ladylike and stylish. Reese’s mother enrolled her and her two sisters in weekend enrichment classes at the city’s museum. Her career direction first emerged when she, her mother, and two sisters would hold sewing contest; whoever finished their outfit first won, the loser bought the fabric. She joked in an interview with Essences “Although I generally won, I still spent every dime I had buying fabric”.

Reese attended Cass Technical High school, a privileged public high school of the arts in the Detroit school system. Cass Tech. had a fashion-design-department, though Reese was not focused on fashion design, she took a couple of classes. She actually felt fashion-design was ”flaky”, and wanted to be an architect or an interior designer. But Reese was encouraged by a fashion teacher to apply for a scholarship to a summer program at Parsons School of design in Ney York City. She won the slot for the scholar program, and loved the experience, school, and city. After graduation from Cass Tech. she attended Parsons full-time for fashion design.

Following her graduation, in 1984, from Parsons Reese received a wonderful job as an apprentice at a small contemporary firm for French designer Martin Sitbon in New York City. Reese was assigned to Sitbon’s Arlequin line. After two years in the industry Reese was still passionate about designing a line that reflected her own style. With funding from her father Claud, she created two collections, both favored by store buyers. The line was sold at stores such as Barney’s New York, Bergdorf Goodman, and Ann Taylor. Reese could not maintain enough revenue to meet production cost, and had to close business in 1989. She recalled in a interview with WWD “I thought I knew everything, but learned quickly that I really didn’t and knew I had to learn more about the business”.

After the close of her business Reese starting working for Perry Ellis, thanks to friend Marc Jacobs, her former schoolmate at Parsons. She enquired more financial experience and mentoring from designer Gordon Henderson Reese. In the early 1990’s Reese became head-designer for a new label called Magaschoni, owned by Magatague (Hong Kong manufacture). After sales reached $4 million in 1991, Magatague executives gave Reese her own line “Tracy Reese for Magaschoni” The line had great sales at high-end retailers such as Saks Fifth Avenue, Reese was still determined to produce her own line and business.

In 1995 Reese and mass retailer the Limited inked a deal for a line. This provided funds for her start-up line “Tracy Reese Meridian”, which launched in the Spring of 1996. With an investor on board the line became just “Tracy Reese”, followed by a more casual line targeted towards younger customers “Plenty”. By 2002 sales had reached $12million. Her collection was shown During New York Fashion week in Bryant Park, were they received rave reviews.

In 2004 the company introduced “Plenty Home” a line of bedding, curtains, and throws. Shoes and accessories were introduced in Fall of 2005.

Reese has established herself as one of the most successful African American women in the fashion industry. Her designs are feminine chic, made for the girly girl. Her signature fabrics are lush patterns from India. She knows what women want to wear.  

An old-school take on jazz (Geri Allen)

Pianist Geri Allen keys her teaching to tradition

By Siddhartha Mitter

Globe Correspondent / December 7, 2007 

On her most recent album, last year's "Timeless Portraits and Dreams," pianist Geri Allen applies her crystalline touch and graceful melodicism to such varied fare as Charlie Parker's bop classic "Ah-Leu-Cha," the devotional "Well Done," and the African-American anthem "Lift Every Voice and Sing." With old-school luminaries Ron Carter and Jimmy Cobb as the rhythm section, the record features guests such as vocalist Carmen Lundy and pioneering black tenor George Shirley.

The companions are prestigious and the program seemingly eclectic, but the agenda that informs the album - and with it, the current phase in Allen's career - is personal, highly focused and deeply felt. Allen's perspective on jazz is both grounded and panoramic, constantly attuned to the connections between the music's development and the unfolding of American, and especially African-American, history.

Her concern with jazz as not just music but culture makes Allen an inspired choice for the residency she undertakes this weekend at Harvard. It features three public events: a music-illustrated discussion this afternoon, followed by a concert with her trio this evening, and tomorrow night she'll perform with the Harvard Jazz Bands in an evening devoted to the work of the trailblazing female pianist Mary Lou Williams.

The academic setting is a comfortable one for the 50-year-old Allen: She is an associate professor of jazz piano and improvisation at the University of Michigan, and she has a graduate degree in ethnomusicology. As she says on the phone from her home in Montclair, N.J., the focus on education runs in her family.

"It's a natural place for me to be," Allen says. "My grandmother was a one-room schoolteacher in Tennessee, and my father worked 35 years in the Detroit public school system."

Her Motor City upbringing also embedded Allen in a distinguished jazz tradition. Her fellow alumni of the music program at Cass Technical High School include legends Carter, Donald Byrd, Kenny Burrell, and many others, including several important female jazz artists, notably Alice Coltrane.

Like these illustrious forebears, Allen eventually moved to New York, emerging in the 1980s as a vivid new voice on the piano. But that was also a complicated period for jazz. Record labels were scaling back their investment in the music or shifting their focus from straight-ahead to fusion and "smooth" styles. Yet while recording budgets dried up, some of the great, long-running bands like Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers continued to incubate new talent with irreplaceable on-the-job training.

"There was a sense of jazz being on the road all the time," Allen says. "The scene was in flux, but it was still rooted in the Art Blakeys, the Betty Carters."

Today, that picture is reversed. Jazz recordings are abundant, whether on major or independent labels, and jazz programs at music schools release hundreds of technically proficient graduates onto the scene each year. But many of the elders have passed away, and the great working-band tradition, with its attendant transmission of experience and lore, is moribund.

At risk, Allen believes, is the cultural grounding of the music and its continued ability not only to reflect American history, but to reconnect to the African-American community in a way relevant today.

"Jazz is a great art form, with a legacy attached to it that helps [us] understand who we are as a people," Allen says. "How do we access these communities of folk for whom the music is a direct reflection of their roots?"

That project resonates with Ingrid Monson, who holds the Quincy Jones chair in African-American music at Harvard. "One of the reasons we wanted to invite Geri Allen is that she places jazz in social context," Monson says. "There's always a dialogue between music and community."

Monson says her undergraduate class on jazz explores the links between jazz and often uncomfortable topics in American history, and asks questions like, "How did jazz come to symbolize freedom, individuality, self-expression?" Allen's approach, Monson says, makes her an ideal guest lecturer on these topics.

"In her musical practice, that's always been there," Monson says. "Not that every piece of music has to have a political connotation, but she has a feeling of responsibility to the larger world."

Allen says that responsibility is not a matter of ideology, but simply the way she is: "It's organic in the way that I work, in the way that I was raised as a musician."

So whether she is honoring the legacy of Williams, a major female jazz innovator who might otherwise be forgotten, or holding community events like her visit yesterday to the Roland Hayes music school in Roxbury, Geri Allen is simply giving back.

"Jazz is culture," she says. "It's a legacy art form. It continues to evolve as long as we continue to celebrate and support that legacy."