Cultural heritage, social identity, political history, and collective memory are themes in Whitfield Lovell’s work. His drawings on worn pine boards have been described as “whispers from the walls,” the images appropriated from hundreds of antique photographs as well as found objects that Lovell collects.
Read More
One of the artist’s most powerful themes is that of the African American soldier. At Home and Abroad depicts three World War I soldiers with scraps of torn cloth, pierced by nails, hanging from their uniforms and a red, white, and blue hole-riddled target placed over the heart of the seated man. The whole evokes the contradiction between patriotism and oppression: serving a country that did not afford them the most basic of human rights.
Lovell earned his BFA from Cooper Union in 1981. In 2007, he was awarded the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship. At Home and Abroad was included, at the artist’s request, in his 2016 solo exhibition Whitfield Lovell: The Kin Series & Related Works at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C..