Barbara Bullock
→Barbara J. Bullock is an African American painter, collagist, printmaker, soft sculptor and arts instructor. Her works capture African motifs, African and African American culture, spirits, dancing and jazz in abstract and figural forms. She creates three-dimensional collages, portraits, altars and masks in vibrant colors, patterns and shapes. Bullock produces artworks in series with a common theme and style.
Early life and education
Bullock was born in Philadelphia on Nov. 24, 1938, after her father James Bullock moved his family from North Carolina to Philadelphia in the 1930s. They were part of the Great Migration of Black people to the North in search of better opportunities. Her mother Janie McFarland Bullock looked for work at the local armory and her father was a truck driver. The couple separated and Bullock's mother died when she was 12 years old. She, her brother Jack and sister Delores moved in with her father and stepmother Gertrude, who became her second mother. Both of Bullock's paternal grandparents, Rev. Oscar and Mattie Bullock, who visited often from North Carolina, were storytellers, and she grew up listening to their tales.Bullock always felt a need to make things and was always in her parents’ basement doing that, she told artist Najee Dorsey in a 2017 interview. “I’ve always been creative. When I was growing up, I needed a language. I realized early on that art was going to be that language,” she told interviewers for a 2015 exhibit of Black artists at the Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia.
Bullock also took dancing lessons. She was asked to leave a dance class when she showed up one day with a stray dog and refused to remove it. She quit the class but never gave up on the concept. She participated in the School Art League, an arts program in the public schools. She attended Saturday-morning classes at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art School and participated in programs at community centers. She became interested in Africa after learning about it in National Geographic magazine and wanted to understand her connection to it.
She attended Roosevelt Junior High School and graduated from Germantown High School in 1958. She was headed to Moore Institute to study fashion illustration. For three years, she took Saturday-morning painting and drawing classes at the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia. In 1963, she began taking night classes at Hussian School of Art, which taught commercial art classes. She remained at Hussian until 1966.
Career
Portraits
Bullock initially painted portraits of famous Americans, friends, and family members. Most of her early works were watercolors. She sought to show the humanity of Black people, she told an interviewer in 1966, but finally decided to paint what she felt.In the 1960s, she became acquainted with other African American artists in Philadelphia. Several had attended or were attending the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts : Charles Pridgen, Cranston Walker, Richard Watson. Pridgen, Walter Edmonds and sculptor John Simpson were among those who had their own studios. She hung out with Joe Bailey, Moe Brooker, James Brantley, Charles Searles and Ellen Powell Tiberino to talk about their craft, the lack of exhibition opportunities and other issues. The seasoned artists offered advice and critiques of her work.
Bullock, Tiberino, Reba Dickerson Hill, and Fern Stanford were among the few working Black female artists at the time. Noting that many male artists were supported by their wives and married females were not readily accepted, Bullock decided not to get married. “I married my art,” she stated in the catalog for the Swarthmore College exhibit “Ubiquitous Presence” in 2022.
In 1971, Bullock was named art director of the Ile Ife Black Humanitarian Center, now the Village of Arts and Humanities, founded by dancer and choreographer Arthur Hall, where she stayed until 1975. She taught art techniques to children and young adults. Hall incorporated Yoruba culture, philosophy and spirit entities into the core of the center, which attracted artists, dancers and musicians from all over the world. Funded by the Model Cities Program, the center offered arts, African-inspired dance and music. Bullock met musicians Odean Pope and Max Roach, who also taught there.
Bullock embraced Hall's African sensibility and absorbed it into her own art. Her outlook changed, expanding beyond the teachings of her Catholic upbringing to accept the possibility of a world of spirits that allowed her to connect with her African roots. She took dance lessons from Hall, and she painted the dancers - images that found a permanent place in her works. “I want to express the ritual through dance, the communion of the body and spirit through movement,” she said in an artist statement for her retrospective at the Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum in 1988.
She taught alongside Charles Pridgen, John Simpson, Charles Searles and Twins Seven Seven, a Nigerian who was the only survivor of seven sets of twins, who had settled in Philadelphia. In his works, Twins Seven Seven connected animals and spirits. Artist Moe Brooker noted that Bullock was among those artists who fed off their African heritage but kept it at a distance as they created their own unique styles.
Twins Seven Seven's influence can be seen in many of Bullock's paintings, including the series “Stilt Dancers,” 1975. She described her artwork as “chasing after spirits.” At one point, Bullock painted an image of an African spirit in a mural on the side of a building, which eventually collapsed. The mural and images – one was of Hall – were recreated by artist Lily Yeh in 2018 on another wall.
Bullock's spirit-based abstract works were dominated by vibrant colors, patterns, rhythmic movement and a cacophony of shapes. She chose black as a predominant color, she said, because she wanted to replace its negative symbolism with power and strength. Her materials included layers of painted paper, fabric, plant fibers, beads, metals, shells, feathers and other small materials. Some of her dancer and animal figures extended outward from the walls when hung. She worked in acrylic and gouache on paper, pen and ink, textured sculptures, figural collages - which she called “shaped paintings”- and three-dimensional wall collages made of heavy paper.
In 1980, she began making altars while researching African culture. She placed them in her home and did not finish, sell or trade them. Made of hand-dyed cloth, raffia, shells, beads, rocks and other objects, they were meant to protect her, she told an interviewer in 1999.
While at Ile Ife, she visited Haiti to learn about its religious practices. She also visited Jamaica and Mexico. With the aid of grants over several decades, Bullock traveled to Ethiopia, Egypt, Mali, Morocco, Senegal, Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire and South Africa. She incorporated into her collages the images she saw and the techniques she observed on her visits to Africa: the land, the black night sky, textiles and masks, and observed ceremonies and other events. “I felt very close to that culture,” she said in a 1983 interview. “In reality, I come from that culture. It’s like getting in touch with yourself.”
Bullock produced series made up of multiple works that, she said, allowed her to fully explore a theme. “Jasmine Gardens,” 1976, included one painting and 300 drawings. “Stilt Walkers” was the first series. The others included “Initiation,” “Night Songs,” “Healers,” “Journey,” “Spirit Houses,” “Chasing After Spirits,” and “Bitches Brew.” Some of her works reflected her feelings toward contemporary issues affecting Black people: “Trayvon Martin, Most Precious Blood,” a teen who was killed by a white Neighborhood Watch volunteer in Florida in 2012, “Katrina," the devastating floods left by that hurricane in New Orleans in 2005, and a portrait of George Floyd, who was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis, MN, in 2020.
She started researching the series “Jasmine Gardens” during the waning days of Ile Ife, she told an interviewer for an exhibit at the Portland Art Museum in 2017. A painting in the series, “Dark Gods,” which showed two thick Black characters intertwined in each other's grasp, evoked controversy because of its erotic nature. The series was inspired by the naturalism she found in Japanese eroticism and the people's openness about love, she said. Although the figures were male and female, some thought they were males. Bullock chose her artist-friend Deryl Mackie as the male model.
Bullock participated in printmaking programs, including the Experimental Printmaking Institute at Lafayette College. In 2017, PAFA held an exhibit titled “A Collaborative Language” of artists who made prints at the institute, and she was included. In 2008, she was also represented in a show at the Hammonds House Museum in Atlanta of works from the program. The institute donated Bullock's print “Seeing is Believing ” to Woodmere Art Museum.
Academia
Over four decades, Bullock taught art classes in schools, colleges, community centers and for nonprofits. She completed more than 200 artist-in-residences in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. She conducted mask-making and art classes at local art centers and museums. She trained teachers on integrating art in their school-district curriculums and led classes for inmates in prisons.In 1978, she was among 18 artists chosen to participate in a Works Progress Administration-style program to employ artists and offer art access to communities. It was conducted under the auspices of the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act and administered by the printmaking Brandywine Workshop. She and the other artists, including Roland Ayers, Bob Thompson, and Cranston Walker, worked at community agencies, community centers and detention centers. Bullock taught classes at Nicetown Boys and Girls Club.
As an artist-in residence, she spent time with elementary and high schools students in several districts, including Shippensburg and York in Pennsylvania, and Sussex in Delaware. In Philadelphia, she worked at Prints in Progress, an afterschool printmaking workshop. In New Jersey, she taught art classes from Cape May on the coast to Camden inland. She taught at Arts Horizon where she held classes for students in the Camden schools and trained schoolteachers on Rutgers University’s Camden campus. She began making fans while teaching there.
In a five-month residency at the African American Museum in Philadelphia in 1999, she produced a series titled “Journey Series #4, Ethiopia.” It is now part of the museum's collection. She also held a residency at Perkins Center for the Arts in New Jersey.