Artist of the Month

ERNIE BARNES

1938-2009

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His work is visual poetry, vibrant, rhythmic, pulsating, and alive. 

Ernie Barnes is the artist we chose to highlight this month, and the art pieces before each section in this issue are presented as a sampling of the Barnes collection.  Born Ernest Eugene Barnes Jr. in 1938, Ernie grew up in North Carolina during segregation and the Jim Crow era. As a child Ernie was encouraged to look through art books, which in time resulted in a passion for drawing and art. Simultaneously, at the encouragement of a masonry teacher, he had begun to work out and grow his physical strength in response to bullying from his peers. Two paths were thus born, Ernie as artist and Ernie as athlete. These paths would run parallel during his college tenure at North Carolina Central University (formerly North Carolina College for Negroes) where he studied art on an athletic scholarship and excelled in football and track and field.

In December 1959 Ernie was drafted as a professional football player for what would be a six year career. However, even while playing football, his desire for artistic expression was apparent. Ernie was often fined by coaches for sketching during team meetings, and sometimes during timeouts he would quickly sketch his observations on the field and run these sketches back to the sidelines. Though he did not love playing football, he acknowledges that his years as an athlete play a role in his usage of elongated movement iconic to his paintings. 

It is noted that as an 18-year-old on a school field trip to the North Carolina Museum of Art, when asking about paintings by African American artists the docent replied, “Your people don’t express themselves that way.” Ernie Barnes would change that narrative, becoming a prolific painter whose artwork is renowned for its neo-mannerist approach, a unique expression of elongation and motion. Barnes’ art was most widely introduced to the world through the 1970’s sitcom “Good Times,” where his work “the Sugar Shack” was often on display and would later become the album cover for the Marvin Gaye 1976 recording, I Want You. Twenty-three years after visiting the art museum, he would return to showcase a solo exhibition that would be attended by the Governor.

Beyond the movement in his paintings two other themes are readily identifiable. Barnes painted many of his subjects with closed eyes. He did this to represent the ways he felt we are blind to one another’s humanity. Many of his paintings allude to his desire to help the Black community know and appreciate their cultural roots. He painted from his experiences with a hope to capture the beauty of Black culture, even in the midst of struggle. He acknowledges his college instructor Ed Wilson as playing a significant role in helping him find the beauty of reflecting upon his own life experiences, saying “He made me conscious of the fact that the artist who is useful to America is one who studies his own life and records it through the medium of art, manners and customs of his own experiences.” (JM)