Quantum: Inhabited Space
Through April 30 at the Dr. Carter G. Woodson African American Museum, 2240 Ninth Ave. S., St. Petersburg. 727-323-1104, woodsonmuseum.org.
Under normal circumstances, the interior of the Dr. Carter G. Woodson African American Museum looks like most other museums — a rectangle of white walls with wall-mounted images and texts on display. Not so these days. Enter the small museum and you’ll find yourself surrounded by color and pattern thanks to artist Ya La’ford. Through the end of April her installation, Quantum, converts the museum’s core into a kind of contemporary art temple saturated from floor to ceiling with slate blue paint and silvery designs that recall both the intricate patterns of ancient African or Maya art and the cool precision of a 20th-century Sol Lewitt wall drawing.
Quantum creates an encounter that would be special anyplace, but the work of art takes on added poignancy inside the Woodson. Last month, St. Petersburg mayor Rick Kriseman announced that the city would work to purchase the embattled Midtown museum, which faces eviction by the current owner of its building, the St. Petersburg Housing Authority. (The museum may still have to vacate the building in July even if the city’s purchase plans are underway.) While far from conclusive, the news infused supporters of the Woodson with hope just as the museum underscored its mission to showcase African American culture by debuting an ambitious and unusual project by La’ford, a young artist of Caribbean descent.
“We thought the timing was perfect to showcase aesthetics that have been far too long marginalized, especially because of gender, race and mainstream preferences for media,” says Terri Lipsey Scott, chair of the Woodson’s executive board.
While not exactly an ingénue, La’ford, 35, is having a moment in Tampa Bay. A New Yorker by birth, her roots run deep in Jamaica, where her great-grandfather John Dunkley was a celebrated self-taught artist. While she was growing up in the Bronx and around Fort Lauderdale, La’ford’s father worked as an engineer and her mother a teacher; that explains why she took a somewhat circuitous route to art, studying for a law degree at the University of Florida before earning an MFA at the Art Institute of Boston. Just over a year and a half ago, she and her husband gave up an itinerant lifestyle to settle in St. Pete’s Kenwood neighborhood. Now she teaches communication law at the University of Tampa and art at St. Petersburg College.
In person, La’ford is a force of nature as engaging as her installations. When we met last week at Kahwa Coffee in St. Pete, she turned heads with her sleek pageboy haircut and throaty laugh; by text, she’s a swirl of wit and emoticons.
Her paintings layer minimal geometric patterns — often deliberately imperfect grids that suggest hand-drawn labyrinths or aerial maps — over fields of soothing color. They look great on your average wall, but these days La’ford is mostly interested in making them larger-than-life and ephemeral in temporary installations. The images first began to come off the canvas while she was completing a two-week artist’s residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach last year. When her painting supplies didn’t arrive on time, she took a cue from another artist in the program and began transferring her sketches directly to a studio wall; soon she was staying up until 4 a.m. to realize an installation that took over the room. Since then La’ford has made four other immersive installations, including Quantum and one at the Dunedin Fine Art Center earlier this year.
“It’s been a life-altering experience for me because what I conceptualized as art and how to make it, and how it would sit in a gallery, has changed for me now. I want to have a deeper discussion, and I find that when you can penetrate something, you get a different experience,” La’ford says.
In Dunedin she collaborated with Nathan Beard, a St. Pete artist whose multicolored paintings of undulating waves evoke musical rhythms, to transform one of the art center’s galleries. Similarly to her approach at the Woodson, La’ford painted the gallery walls deep plum and etched a network of gold lines on top, incorporating a mirror into the space; Beard’s paintings added a layer of contrasting color and pattern. Visitors found themselves drawn in to contemplate the drama of color, light and reflection, says DFAC curator Catherine Bergmann.
At the Woodson, La’ford estimates that she spent 136 hours over less than two weeks to transform the space. Parts of the museum’s usual décor such as display pedestals are painted over, giving the impression of an aesthetic infection that has invaded even the museum’s most mundane parts. One doorway is covered with a temporary panel that bears the most detailed of La’ford’s silver patterns, a hypnotic nexus for the labyrinth that unfurls outward in lines on the surrounding walls. Some details perhaps invite a more polished finish — where strands of blue lights have been installed behind the panel and under baseboards to create a glowing effect, they reveal themselves as plastic tubes at odds with the ethereality of the installation. But as a scaled-up version of La’ford’s vision, Quantum impresses. A lot.
La’ford’s next goal is to expand the scale of her installations further and stage them in places where diverse audiences might benefit from coming together in a shared aesthetic experience.
“This is an ambitious goal, but I want to be the largest-scale female artist that ever lived,” La’ford says.
This article appears in Apr 2-8, 2015.