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For two weekends this fall, Claude Lockhart Clark will be at the Academy demonstrating a variety of woodcarving techniques and displaying samples of his work. Claude's pieces include ceremonial stools with totemic animals, masks, human figures, and delicately carved walking sticks. His art incorporates powerful images that most strongly resemble those of the Yoruba people of Nigeria. Claude comments:
It is important that we, as African craftsmen, be the architects and builders of our own culture. We cannot afford to use our relocation in America with our subsequent loss of cultural traditions and need for modernization as an excuse for failure to address ourselves to this dilemma. As African Americans our experiences have been different from those of the homeland. We must assert ourselves to learn our African heritage and African crafts, then apply these tools to our experiences here in America.Claude Clark was born into an artistic family in Philadelphia. His father is a painter and printmaker who has exhibited his art throughout the USA and abroad. Father and son have shown their work in many exhibits together. Claude has been strongly influenced by his father, who asserts that “the black person wants to know his African roots, and art serves him as a source of this identity.”Claude began making ceramic figures at the age of fourteen under the guidance of his grandmother. As a high school student in the 1960s he also experimented with bronze casting. By the time he was eighteen, Claude had completed over 110 ceramic and metal pieces. In Pasadena during the summer of 1972, Claude met a Nigerian woodcarver, Lamidi Olanade Fakeye, and spent several weeks watching him work, eventually changing his own artistic medium to wood. He became interested in traditional West African art forms and began to draw on his African heritage to develop themes that were a blend of traditional elements and personal statement.
In 1972 Claude received an MA in sculpture from UC Berkeley. Today, he is a well-known artist in the Bay Area and an experienced lecturer on West African art history. He has made many visits to Africa in search of woodcarvings for his own private collection and for creative inspiration.
Claude uses medium-to-hard woods such as live oak, cherry, myrtle and poplar, which he gets his wood from many sources. Sometimes he looks for old tree stumps or gets donations from park rangers or city tree cutters who have cut down old or leaning trees. Claude uses a variety of adzes, chisels, axes, mattocks, knives, and mallets in his carving. He is adept at making his own tools, which are as interesting and creative as his large sculptures. He imports the steel blades from West Africa and carves his own wooden handles—miniature works of art in themselves.
Watching the artist work is a fascinating experience. He is a very fast carver, using both right and left hands to quickly transform the natural wood into objects with religious and social significance within the context of African village life. The ceremonial stools used by tribal kings are the equivalent of thrones and have a political and spiritual function in West Africa. The king is a religious leader as well as community ruler and the spirit of the people is said to reside in the stool. During Ghana's colonial period, the British stole the "Golden Stool" of the Ashanti people and precipitated a bloody retaliation. Other less-ceremonial stools may have ancestor figures, clan leaders, or totemic animals carved on them. Decorated walking sticks, in contrast, are an African American art form, possibly derived from the staffs used by diviners in West Africa.
For more information, see June Anderson's book on the artist: Honoring the Ancestors: The Woodcarvings of Claude Lockhart Clark (California Academy of Sciences and the University of Washington Press, 1997)
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Copyright 2000 California
Academy of Sciences