July 2024
Gregory Wiley Edwards
Editor-in-Chief Amanda Quinn Olivar speaks with Oakland-based artist and longtime friend Gregory Wiley Edwards about his life and career, coinciding with his inclusion in On the Edge: Los Angeles Art from the Joan & Jack Quinn Family Collection at the Laguna Art Museum.
Gregory Wiley Edwards, The Last Supper, 1973, pen and ink on paper, 9 x 19 inches
Amanda Quinn Olivar: Your life has been such an epic journey, and you tell the best stories about it! Although we’ve known each other for years, I always want to hear more. To start, will you tell our readers the story behind The Last Supper ink drawing you made when you were 22 years old…
Gregory Wiley Edwards: That experience unexpectedly caused me to contrast the values of my beloved upbringing, with the moral trajectory resulting from my new independent pursuits in the art world. My paternal grandmother, Cora Anne Anderson, matriarch of our family, was a venerable member of our church and the larger Fifth Ward community. When she asked me, in the early ‘70s, to “make her a picture of The Last Supper,” I knew she meant a European, blond, blue-eyed Jesus with European disciples. I knew that I couldn’t just tell her no, nor could I simply deliver any image, including that obfuscating propaganda, in good conscience at that point in time.
I’d just read Anacalypsis, an inquiry into the origin of language, nations, and religions, by Godfrey Higgins, which categorically stated that Jesus was black, agreeing with a quote by Malcolm X and the writing of J. A. Rogers, among others. I made a pointillist drawing in pen and ink featuring black faces hovering above a pyramid, the rays of creation, and mystic symbols within a force field background representing Imhotep’s axiom, “Paint Not Created Things, Paint The Forces That Created Them.” Our Dad, Melvin Eugene Edwards, Sr., delivered the finished drawing to Cora and reported that she eventually understood the image’s meaning. He was pleased with the endeavor too.
AQO: How would you describe your current body of work?
GE: I’ve always loved to make drawings. I refer to them as “American Hierography.” The Last Supper was one of the first. I continue to make them, inventing and utilizing new strategies. The latest group is made in sketchbooks, so I can keep them all together and make archival prints of a selected number of them. I drive a customized Cadillac with a drawing desk fitted into the rear seat, where many of the drawings have been made.
My paintings are gestural abstractions. I refer to them as “Big Black Paintings.” They are a layered mass of continuous flow, multiple strata of fully saturated brush strokes, interferences, and ghost lines—a detailed, chaotic random sequence, pregnant with meaning.
Gregory Wiley Edwards, Untitled, 2001, pen and ink, 14 x 11 inches, early sketchbook drawing made on the desk in the backseat of his Cadillac
Gregory Wiley Edwards, Paris Painting - Kerivon Style, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 40 x 40 inches. Collection of Christene Adams
AQO: When did you first know you were an artist? Tell us about the turning point that led you to pursue art as a career. Did you ever have second thoughts?
GE: In 1969, after our son was born, my wife Penelope and I made some inspired drawings at our first place in Silverlake. She decided to study Ikenobo Ikebana, extending her inspiration for fifty years, and I continue to make drawings. Studio Z was a turning point for me. There was a group of LA artists sharing David Hammons's former Slauson Avenue studio as activists initiating community projects, creating conceptual and performance works, writing grants, and producing Black Music festivals under the alternative art space banner of Studio Z. It didn't last more than a few years. Still, it served magnificently as an activist's beehive studio.
After I organized a couple of seminal group shows (Double Diamond at Houston's CAM and Studio Z: Individual/Collective at the Long Beach Museum Of Art), the realization materialized that sustaining an art career meant committing my life to making meaningful art and getting a day job. African American artists were not enthusiastically welcomed into mainstream commercial galleries at that time. I never looked back, even though the wolf was sometimes at the door.
AQO: How did your upbringing in Houston and later your move to Los Angeles as an athlete influence your art-making? What informs it today?
GE: I grew up in an artistic household surrounded by thinkers, readers, doers, players, and prayers. Our community proved that hard work and creativity are an effective combination. My parents' relatives and friends were exquisite craftspeople and impeccable functionaries in every field they were required/permitted to pursue, the legacy of an epic forgotten past.
My move to LA put me in the middle of a huge group of incredible athletes during the South Central Los Angeles Cultural Renaissance following the Watts Rebellion. Many were destined for global recognition as athletes and distinguished themselves based on their aesthetic, intellectual, entrepreneurial, and administrative skills. A few were in art schools, so I naturally gravitated to them. We frequented concerts, jazz clubs, and coffee houses and counted many musicians, poets, dancers, and philosophers as our friends. The result of those associations was expressed in my feeling aesthetically inspired much of the time.
Gregory Wiley Edwards, Dorsey Don #84, Making A Tackle, Fall 1965. Photographer: Melvin E. Edwards, Sr.
AQO: How do you approach your work? Will you give us some insight into your painting process?
GE: After I meditate in the morning, I stop by the hardware store and/or the art supply store to pick up a few items for the studio. When I arrive, I mix colors, identify several forms, and then enter the unknown to conjure visions. My new studio is an hour from the house, so I take a long drive in the countryside. I bathe my mind in the vehicular pursuit of Right Attitude before I arrive at the studio. I generate new questions, so with pen and ink and brushes and paint, I dance the answers onto paper and canvas.
AQO: What is important to you about the visual experiences you create? What drives you? Are you communicating anything?
GE: The most important thing about making art is the making of the artist. The African tradition requires that I commit to a specific inner objective so that specific quality manifests consistently in the work. I’m driven to establish and maintain contact with inner sensations of diverse magical origins, isolating the movement of intuition. I’m practicing balancing my equilibrium, while communicating with our ancestors. Hopefully, I’m generating results worth contemplating for those who choose to view art, while consistently maintaining my methods.
Meaning and purpose inside provide a stable foundation for the passionate exterior expression of form and color. These are essential values and qualities related to the Gutai approach to abstract ideas in my practice. Broadly, my intent is to communicate these ideas.
Gregory Wiley Edwards, Expanded Resonance, 1992, acrylic on canvas, 46 x 69 3/4 inches. Courtesy of The Joan and Jack Quinn Family Collection
AQO: What artists or movements have influenced you and why? Did your brother, artist Mel Edwards, play a role?
GE: Like everybody who came of age in the ‘60s, I remember Jackson Pollock and the Ab/Ex masters on the pages of Life Magazine as child in the ‘50s. On a school field trip, I was exposed to Marcel Duchamp and his brother Raymond Duchamp-Villon at a Houston Museum Of Fine Arts exhibition.
Later, I was intrigued by community discussions on the Black Arts Movement, proceeding as they did from the liberation speeches of Malcolm X and the discourse of Imamu Amir Baraka.
Mel was a subscriber to the Liberator Magazine, an avant-garde platform of ideas by serious writers. I inhaled every edition that I got my hands on. Reading Richard Wright, James Baldwin and their peers while listening to avant-garde composers and cutting edge jazz musicians dove-tailed with the conversations Mel and Daniel LaRue Johnson were having in my presence.
Ron Miyashiro was making awesome, groundbreaking paintings and Marvin Harden was making really excellent, unique pencil drawings that touched me deeply. Virginia Jaramillo, Rick Mayhew, Jack Whitten, Sam Gilliam and William T. Williams are major painting influences. Ornette and Denardo Coleman were musical influences. Lamidi Fakeye, a fifth generation woodcarver, gave me wonderous insights into the Yoruba Tradition.
The Civil Rights movement was an opportunity to meet new intellectual peers in the streets, further expanding the parameters of my fledgling bohemian activism.
Before he left LA for New York in 1967, Mel had introduced me to everybody in the LA art scene. My cup runneth over! Mike Kanemitsu, Charles White, Conner Everts, Larry Bell, Ed Moses, Bruce Conner, Kofi Bailey and William Brun were also highly influential ‘60s Los Angeles artists. Jim Melchert and Stephen Goldstine were my inspirational touchstones in San Francisco and Berkeley. In the early ‘70s, Katherine White introduced me to Lamidi Fakeye, a renowned sculptor from Nigeria.
Artists Duval Lewis, Joe Ray, John Alexander, Chris Burden, Roho Donald Davis & Gregory Wiley Edwards, 1978, Studio Z exhibition opening followed by dinner at Southtown Soul food Cafe, Hollywood. Courtesy of Gregory Wiley Edwards
Artists Rick Buxie, Joe Goode and Gregory Wiley Edwards, circa 1970s, Los Angeles. Courtesy of the Joan Agajanian Quinn Archives
Gregory Wiley Edwards and David Hammons at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles
Gregory Wiley Edwards and his brother Mel Edwards at Pace Gallery, New York
Penelope Edwards, Genvieve Theurel & Gregory Wiley Edwards, Kerivon in Brittany, 2012. Photograph by Ian Borthwick
Gregory Wiley Edwards with Denardo Coleman's Band, San Francisco
AQO: Please briefly relate a memory that impacted your life and/or career.
GE: Once I was with a group of friends down at the Elks Lodge across the street from the Western end of MacArthur Park in Los Angeles’ historic Westlake District, to see some daytime boxing matches. I was the one who was dressed most like an artist and so I was immediately targeted by the fight mob organizers of the event as an undesirable attendee. They kicked me out of the place, so I found myself out on the street alone, as all my friends vanished into thin air as soon as they became aware of the quality of attention I'd drawn to myself.
As it happened to be in the neighborhood where Chouinard and Otis Art Institute were located, I went next door to Otis and serendipitously ran into Charlie White. He had no classes that afternoon and invited me to hang out with him, which I did for three or four hours. Although we knew each other, we'd never spent the kind of exclusive time together that we did that afternoon.
We talked about how not to get robbed in New York and all kinds of things, including the time he spent in Mexico, painting murals with David Siqueiros, who always wore a pair of six guns while he was up on the scaffolding. Charlie was also super encouraging about my drawing. After that, when I asked him to participate with me in the Black Artist's Seminar, he readily agreed. Having his enduring friendship was sublime.
AQO: What is your current obsession?
GE: I'm obsessed with drawing all over again every day and with making monumental prints of The Last Supper. I was on the Vaporetto floating down the Grand Canal in Venezia and there was this monumental print of a Leonardo da Vinci drawing, on a scrim attached to the scaffolding, facing the canal, fronting a major palazzo and I’ve thought about it every day for years. I've started making larger and larger pigment prints of The Last Supper ever since, with the idea of eventually making one building-sized. Alternately, I’m obsessed with painting.
AQO: What is your favorite art accident?
GE: One of my most significant early drawings was Facing The Music Of The Spheres, #I & #II. #I is primarily pen and ink, which I was exclusively committed to, and required a free lance frisket to ultimately achieve the desired result. The frisket was the same sized paper as #I and inadvertently it became #II. When #I was completed, I slid it into my portfolio and inadvertently slid the frisket in as well.
Larry and Fonce Mizell, friends and music producers, invited me up to Sky High Productions to meet Donald Byrd and Duval Lewis. They looked through my pieces and Donald choose #II as the cover for his upcoming album release, Stepping Into Tomorrow. The part of me that screamed “Noooooo!” was discretely left mute momentarily. Donald had pointed me in a completely new direction, accidentally. Byrd, master musician, by really loving that work, assisted me with some ascension. Simultaneously, Larry and Fonce, who owned twin black Porsche Targas, swiftly raced me over the Hollywood Hills and out Mulholland Drive to the Beach, where we proceeded to quite vigorously celebrate serendipity as happy accident.
Gregory Wiley Edwards, Facing The Music Of The Spheres I, 1971, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 18 inches
Gregory Wiley Edwards and Amanda Quinn Olivar, Bakersfield CA, 2020
On the Edge: Los Angeles Art from the Joan and Jack Quinn Family Collection
March 24 — September 2, 2024
Laguna Art Museum
Laguna Beach, CA
On the Edge: Los Angeles Art from the Joan and Jack Quinn Family Collection was first exhibited at the Bakersfield Museum of Art, September 30, 2021 — April 2, 2022. Click here to read Curator’s interviews with several of the artists (including Gregory Wiley Edwards) who participated in the exhibition.
Gregory Wiley Edwards began his career as a photographer in the 1960s, documenting significant social, political, and artistic events in Los Angeles. He was a member of the revolutionary street theatre group Bodacious Buggerilla and a notable participant in the 1971 Watts Festival Art Show. During the 1970s, Edwards organized the group exhibition Double Diamond at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston and was involved with the Studio Z Crew during the Alternative Artspace scene. He also organized important symposiums on public art and the role of business in the art world, and he invited renowned Nigerian woodcarver Lamidi Fakeye on significant tours in Southern California. In the 1980s, Edwards exhibited with his brother, sculptor Melvin Edwards, in New York and focused on solo shows to emphasize his commitment to abstract painting. The 1990s saw Edwards and his family relocate to the San Francisco Bay Area, where his travels to various international cities influenced his artistic perspective. He continues to draw, paint, and experiment with printmaking at his studio in Sonoma County.