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NEW YORK NEWSDAY
MAY 23, 1995

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

ARTS IN THE BOROUGHS

A.C. Hollingsworth at the Hostos College Art Gallery. To the left is his painting 'Bird,' to the right is 'Horn Men.'

[[image]]
Newsday/Susan Farley

The Fine Art of Bebop
He heard the lullabyes of Birdland; now he paints them

By David Garrick
STAFF WRITER

WHEN THE final bell would ring at the High School of Music and Art, A.C. Hollingsworth always ran over to the Birdland nightclub on Manhattan's West Side to listen to the world's greatest jazz performers. He was learning to paint in school, but always wanted to express his ideas and creativity like musicians did.
 That was more than 40 years ago, and though Hollingsworth never did learn to play himself, he has simulated that creativity in "The Color of Jazz," a free exhibit of monographs, lithographs, watercolors and oil paintings in which he's attempted to capture the intensity and emotion of jazz tunes. The exhibit at Hostos Art Gallery in the Bronx opened last week and runs through July 31.
 "My jazz paintings reflect the soothing, inspiring and exciting ways that those musicians affected me when I was younger," the Bronx-based artist said. "I listen to their recordings when I paint and how I feel - and memories of how I felt seeing them live - actually create the paintings."
 Many of the paintings are attempts to capture the energy and flavor of one song, but a few are tributes to the progression of jazz, Hollingsworth said. "Horn Men" features seven musicians from overlapping eras, with Wynton Marsalis at the extreme left representing present-day jazz and Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and others representing the evolution of jazz, he said.
 And other paintings are a tribute to the career of a single musician. "Miles" is three images of Davis - one as a young man, one middle-aged and one in his late career - with deepening colors from left to right commemorating the musical changes that accompanied his physical maturation.
 While Hollingsworth resists strict correspondence between color and particular musical instruments, color does correspond to mood in his paintings with deep blue for low, somber notes and orange and red for the swinging and screaming high notes, he said.
 Hollingsworth, whose excitement about his art causes him to manically skip from topic to topic when discussing it, was first featured in an exhibit in 1961 and has been a professor of studio art at Hostos Community College in the Bronx since 1972.
 "I'm an art veteran but always yearned to do this jazz series," he said. "I did an abstract series and a civil rights series and built a reputation, and about five years ago I realized it was now or never for the jazz. These works are recent but they have been incubating for decades."
 Hollingsworth, born in Harlem Hospital, has hosted three television series' for WNBC that appeared on Saturday mornings: "You Gotta Have Art" (1970-71); "You're a Part of Art" (1975); and "The Creative Years of a Child" (1979), where he also is credited for writing the series.
 "The shows were aimed at children as well as adults and focused on art as a part of culture," he said. 
 Hollingsworth was first exposed to the social and cultural implications of art in the Spiral group, an organization of black intellectual artists attempting to advance the civil rights movement in the 1960s. 
 Spiral did not achieve its goals, Hollingsworth said, but he is still trying to change perceptions, especially of women. In addition to 31 jazz paintings, his exhibit includes 12 paintings of "strong, defiant and independent" women.
 "Women are my cause. They've always gotten a bum deal by the way they've been represented in art," he said. "When I was in school 'feminine' was always equal to 'weak' and paintings of women focused only on their sensuality - which I love as much as anyone - but there is so much more there and I'm tired of seeing women objectified all the time."
 Hollingsworth is working on a book about female images and their effect on him, and has had poems about women and music published in several poetry journals. 
 Another cause of Hollingsworth's is black participation in art and culture. "There are tremendous barriers to entry in the art world, especially for blacks," he said. "But there has been a recent resurgence of interest in black art that is very exciting."
 The Brooklyn Museum has expanded its African galleries and the Whitney Museum of American Art presented an exhibit entitled "The Black Male," this spring. Several respected galleries have increased the number of shows devoted to African art as well, Hollingsworth said. 
 The resurgence has been lucrative for Hollingsworth, whose works have been selling swiftly. Actresses Halle Berry and Debbie Allen and WNBC newscaster Carol Jenkins have purchased Hollingsworth originals in the past two years. 
 But Hollingsworth said he creates the images for himself and would continue if he never sold another painting. "Painting is like building a chair," he said. "It seems like drudgery to some, but with the right attitude it can be amazingly fun and rewarding." [[black box/end of section]]
 The Hostos Art Gallery is at 450 Grand Concourse near 149th Street in the Bronx. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday. Call (718)518-4242.