“Seaside is the hub of the Black community; always has been,” says Sandra Gray, city of Seaside recreation specialist who has been organizing City Hall’s Black History Month exhibit since the project’s inception in the mid-1980s. “When Fort Ord was here, the base was one of a few places in the country that would allow interracial marriages. When they closed [in 1994], a lot of people left.”
Another wave of African American homeowners didn’t survive the housing bubble that hit in 2007. “People sold their houses and moved,” Gray says. “It’s harder and harder to find local Black artists for this exhibit.”
This year, on multifunctional walls above characteristic bright red carpets at the Walter Lee Avery Art Gallery, one can admire works by three local artists – mixed-media artist Kenji Tanner from Salinas, photographer Richard Cannon from Monterey and Pacific Grove-based mixed-media artist Germain Hatcher.
Hatcher’s paintings grab your attention from the entrance; her domain is facial expressions – each a study in deep psychology. The pieces come from her collection titled “By Faith,” conceived as the visualization of an oral history. “It was in 1988 when I came across the book Bullwhip Days,” Hatcher wrote in an artist’s statement. (The book contains 32 interviews with formerly enslaved people, projects that were assigned to journalists by the Works Progress Administration during the 1930s.) “The interviews stayed with me,” Hatcher wrote.
Cannon is a San Jose native who has been pursuing photography most of his adult life. He retired in Monterey in 2004, and is showing eight pieces at the exhibit – black-and-white portraits of jazz musicians with titles like “Brother Leon” and “Brother Scottie.”
Tanner, finally, brought in acrylic paintings embroidered with beads and her handmade colored dolls. Tanner considers herself a surrealist; she is attracted to decisive, full colors, and has been working with thousands of local students as a youth educator.
“This exhibit used to last a month,” Gray says. “Now, it’s two months.” This is great news since City Hall was closed during January – now hours are back to normal and the exhibit can be enjoyed through March 3.
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