Orlando celebrates Black History Month in art at City Hall's Terrace Gallery

To celebrate Black History Month, this year the city of Orlando has brought 26 Black artists to the Terrace Gallery in City Hall, and six to CityArts in the Rogers-Kiene Building. Both group exhibits showcase Central Florida's Black creatives, and document the local African American experience with unusual depth and honesty.

At the Terrace Gallery, an open call to artists was the first step to this juried exhibit, and the selection process yielded some amazing pieces. While portraits predominate, the exhibit's essence lies somewhere between contemporary social realism and a gorgeous "jump at the sun" spirit.

Nina Simone, Billie Holiday and other Black artists earn honored places here, while Martin Luther King, Frederick Douglass, Ruby Bridges and other civil rights movement figures form an important foundation to the show.

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photo courtesy City of Orlando/Terrace Gallery

Robert Rell, ‘Reflection’ | acrylic on canvas (2023)

The familiar faces seem to introduce the viewer to other figures: Kathleen Battle's beautiful, smooth face stares starkly out of the canvas in Victor Wilson's "Opera Diva." Ronald Kelly's postage-stamp paintings honoring Black artists exalts Nikki Giovanni, Edmonia Lewis and Florida's own Augusta Savage, a sculptor from Green Cove Springs who participated in the Harlem Renaissance. (Savage and Lewis do in fact have USPS stamps designed in their honor; Giovanni, though deserving, yet awaits. She joked in 2016 that "you have to be dead to be on a stamp." No hurry, please.)

These are glimpses of the past, present and future of the African American experience, as painted by African American artists. Just as art's social realism movement brought home the stark reality of the Great Depression, contemporary social realist art brings home the stark reality of the Black experience.

Alexandra Vasconcelos' "God Sees the Inside" is a beautiful silver-leaf collage on canvas. Three children are engrossed in grooming one another; the quote "we see the outside, God sees the inside" appears upside-down, a poignant message of dignity and pride. Delia Miller's triptych "Journey to Resilience" begins with apocryphal images from the Middle Passage and Jim Crow Era, culminating in achievements of the now. If one turns to Delia Miller's "Sistas," this incredible ink-on-paper drawing swells upward with joy, music, hair and balloons. Jordan Jones, whose work also appears at the CityArts show, leaves the viewer with a delicious portrait titled "Hov-squiat," rendering the legendary hip-hop artist and husband of Beyoncé rather Basquiatically.

It's a melding of Black creativity, and a taste of local African American artistic talent one would like to see more of all year around.