WASHINGTON — If you love the sound of piano keys exploring your deepest emotions while attempting to heal the scars of America’s complex racial history, mark your calendars for this week at Georgetown University.
Acclaimed pianist Bruce Levingston will perform the D.C. premiere of “An American Citizen” at 5 p.m. Wednesday in Gaston Hall. The show will explore the life of John Wesley Washington, who was born into slavery and became the subject of Marie Hull’s famous painting “An American Citizen.”
The concert will be accompanied by a discussion of art, race and politics in Levingston’s new book “Bright Fields: The Mastery of Marie Hull.” Levingston always felt a person connection to Hull’s paintings because Hull was born in Levingston’s home area of the Mississippi Delta in 1890.
“She was born into an era where women could not vote. … She went to the Pennsylvania Academy of Art, then to New York and to Paris and became an outstanding painter, came back to live in Jackson, Mississippi. … In the Depression, she started a series of paintings … that looked at working people and what was happening in their lives,” Levingston tells WTOP.
Hull’s fascination with the Depression-era working class led to a groundbreaking series of paintings.
“People would come and ask her for some job or work, and she would give them a little money or breakfast and say, ‘But would you sit for me for a while?’ So she began this series of paintings of African Americans and also sharecroppers and tenant farmers, some are white, some are black. These paintings are remarkable for their honesty and realism,” Levingston says.
Note the direct gaze of John Wesley Washington in the “An American Citizen” painting below.
“This particular painting is extraordinary because he’s looking directly at the viewer, and at the time, African Americans knew it was dangerous to look directly into the eye of many white people, so that’s already unusual. There’s a kind of wonderful warmth to his expression, a clarity, a sweet resignation, and she caught the spirit of this man who was already in his 90s,” Levingston says.
We’re catching Levingston during a special time. Just before swooping down to Georgetown, Levingston will perform Monday night at New York’s prestigious Carnegie Hall to celebrate the 15th anniversary of Premiere Commission, the music organization he founded to promote new music.
“I’m going to be playing some great pieces of Philip Glass and also some world premieres by Jim Matheson, the great composer whose music is played at the New York Philharmonic and Los Angeles and Chicago Symphonies, and also Nolan Gasser’s beautiful ‘Recast,’ which is based on the life of Booker Wright, who is a Civil Rights figure from my home area in the Mississippi Delta.”
Are you sensing a trend? Levingston loves his Mississippi Delta and the civil rights stories that spring from within. American roots — like still waters, like still piano keys — run deep along the delta.
Click here for more information on the Georgetown show.
Listen below for selections of Levingston’s work.
