Posted on Sun, Mar. 21, 2010
The Philadelphia Inquirer

Galleries: A pair of exhibitions that transcend their themes

By Edith Newhall

For The Inquirer
All too often, the art that illustrates an artist's preconceived project doesn't measure up to the project itself, and the latter ends up being the enticing aspect of the show, with the art tacked on - a good student dotting all the i's.

Fortunately, this is rarely the case with those ongoing projects in which the artist finds an irresistible personal calling or challenge to explore. The exhibitions of recent work by printmaker and painter Daniel Heyman and painter John Moore, for example - at Swarthmore's List Gallery and Philadelphia's Locks Gallery, respectively - illuminate, expand, and transcend their themes.

Since 2005, when Heyman first traveled to Jordan and Turkey with American lawyers to draw portraits of former Abu Ghraib detainees while listening to their sworn testimonies, the artist has also drawn and listened to the testimonies of Iraqi victims and survivors of Blackwater's Nisour Square shootings on Sept. 16, 2007.

In 2008, he began visiting the National Comprehensive Center for Fathers in Philadelphia and listening to the stories of area African American men in counseling there, who had spent their lives in poverty and repeated incarcerations. Another series of portraits was born.

Heyman's List Gallery show, "Bearing Witness" - which is one of Philagrafika's Independent Projects - manages to combine extremes of great beauty (from pitch-perfect installation to plywood wall of etchings to lusciously hued watercolor and gouache portraits of Iraqi and African American men) with profound suffering and sorrow (the men's uniformly solemn, downcast expressions, their painted testimonies, desperately sad and upsetting in content, looking like words that prisoners paint on their cell walls). It's a seamless balance of opposites throughout, like so much of real life, and increasingly disturbing the more you think about it.

Swarthmore is also hosting "Printmakers Go to War," Heyman's collaboration with Eric Avery, Damian Cote, Nick Flynn, Michael Reed, and Ehren Tool, through April 9 in its McCabe Library (check hours at www.swarthmore.edu).