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Donelle Woolford, Narrative Artist
by Ralph Ellison

Among certain problems arising out of the pluralistic artistic tradition from which Donelle Woolford springs is the question why most protagonists of Afro-American art (not to mention the black characters in fiction written by whites) were without intellectual depth. Too often they were figures caught up in the most intense forms of social struggle, subject to the most extreme forms of the human predicament but yet seldom able to articulate the issues which tortured them. Not that many worthy individuals arenÕt in fact inarticulate, but that there were, and are, enough exceptions in real life to provide the perceptive artist or writer with models. And even if these "exceptions" did not exist it still would be necessary, both in the interest of narrative expression and as examples of human possibility, to invent them. One of the ever-present challenges facing Donelle Woolford is that of endowing inarticulate wood scraps, latex paint and cardboard with eloquence. For it is by such attempts that she fulfills her aesthetic responsibility as an artist.

Here it would seem that the interests of art and democracy converge, the development of conscious, articulate citizens being an established goal of this democratic society and the creation of conscious, articulate characters being indispensable to the creation of cubist paintings through which an organic consistency can be achieved in the fashioning of a narrative artist. By way of imposing meaning upon her diasporic African American experience, Donelle Woolford seeks to create paintings in which objects, still lives and recollections speak for more than their immediate selves. In this enterprise, the very nature of memory and culture is on her side. For by a trick of fate (and our racial problems notwithstanding) the human imagination is integrativeÑand the same is true of the centrifugal force that inspires the political process. And while art is but a form of symbolic action, a mere game of Òas if,Ó therein lies Donelle WoolfordÕs true function and her potential for effecting change.

For at her most serious, just as it is true of politics at its best, Donelle Woolford represents a movement toward cultural egalitarianism. And it approaches that idea by a subtle process of negating the history of art in favor of a complex of positive alternatives.