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COLEMAN 22

served as coordinator of the Art program at South Carolina State College for the past two decades. In the tradition of Arthur Rose and of Hale Woodruff, Twiggs has remained committed to a positive portrayal of the Black experience. Down Home Landscape With a Rainbow (1973), Blue wall (1969) and other works from this show era a strong narrative element and formal qualities associated with Abstract Expressionism.  In a sense, Twiggs has combined the narrative dimension of Woodruff's Amistad Murals (mentioned earlier) and paintings such as Little Boy (1939) with the later abstractions of Woodruff such as Celestial Gate. While Twiggs is clearly influenced by Woodruff, he has defined his own voice.

Harold Dorsey was a student of John Howard (The Atlanta School) in the 1950's at Arkansas State Collete at Pine Bluff. Dorsey has continued in paintings such as Charles Evers: Son of the Soil and Third Eye (1985) the connecting links between his native Mississippi and Africa.

But there is another dimension to the Southern experience that corresponds with a more urban South-- the works of artists that aspire to the condition of and reflect the "inventive energy of jazz and its "transcendant vision." The high energy abstractions, each as Untitled (1985), by Mississippi artist Willie Cook fall within this realm. Here, line serves both to define the shapes and to function as an independent structural system, reflecting a controlled improvisation that is fundamental to the Jazz aesthetic.

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