AURAS: New Icons by Mark Steven Greenfield

Mark Steven Greenfield is a painter of phenomenal insight, exemplified by his upcoming exhibition “AURAS: New Icons by Mark Steven Greenfield.” The majority of his paintings in this exhibition are presented for the first time at the Ronald H. Silverman Fine Arts Gallery. These images draw upon issues that have been at play regarding the black identity and black history in the United States. These two series are reflective of the spirituality that permeates the black psyche and reach back into the earliest of experiences of their presence on the American continent or even before, as well as their exposure to the European narratives and their appropriations by the Christianized Blacks. Haloconveys the black spiritual experience through various social, political, and religious signs and symbols by appropriating the icons of the colonizing Europeans.
 
Each image is the truth resurfaced as the story is retold. To put it artfully and adroitly, each of his images is born of the black bosom of love and the black experiences of pain, and yet it exemplifies their struggle, survival and victory. To put it differently, from all perspectives, these images are a fusion of European and African experiences. They are a unifying sign that undermines differences and biases and historical fractures. Greenfield’s art transforms the European and American imagery into what is familiar to one group in regard to color and familiar to another group in regard to the narrative and history of art. In the last analysis, I have no other path of understanding but to conclude that the stories belong to those who have lived them and processed them in their own settings and through their own experiences. Most importantly, in today’s political and philosophical arena of the American experience and its masked racial divisions, the Black Madonna and Halo series offer a new vision of the black persona and of the white history that transcends the narratives of the injustices experienced.