Art & Love Indivisible: Sydney G. James & Lamar Landers

By Nichole M. Christian

Between the painter and the photographer, a natural yet rarely explored symbiosis exists. At first, the chosen tools appear in opposition, cause for a great debate – sharp stroke of the brush versus sly snap of the shutter – which captures the moment best? Of course the duo, immersed in the art of seeing, sees past the question. Each knows a greater challenge is literally in their hands, the silent hope of seeing all things with eyes fresh and free enough to find relatable truths.

This is the quest and quandary that binds painter Sydney G. James and photographer Lamar Landers in art, life and love. Portrayal, the duo’s first major joint exhibition, welcomes witnesses to the ways that their individual practices act in response to what the writer James Baldwin and singer Nina Simone insisted was the artist's duty, to reflect, illuminate and expose reality, perhaps even expand some aspect of human understanding. Surely, Simone and Baldwin would salute the hues and scales that James and Landers deploy in Portrayal as answers to their call, each work unapologetically trumpeting the depths of Black faces, Black lives, and Black lands.

The sixteen works that form Portrayal, including five new paintings from James, create a secondary portrait as well, a serious yet subtly playful snapshot of James and Landers in relation to the physical journeys they’ve shared as creative and life partners. We, the viewers, see as James and Landers see on the streets of their hometown, Detroit, through and into the eyes of its people; all the way to Africa, Ghana and Sierra Leone, where eyes come alive too.

“The harmony,’’ James explains, “comes in the experiences and the way we individually portray the impact of what we see. ’’

As a photograph, Landers’s portrait titled “Ghost” is stunning compositionally, drawing viewers into a landscape that becomes downright chilling for those who know its backdrop and what happened inside. The image, which features a Black boy and his shadow walking the coastline toward an unknown horizon, is shot outside of Elmina Castle in Ghana. The castle, under Dutch authority, was a holding space for an estimated 30,000 enslaved Africans a year, each forced to pass through the infamous “Door of No Return,” the last stop before having their lives stolen as part of the Atlantic Slave Trade.

“As a photographer, any visual person, really, it’s about catching a moment, a reality that will stick with you,’’ Landers says during a visit to James’s studio in the basement of their Detroit home.“You can’t go looking for them; you have to be dedicated in the same way that she is down here constantly working on her painting.’’

In some instances, James’s paintings and Landers’s photos are in direct conversation with one another. “Efya,” a photo portrait by Landers, captures the elegance of a Ghanaian woman standing like a sentry against a brick wall. The image could easily stand alone but it takes on a dual duty, functioning as a metaphor for the duo’s tendency to draw inspiration from one another, and it becomes an explicit muse for James’s brush.

She responds on canvas with a portrait of Efya that is arresting in color, dimension and detail, and it's made all the more mesmerizing by the fiery fragment beckoning to the viewer from the painting's background, a female face that appears, with mouth wide open, to have something to say to Efya.

Like the photo, the painting leaves the interpretation open to question, to wonder, just as Landers likes. “You can’t go around telling people everything about art, what to think, what to see. That’s what makes it corny. You’ve gotta put the shit in like little Easter eggs; let ‘em find it.’’

Those familiar with the Sydney James whose name has become singular and global in the world of giant street murals and a recent foray into shoe design with Vans, will find a slightly different, evolving, James.

Yes, the women, strong and Black (her signature subjects) are front and center, powerfully rendered and framed by color choices so explosive and electric, the subjects seem ready to walk right up off the canvas, into the world. Here, James also calls to mind painter Kerry James Marshall’s mastery of taking the color black to new indescribable limits. Neither James nor this writer could find a word exact enough to capture the enchanting near-aubergine-but-not color she achieves to enliven the central subject in the painting, M’Balou embodies Umoja (#jonnisonthespot). Pressed to define the color, James insists, “I don’t know, for real.’’ But she owns the importance of the artistic risk and its reward. “She (the subject) was the darkest person I’ve ever painted. I honestly wasn’t sure I could pull it off.’’

While bold and bursting with life, James’s canvases in Portrayal also show a deepening affinity for negative space, a gift to viewers who could otherwise overlook the painter’s well studied understanding of fine details and shadows. The most notable turn in the works James offers is the presence of men. She intentionally paints them into the mix, the foreground even, creating a harmony that perhaps alludes to the one she’s shared with Landers since their first meeting in 2011.

An important, and pause worthy, fact about that meeting: A few months later Landers bestowed to James the brand identity for the life, the grind, she chose by abandoning Los Angeles that year for her roots, and the subsequent rise of a girl –and a brand G.R.inD.– raised in Detroit. The moment they met, Landers says he knew, “she was someone who’d actually do something with it.’’

James remembers the moment but more for the comical direction of her thoughts that day. Sitting beside Landers and struggling to hold back a laugh, she says, “I was thinking to myself, ‘Oh, he really likes me.’ I grabbed his arm, and we’ve been building ever since.’’

Landers interrupts to correct the record: “I didn’t not like you,’’ he says smirking, “I just didn’t like a good idea sitting around, and I wasn’t a girl, you were, and it seemed like you had some talent.’’

The shared memory is as lush, and real, as the work they’ve created, independently and collectively, in the years since. The exhibition, James says, is merely a logical and focused progression of a bond, and a story. “It’s legit the art of love, the complexity of it, making sure we’re steadily productive in the right ways.’’

For all the rich colors and composition on display in the collection of works, the art is incapable of capturing the full tale. “Out of all the relationships I’ve ever had, this is my only partnership. He’s the most open minded when it comes to growing, going to these foreign ass places, going in with brand new eyes together, sharing the same fears going in, but overcoming at the same time. That’s a beautiful experience to have with a person and to create from.’’

James cuts her words off, takes a momentary glance at Landers then adds: “It feels endless.”

Portrayal Exhibition Page

ABOUT NICOLE M. CHRISTIAN

Nichole M. Christian is a writer and veteran journalist. She is coauthor of Canvas Detroit. Her writing also appears in the poetry chapbook, Cypher, summer 2021; Portraits 9/11/01: The Collected Portraits of Grief from The New York Times; the online arts journal, Essay’d, A Detroit Anthology; and Dear Dad: Reflections on Fatherhood. She was creative director, editor and lead writer of Wonder and Flow, the monograph honoring 2020 Kresge Eminent Artist, and of A Life Speaks, the monograph honoring 2019 Kresge Eminent Artist Gloria House. Nichole is also currently co-director of We exChange, a year long arts project, with Signal-Return letterpress, pairing six writers and six visual artists in a collaborative exploration of the meaning of change in a time of chaos — its limits and its unexpected possibilities. The project will culminate in an art exhibit in late 2022.