One year later, Jon Onye Lockard refuses to compromise in his art

It was from a Nigerian friend living and traveling with him in the United States that artist Jon Lockard, who is black, acquired his middle name, "Onye." In response to letters recounting warm receptions everywhere they went, the friend's father wrote back that Lockard should be called "Onye Ije," the artistic traveler who has many friends.

The name suits the 52-year-old artist well.

Muralist, portraitist, educator, chronicler of black America and president of the National Conference of Artists, the world's oldest and largest black artists' association, Lockard has circled the globe in the name of art and cultural understanding.

He has drawn portraits at the Worlds Fair and on the Queen Elizabeth, traveled widely in Africa and South American. Soon he may add a mural at Nigeria's national airport to his catalogue of such works for the University of Michigan, Wayne State University and Ohio's Central State University.

Later this summer, he will journey to Brazil for the nCA-sponsored First International African Diasporic Experience, which will bring together - in an atmosphere free of politics - visual and performing arts from Libera, Brazil, Surinam, French Guyana, Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Curacao, the United States and Nova Scotia.

Between world travels, Lockard, who is on the faculty of both the University of Michigan and Washtenaw Community College, calls Michigan home. On a recent afternoon, the artist, a tall, imposing figure whose straw Panama suited the steamy, tropical weather, was in residents at his Victorian home in Ypsilanti. His travels are the source of the African and African-inspired art objects that decorate the living room, his studio next door the source of the paintings, drawings and stained glass that fill its high-ceilinged walls, making it feel lived in - populated - before anyone even enters.

Lockard is familiar to Ann Arborites for his 22-year participation in the Ann arbor Street Art Fair, his exclusion from the 1982 fair, and his subsequent law suit against the fair. But as he settled his large frame into a low-slung upholstered chair and lit the first of a string of cigarettes, Lockard expressed a desire to talk about art, rather than politics.

In the broadest sense, however, to talk about the one with Lockard is to talk about the other. He views his role as artist and chronicler of life and events around him; that he chooses to portray black American subject matter that makes some people uneasy, he knows. 

But "art," he says, "has a responsibility to the truth. It comes from people to people, a process of communicating ideas. I would love to have the opportunity to paint flowers, but there's so much that's important in our daily lives that I haven't had the luxury."

The idea that art is for people's and not art's sake has motivated Lockard's longstanding commitment to public art. A muralist for the last 15 years, he does copious research before picking up a brush. The recently completed Central State mural celebrating Paul Robeson, for example, took Lockard one year to research nearly another two to paint.

Cityscapes that espouse an architectural aesthetic of "plainness and sterility" may please some people; Lockard finds them infinitely more congenial with "flashes of color, and particularly of significant color."

"There's a different relationship people have to murals in a public setting," he continues. "When you look at art in museums and galleries, there's a deceitful aura - we call it 'respect.' There's always a guard standing by; you whisper and you move along briskly. At the Vatican Show in New York, the average person stood in line for hours - far longer than the time at the show, which was about 18 minutes. It's unfortunate.

"In the city, people find a way to blend in with art. Even a certain amount of graffiti - if it's tastefully done - can be okay. Public art gives people an opportunity to enjoy the arts, to feel complimented to see things that reflect their daily lives."

If Lockard cites artistic influences as diverse as the Old Masters, Charles White ("His work spoke to the ethos of the black people"), Kathe Kollwitz and the Mexican muralists, his taste for working big hails from a more plebian source; a three-year teenage apprenticeship with Detroit's first black-owned outdoor advertising company. 

"I'm very comfortable on scaffolds," he smiles.

Certainly, in his current work there is less danger than there was in those days, when for a wage of one dollar a day - minus what the company took out for pop and potato chips - he painted signs from an exalted perch over the wintry Detroit River. "I think every finger has been frostbitten at one time," he says, rubbing his hands in remembrance. 

Lockards two ambitions are monumental in scale. He would "like to do a church, inside and out, including the stained glass," and "a large mural, somewhere that depicts America the way I think it ought to be shown." Such a mural would include "the contributions of many groups in the country which are overlooked," he says.

To an outside observer, Lockard's 25-year career as a portraitist seems to contradict his interest in large, public pieces. But despite differences of scale and audience, both murals and portraits are intimate, maintains Lockard, who recently completed a commissioned portrait of Andrew Young, mayor of Atlanta, and his wife.

"Murals, even though they are sometimes decorative, often deal with issues," he observes. "It takes sensitivity and a particular community awareness to even be aware of the issues. So one of the things that working in murals demands is a sense of consciousness, a sense of the rhythms happening in the community, the country or the world."

Portraits, he adds, demand a similar understanding of the subject. "The relationship is for a shorter period of time, but you have a chance to make some statements about individuals who have positive and negative things about them. Doing a celebrity is difficult - you never want to do them as a celebrity, but as a person. And with a regular person, you talk to them, you try to seek something out in them to make them enjoy themselves . . . to make them a celebrity."

Over the years, Lockard has shared his life and work with several apprentices. He is a strong partisan of the apprenticeship system, nothing that it allows developing artists the opportunity to see many aspects of the artist's work, to delve below the surface and be in the midst of production. He recalls that it was two years before his employers at the outdoor advertising company even allowed him to pick up a brush. Although he did not appreciate it then, he was "learning how to run a shop," he says. "It has affected things I've done the rest of my life."

Lockard has also learned from his pupils. His interest in stained glass, for example, came from apprentice James Greene's. 

A teacher in the classroom as well as the studio, Lockard encourages diversity of expression among his students, both black and white. "They've got to discover who they are and reflect their families and their backgrounds in their work," he says, "With a sense of history and hard work, they'll survive in their art. But that doesn't mean that I have to agree with everything they do."

In American art, as in American life, Lockard prefers the "salad bowl theory" to "the melting pot theory."

"Art," he says, "is a way to meet situations we may never meet ourselves on our own." He indicts gallery owners, fair judges - those who control art but do not make it - for their failure to facilitate the growth of the "salad's" minority ingredients. A lettuce person, he agreed, when offered a hypothetical example, should be able to appreciate the virtues of avocados," he adds, "you can't deny the fact that they're there."

He feels that the artist, like the novelist, should paint from a palette tinted by his or her life experiences and knowledge of the world. Although life is heightened or transformed on the page or canvas, the product must portray a truthful vision. If Lockard is sorry to have included conflict in the Afro-American section of his mural for Wayne State's Manoogian Building, it is not because it made some people uncomfortable; his sorrow is rather for the events themselves. Art, he says, should not play Pollyanna: "If we reflect a panacea, we cheat ourselves and our generations coming. I don't say that from a vindictive point of view. I didn't write history; I just chronicle it."

Lockard looks forward to the day when a canvas portraying a black person eating a plate of food would not have political overtones, as he says it does now, and when museum holdings would encompass more works reflecting a black aesthetic and black experiences.

Noting the resurgence of ethnic pride in the arts, he has hopes that, in the next decade, the art world will shift toward "the delicious salad it's supposed to be."

"If I can enjoy Bach," he says, "you can enjoy Leadbelly. It's all a part of the same thing."

IMAGE CAPTION:

Artist John [sic] Onye Lockard steps back to assess one of his murals while an apprentice watches. Lockard did not submit works to this year's jurying process for the Ann Arbor Street Art Fair. He unsuccessfully filed suit against the fair last year, over his exclusion.