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Dahyun Kim - Houston Conwill

By Anonymous


Houston Conwill is an African-American installation artist who expanded the concept of what is a work of art. When he designs a site-specific art, his design involves various media such as music, dance, narrative, song, time, and theater. Altogether, they represents and celebrate spirituality and black culture as African-American. 


He was born in Louisville, Kentucky on April 2, 1947. He pursued a BA in the fine arts program at Howard University. At Howard, he worked with painter Jeff Donaldson and Sam Gilliam. Jeff Donaldson helped him to look at art as a black artist. Sam Gilliam informs him how painting could escape its two-dimensional framework. He successfully employed it to his first student exhibition where he shows works with canvases stretched over pyramid shapes. In 1973, he went to the University of Southern California to earn a master of fine arts and began his career.


In 1986, he designed a large installation called Arc for the York College, CUNY campus. It is covered by various symbols to represent African American cultures. An interesting fact about this Arc is that he considered the changes of shadow for the design. As the sun’s position changes, Arc’s shadow changes its placement along with the metal circles.


Arc, 1986

Conwill had contributed to the area of installation art by creating of scroll forms, “petrigraphs,” made with African-American objects. When he moved to New York in 1980, he expanded the idea of petrigraph and constructed the “cosmogram.” In 1989, with his sister poet Estella Conwill and architect Joseph De Pace, he made three cosmograms to exhibit in public libraries in New York, Chicago, and Charleston. The most prominent work of these cosmograms is called Rivers. For this project, he designed the terrazzo and brass floor at New York Public Library to commemorate the poet Langston Hughes.

Rivers, 1989


In the same year of 1989, Conwill created an installation art called The Cakewalk Humanifesto: A Cultural Libation. This installation takes its name from a dance that became a national trend in the 1890s. Although the dance was originated as a parody of white culture by black slaves, white society also enjoyed the dance. The Cakewalk Humanifesto shows the spirit and vitality of African-American culture.


The Cakewalk Humanifesto, 1989


In 1995, again with Estella Conwill and Joseph De Pace, he created The New Ring Shout. It is an artwork made after African Burial. The cosmogram represents an allegorical dance floor for a traditional black dance called the “ring shout.” Around the circle, there are names of twenty-four Africans who were victims of the Atlantic slave trade. 


The New Ring Shout, 1995



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