THE EXTRAORDINARY GRACE OF A BOOK CALLED ELEMENTAL

Unless a person enjoys an association with someone who successfully integrated the Harlem Renaissance goals of artistic excellence, individual integrity, and spiritual vision into their creative agenda, it becomes easy to view the movement and its influence as a finite period restricted to a few decades. Such a perspective is less likely to hold, however, when meeting someone such as the Savannah-born and New York-raised artist Luther E. Vann.
As an adolescent and young man in the 1950s and 1960s, Vann satisfied his hunger for creative expression with frequent visits to sources of knowledge and insight like the Art Students’ League, the Center for Art and Culture, and the Cinque Gallery, places where Harlem Renaissance artists had left their aesthetic marks and where some had established new roots. The Cinque Gallery in particular was not founded until 1969 by three major artists identified with the Harlem Renaissance: collagist Romare Bearden, figurative painter Ernest Crichlow, and abstract expressionist Norman Lewis. Their aesthetic and philosophical formulations helped provide Vann with a sound foundation that allowed him to mature into a singular artist whose visual language is uniquely, richly, and brilliantly his own.
The value of the legacy Vann absorbed from the creative spirit of the Harlem Renaissance is on powerful display in the extraordinary grace of the book titled ELEMENTAL. The ELEMENTAL project started in the early 1990s. The book traces Vann’s work from successful experiments of the 1970s, in which he created abstract representations of the inner self, to later more representational metaphysical works that utilize mesmerizing fusions of classic styles. Vann is as equally at home rendering visual commentaries on the neon flow of life in New York City as he is portraying that of family ties and culture in the South.
The stunning visual appeal of ELEMENTAL is further accentuated by a biographical essay on the artist and more than three dozen poems inspired by Vann’s work and composed specifically for this book. A number of the poems have been published in ESSENCE Magazine and consequently won some measure of fame in their own right.
Because ELEMENTAL represents the first published collection of Vann’s work, it is already considered something of a collector’s item. The title may be ordered from Bonaventure Books through the publisher’s web site at http://www.bonaventture.com/elemental.htm or by faxing or telephoning (912) 355-7054.
(photograph of Luther E. Vann courtesy of the artist)

Aberjhani
Author of I MADE MY BOY OUT OF POETRY
And co-author of ENCYLOPEDIA OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE