Patrick-Earl Barnes’s “Shotgun House” continues at the Heath Gallery in Harlem through October 19 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
The Heath Gallery
24 West 120th St.
Thursday – Saturday through October 19
646-872-0419
www.patrick-earl.com
www.heathgallery.squarespace.com
A few years ago, we met self-taught deep-folk artist Patrick-Earl Barnes on a SoHo street, selling his compelling artwork. Barnes concentrates on two primary series: “Family Ties,” paintings and fabric collages inspired by his late father, and “Shotgun House,” acrylic paintings on canvas or wood of the historical architectural dwelling. The latter is the subject of his current show at the Heath Gallery in Harlem, which continues through October 19. In the front room, fourteen works of different sizes line the walls, primarily paintings of multiple rows of tiny shotgun houses with names based on their color scheme: “Pink Agboile,” “Powder Blue Agboile,” “Kool Aid Red Agboile,” “Black Denim Agboile.” Two of the works feature a male figure in the foreground. Barnes, who was raised in Shreveport, Louisiana, and is now based in Brooklyn, gives the repeated images a sociocultural power that goes well beyond their apparent simplicity; shotgun houses are small, inexpensive residences that began in West Africa and spread throughout the American South following the Civil War. Among the stories behind their curious name, and the one Barnes favors, is that if you opened the front and back doors, you could fire a shotgun right through the house, the pellets not hitting anything as they entered one end and exited the other. “I’ve used my open air art gallery in SoHo to educate everyday people about a cultural and aesthetic experience that remains misinformed and underrepresented,” Barnes said about an earlier show at Heath, but that statement relates to “Shotgun House” as well. Be sure to check out the back room, which is displaying gallery owner Thomas “Hat Man” Heath’s beautiful, complex paintings of men, women, and children of the African Diaspora.