Window Works
Window Works is an outdoor project located at the entrance of the Lyndon House Arts Center using the banks of windows as a palette.
Michael Reese
Spring 2024 - Spring 2025
Michael Reese is an artist, photographer and educator. His work explores themes of identity and history; using past and current photographic processes as a base. With a fascination in cosmology and celestial science, he has created conceptual bridges between astronomy and the fight against human bondage. He sees photography as the perfect vehicle to stay curious about the world around him.
Michael Reese lives and works in Atlanta GA.
Artist Statement
Meditation’s On Perceived Acts of Violence is a body of work that examines the idea of perception, more specifically as it relates to Black Bodies. The work speaks to my understanding of the intellectual and behavioral gesturing that is required of Black folks to successfully control the narrative of perception. The photos used in the body of work are re-contextualized family photos of my folks doing the innocuous things humans do. The question I want to raise with the work is a query into perception. When one perceives the Black Body as being socially perfect and/or imperfect, how does one respond? Is violence the necessary response? I'm using the cyanotype process as a base for the imagery. The cyanotype process is how the original architectural blueprints were made in the late 19th century. The blueprints I've created, which are at the base of each piece, are blueprints of perception. The photograph is layered over the cyanotype and is only a portion of one's story. The complexities in the design of the blueprints speak to the more nuanced narrative of an individual’s existence. I am examining the danger that can come from snap judgements and how violence has been used as a first resort, many times fueled by misperceptions. - Michael Reese 2024
Previous Window Works Artists 2021 - 2024
The Lyndon House Arts Center is pleased to present a new project entitled Window Works featuring original site-designed artwork by artist Cedric Smith. on view through 2022
Window Works is an outdoor project located at the entrance of the Lyndon House Arts Center using the banks of windows as a palette.
Smith's work asks the question, why is it that the Black man is not visible in so much of our country’s graphic history? Where are the positive and powerful images in our past advertisements, images that this artist would have seen when he was a small neighborhood boy growing up? Cedric Smith is a researcher and reader, whose work investigates these questions of image and visibility.
Born in 1970 in Philadelphia, Cedric found art in a different location. From the start, he had talent with the pencil and paper. He drew a lot during at his first job in a barbershop. A regular customer, artist William Tolliver, invited this young man to his studio where Cedric saw the life and career of a working artist and decided to follow that path. Especially poignant as both he and Toliver are un-schooled painters.
Smith lives and works in Macon GA.
The Lyndon House Arts Center is pleased to present a new project entitled Window Works featuring original site-designed artwork by local artist AJ Aremu on view from May 24- September 30, 2021.
Window Works is an outdoor project located at the entrance of the Lyndon House Arts Center. Using the banks of windows as a palette, AJ Aremu represents black bodies in motion and states of repose. Their contemporary clothing blends with African patterns in Aremu’s exploration into the melding of cultures.
Window Works is a new outdoor art experience in response to the Covid pandemic, available for viewing while in daylight.
AJ Aremu is a 2nd generation immigrant artist based in the US. They use a variety of art techniques such as painting, drawing, and printmaking to express their stories or political messages.
"I aim to depict the dichotomy that exists between African-American Culture and African culture. Through this exploration, I intend to create a unity between these separate, but vital cultures. I portray young black individuals in their everyday American clothing but highlighted the lower half of their bodies with African print patterns."
"I use the African print pattern as the background of my tapestry, illustrating the connection between Africans, and African Americans. running through them as well as in the background.
The bodies of the individuals in my work are portrayed in silhouette. I chose to use silhouettes because I wanted my audience to be able to envision themselves in the painting and black being the absences of color further drives the point home of the treatment of black people within the United States. The clothing were all items that would be typically worn by everyday people you would see on the street.
I also use the silhouettes, to represent black individuals as a whole, rather than the representation being only limited to the model used for the painting. The goal is to say that black people, as a whole race, have to ability to progress as one in a world where systematic oppression has restricted and limited our abilities as black individuals. It is when we come as one that we are able to truly advance in the world.
My paintings are large scale, varying from three feet to six feet high as well as three feet to about twelve feet wide. My large-scale paintings have been on un-stretched canvas that have been displayed using hooks, wood, or simply positioned on the ground. Creating life size figures gives me the ability to allow the viewer to not see the painting as a painting, but rather see it as themselves or another human. I am creating a connection between the viewer and my paintings speaking not only to their humanity, but also immersing them in the experience of another to their humanity." - AJ Aremu
WINDOW WORKS January - April 2021 Noraa James
January – April 2021
The Lyndon House Arts Center is pleased to present a new project entitled Window Works featuring original site-designed artworks by local artist Noraa James. Window Works is a new outdoor art experience in response to the Covid pandemic, available for viewing while in daylight outside.
Window Works is an outdoor project located at the entrance of the Lyndon House Arts Center. Using the banks of windows as a palette, Noraa James has designed a triptych and diptych inspired by love, the Black body and primary colors. Noraa’s work is an exploration into the representation of blackness in its beauty, sublimity and the connectedness of such with the natural elements in and around us, primarily through the scope of afrofuturism and afrosurrealism.
From the Artist:
Window Works (2021) comprises of a digitally painted diptych and triptych portraying a continued exploration in the sublimity of the deeply melanated being and literal resemblances between dark skin and the night sky. These figures are portrayed as ancestors of extraterrestrial origin and cosmic proportion through their relation to other celestial bodies, that they are both an authority and embodiment of. In all of my art, I’m driven to create portrayals of Black people with a divine sense of esteem, mythos and golden touch to increase the positive representations of melanin and to celebrate deeply pigmented individuals who have historically been targets of contemptuous perception.
In Love in Primary, a triptych of embracing figures, I intended to portray moments of intimacy and interconnectedness through friendship and solidarity. This togetherness is catalyzed from a personal longing to see and experience more physical touch that has become endangered due to some secondary symptoms of the COVID-19 pandemic like isolation, alienation, distrust and neurosis.
Planet Nursery is a digitally-painted diptych portraying a world creator and her black panther companion. Dark as the night sky and donning a crown of light, this matriarchal figure is posed resembling iconic figures like Lady Columbia and the Statue of Liberty. The black panther’s primary role is to use its paws to propel the worlds she manifests into orbital revolution.
- Noraa James
Noraa James is an artist, designer and photographer from Norfolk, Virginia, a graduate of Old Dominion University and presently based in Athens, Georgia. James is an artist listed in the athenscreatives.directory website co-hosted by Envision Athens and the ACC Department of Economic Development where his work was introduced to the Lyndon House Arts Center.
For more information, please call 706 613 3623. Please visit us at accgov.com/lyndonhouse or on Facebook and Instagram.
Lyndon House Arts Center, located at 211 Hoyt St. in Downtown Athens GA.