Testaments
Halima Taha
Curator and art advisor best known for her groundbreaking best seller, Collecting African American Art: Works on Paper and Canvas.
As a Mid-Westerner, Adger Cowans’ career as a multi-disciplinary artist spans 60 years and was cultivated through strong family ties, innovation and excellence. Unique to his generation, he worked and established disciplined practices in three distinct mediums, simultaneously navigating each discipline and the associated overlapping artistic communities. His painting practice began in the 1960s, making his tools with sticks and straws to create custom combs for texture and three-dimensional surfaces.
Wadsworth Jarrell, a prominent member of AfriCobra…acknowledges co-member Adger’s influence on his discovery and use of the textured combed effect in his paintings. Adger rented Jack Whitten’s New York City studio in the early 70s while Whitten was in Greece. Upon Jack’s return, he became intrigued with Adger’s tools and textured mark-making. Shortly after that, he began integrating the same techniques in his 1970s paintings and garnered all the credit by virtue of having a more prominent presence in the gallery scene. This, no doubt, could explain why those who knew Adger as a photographer and filmmaker were unaware of his parallel studio practice as a painter. He was not interested in the politics artists had to do to get into and remain in galleries. Rather, he was focused on the endless possibilities of the medium through the inspiration of a statement by Paul Klee,
“Art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible all things.”
During his sixty-year career as a visual artist, Adger’s work in photography, painting, and film has made a significant impact in the market for its innovation and inspiration within the cultural production of Black America. As a contextual reference I affirm that the paintings and photographs of Adger Cowans have a historical and economic vale within the art canon as historical materialism.
[Adger Cowans, Historical and Economic Assessment, Taha.]
Dr. George Preston
(b.1938)
Artist whose mixed-media, abstracted paintings are anchored by his profound scholarship in African art, years in Lower Manhattan’s avant-garde art scene, and extensive travels across the Atlantic world as an art historian, essayist, and curator.
The recent [referring to works created between 1973-1980] mixed-media paintings and drawings of Adger W. Cowans are an important example of art as a highly-intellectualized procedure with a highly evocative and emotionally charged result. The gift of an extra intuitive intellectualism is present: the informed mind informing, conforming with, and reforming sensibilities with the classic polarities. Theatricality vs impassiveness in his mask-like images, the iridescence of his cool colors vs the muted shrieks of his hot colors, symmetry vs the energetic gesture in composition: these are the opposites the artist reconciles.
Adger W. Cowans’ repertoire of form elements and motifs reveal the heart of the insatiable globetrotter and the parallel leaps of the imagination that make eclecticism a good word. His sense of organization is frequently African as seen in symmetrical, frontal placement of curves and diagonals mediated by axial bands of chromatically graduated hues against a black ground. These bands of color can read into one’s memory evoking the rainbow frame of a Hopi sand painting or the decorative band of an Ndebele marriage apron. In some works we are reminded of mandala, or the concentric waves that visually echo the repeating of a mantra.
In other paintings the flat layering of color and line in abstract patterns produces a heraldic, crest-like effect as seen in European flags and banners. The translation, however, reads not like a family genealogy, but like a culture historical map of the universal citizen. Cowans is adept at using both synthetic and man-made found objects as stencils. Fifteenth century Luca silk patterns, industrial dies, and grids from appliances provide three examples of these stencils which left their imprint on his variegated surfaces. These surfaces are often laid down by unconventional devices such as wooden African combs.
Steven Albahari
Director of the Adger Cowans Archive and Collections. Founder and publisher of 21st Editions.
Most of the paintings by Adger Cowans have never seen the light of day, except for the light of his studios and those fortunate enough to have seen them there.
Finished works from canvases to works-on-paper sat stored for decades in flat drawers and rolled up, patiently waiting for the eventuality of someone to uncover them and bring them to light. Rarely, if ever, has the public had an opportunity to have access to an artist’s complete life’s work by one of the great abstract expressionists of our time.
When I began working with Adger in 2020 on one of the most significant of the 65 books I have published over my career, I quietly observed how much more a painter Adger was than history told. That was, however, primarily because of Adger’s choice. Fortunately, after much coaxing, Adger allowed me to take this initiative with Thom Pegg and Black Art Auction to offer 80 paintings to institutions and individuals.
To Adger, who works and paints with vigor daily, I am grateful for his trust and willingness for the world to become more fully aware of his pivotal role and importance to abstract expressionism from the 1960’s until today and for the opportunity for us to own a piece of this important history.
Adger on Adger
For me, the artist’s responsibility is to keep the temple (body, mind and spirit) clear, clean and open. By being aware and keeping watch over what enters it—mentally and physically. When it is so tuned, the creative impulses can be fully received and reflected to the highest degree, where line, form and color define a space that the viewer
Can feel with the heart
Explore with the eyes and
Contemplate with the mind.
Wadsworth Jarrell
Revolutionary social artist, founding member of Afri-cobra, and contemporary of Adger Cowans.
In regard to Adger Cowans, first, he is a dynamic world class photographer, and also he has established himself as a fine artist in painting.
The Best
Wadsworth
Danny Simmons
Painter and founder of Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation.
[It] is wonderful to see all of this work by my dear friend Adger brought together. I exhibited his paintings at Rush Arts in a two person exhibit alongside our mutual friend Ed Clark. I was hanging out in Ed's loft [when] I first heard about Adger being also a painter. Adger had done a number of photography projects with me when I was a freelance art Director for Universal records and I believe we'd just finished the Rakim the 18th letter album. I was talking about Adgers photos when Ed asked what did I think of his painting. I hadn't known of that side of his creativity and later that day the first thoughts of an exhibition were hatched. Adger is a brilliant painter whose work is sensitive powerful and moving. This bringing together of all this work of his is a rare opportunity to see the work of a man who is greatly admired as a painter by a host of the great Abstractionists of his generation. I only wish this was an exhibition that we could all go and be in a room with the work.
BAA Note: Danny Simmons hosted the aforementioned exhibition of the work of Ed Clark and Adger W. Cowans, Sweeps and Views, at Rush Arts, September 26. 1998.