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The art of Turtel Onli is African Centered. Many who have seen it appear to be confused by it. The culture conscious African Americans find it unacceptable because it doesn’t bespeak the “traditional” African that they have come to know and love.
The middle class find it difficult to accept because it is too African and not like what they have been told is “good art. The Rhythm & Blues Hip-Hoppin’ Black Americans don’t know about him or his work.
As I stated earlier, his work is African-Centered. He has termed his style Rhythmism. He coined the term in the early 1970s, and rightly so.
The paintings, wearable art and performances he creates are alive with RHYTHM.
His work is demonstrative in its force.
Prof. Turtel Onli with his show-stopping "Rhythmistic Adinkra Bambara Madonna Quilt" in the "Parapluie" group exhibition at the Hyde Park Art center, Chicago. 2024.
Visual excursions: “Tanya” Oils on 24” X 36” canvas 1985.
Akomo Colored pencil on 18” X 24” acid free paper 2015.
The colors appear to dance before you. The eyes, the lips, the styles of hair pull you, cajole you, take you in, The colors are bright, vibrant, steamy as they vaporize into a thin layer of white heat and back the vibrantly charged colors. The colors dare you to laugh, to play, to join in the high energy of life. Life on a higher plane. Life in a new Africa, a futuristic Africa with a neo-tradition that doesn’t deny itself but digs down into itself to bare yet a new fruit for the future. This future fruit, a Rhythmistic one, is a universal fruit to embellish the entire fabric of humanity.
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!975 For Miles Davis album cover. Inks on illustration board.
Universal is mentioned because the reference to Onli’s work being African Centered and not generally accepted in that community is due to its power and influence being misunderstood. There is another community into which Onli has yet to be accepted and that is the mainstream Art Community. Onli is representative of a new age, a forward-thinking age. An age that has a vision of an Africanization of the future by an Africa that is viable in the global scheme of things. And a world unified by its universal values.
The disparities between Blacks and Whites often stumbles blindly over into the Art World. The continuance of this practice inhibits the flow of contributions by Black artists creating voids of sterility.
This disparity curtails the more enlightened well-resourced universals that we as a culture look for in the world of elite, educated, proven, acclaimed and innovative art like Onli's unique Rhythmistic collections..
The works of artists like Turtel Onli must be reviewed and institutionalized because their universals will rhythmically pull at the ancestral memories that continue to make us human. We can no longer afford the limitations of Euro-Centric Art as the only contemporary modernistic approach to unleash and invest in the potential power of Art.
Onli and his Rhythmistic Future-Primitif visual art movement gives the art critics, patron, and maker the opportunity to expand their concept of the universal.
Written by Marcia Hicks, PhD. Circa 1986
