Damu

Untitled Man Performing with Guitar To Girl

1987

Acrylic on MDF

52 x 48 inches

Signed, dated

Original frame

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Damu is probably a pseudonym for the artist who made the three folky panels in this sale. The name means "ChildÂ" in Sumerian and refers to an ancient Mesopotamian god of vegetation. Damu is described by historians as a healer and the head of a cult worshipped primarily by women. The name is also an acronym used by west coast gangs (Drama Against Men Unified), presumably to describe cop hassles.

But Damu could also just be a name. So we"ll forget the author"s identity for a second and just focus on the paintings. Each one seems to draw on the work of a different black artist and sensibility. The scene of young people harvesting watermelons has a Horace Pippin vibe, and could fit into the tradition of black painters creating fantasies of bygone southern utopias for patronizing white audiences. It could also be an ironic appropriation of that genre or, most likely, a sincere post-migration memory painting since the work feels authentic.

The scene of a red-suited crooner playing guitar to an enthralled young girl in what also appears to be a rural setting calls to mind Romare Bearden"s jarring collage technique. The crooner is dressed in a 50s-60s Motown suit and his face, captured mid-song, is represented by a newsprint cut-out. The little girl, the central character in the drama, is magnetic, if bizarre: Her head is gigantic and her arms are too long and you can"t take your eyes off her. In the background another little girl watches the scene through a window in a bumble-bee-striped barn. Her face is a newspaper cutout too. This painting also feels like a memory and the little girl looking on seems to be the one having it. You get the feeling the artist wants to draw a distinction between fact and fiction in memory and representation.

Unlike the two rural pictures, the large family picnic scene seems to take place in the 1980s, what was then the present. A community parties in an edenic green foreground while the city, the site of so much migratory trauma for African Americans, looms safely in the distance. Two giant trees provide shade for the party and anchor the composition. The figures are as flat and crude as Beavis and Butthead but specific enough to convey little intimacies. It"s a vision that calls to mind the memory paintings of Henry Taylor and the urban folk paintings of Chris Johanson and one wonders if Damu could have developed a style as varied and interesting as that of those artists if he or she had gotten more attention in their day.