Arturo Lindsay - Artist Statement

Arturo Lindsay- Artist Statement

My interest in African retentions in the Americas has brought me to an important personal and professional crossroad where the paths of my spiritual, scholarly, and aesthetic journeys meet. As an artist, I use ethnographic research methods to uncover information people use to order their lives and construct their cultures. My research findings are presented in works of art, and in scholarly articles, essays, and lectures. I am particularly interested in observing the presence of African spiritual and aesthetic retentions grounded in the concept of mestizaje cultural-cultural mixing in Latin America.

My three paths were fused in 1994 when I established a studio in Portobelo, a 16th century Spanish colonial village on the Caribbean coast of the Republic of Panama steeped in magic, myth, mystery, and miracles. In Portobelo, I became interested in telling the stories of the cimarrones-enslaved Africans who escaped the bonds of slavery-and their descendants, the Congos. I have also become interested in the Cristo Negro de Portobelo-the Black Christ of Portobelo, a large wooden statue of a black Christ bearing a cross that mysteriously arrived in the village three centuries ago. Devotees of the Cristo Negro believe the statue possesses miraculous healing powers, and as many as 60,000 pilgrims annually visit Portobelo for the feast day of the Cristo Negro de Portobelo. My residency in Portobelo has completely changed the direction of my life and the way I create works of art. I now embrace the concept that art can serve as a catalyst for spiritual healing and/or protection against evil. Recently, I began creating installations that are paradigmatic of ancestral shrines; I then pour libations in these works in veneration of my ancestors and spirit beings. Additionally, I have been infusing my paintings and sculptures with "juju" packs modeled after grigris-magic filled protective amulets found on the warriors and hunters' tunics of the Mande and Ashante of West Africa. Many of these works have been conceived as home altars or sanctuaries for children who lost their lives during the Middle Passage of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. With these changes, my art ceases to exist solely as works of art in a Western European aesthetic frame and emerge as creolized sacro-secular art objects.

I return to Portobelo several times a year where I am now an integral part of Taller Portobelo, an artist cooperative dedicated to preserving local traditions, while developing new ones. In order to provide my students with an opportunity to live and make art in Portobelo, as well as to participate in the growth and development of Congo culture, I established the Spelman College Summer Art Colony in 1997. I have also purchased 13 acres of land on the Bay of Portobelo on which I plan to build Taller Arturo Lindsay, a permanent artist colony where artists and students from the United States, Europe and Latin America can live and work along with the artists of Taller Portobelo.

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