Community takes center stage in ‘Time…with Baba Shongo’

In naming the character traits he sees in Baba Shongo Obadina, Richard Duarte Brown could have initially been describing the tools the Columbus artist and gallery founder utilizes in his wood carving. “He’s blunt about everything, and sharp, and straight to the point,” Brown said in mid-December at the Obadina-founded William H. Thomas Gallery on the East Side, better known as the Gallery in the Hood. “I call him Elder Chief Baba Shongo, a person who disciplines, who’s strong, opinionated. He’s carved his own way, and he didn’t wait for a grant to fund him. … It takes a lot of strength to run your own gallery and to resist, because sometimes you’re resisting when you’re standing for your own culture in a gallery space in a neighborhood. It’s his heartbeat.”

A new art show dubbed “Time…with Baba Shongo,” honors this outsized artistic legacy and the sprawling community that has grown up around the Gallery in the Hood, located at 1270 Bryden Road. Curated by Malik Carrington and Kendrell Mills, the exhibition, which kicks off with an opening reception from 2-5 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 21, draws on a wide swath of the local community, displaying work by artists as young as 12-years-old and extending through masters like Brown, who spoke of the “many strings” extending from the space that bind the likes of Tiffany Lawson, Shelbi Toone, and Raeghan Buchanan, among countless others.

“There are many strings, and they all come together here. Shelbi, she’s of another generation, and she learned batik (a fabric dyeing technique that utilizes wax resist) here. Smoky Brown and his wife, Mary, got married here,” Brown said. “And those are the things I watched. And that’s what drew me to this gallery. … Baba is a person who has a dream and a desire, and his dream and his desire keep him around, and they’re infectious. And I think this gallery has been infectious to us all. … The mirror that happens here is nice. You see yourself where you belong.”

Carrington, who first visited the gallery years back on a middle school field trip, described the act of co-curating the exhibition as a full circle moment. “You really can’t tell what the future holds for you,” said Carrington, who didn’t believe a career in the arts was possible until he set foot in the gallery as a younger man. “And now I’m here, still striving, still growing with the community.”

The sense of possibility Obadina’s gallery has introduced to generations is a rare thing, said Brown, who allowed that he didn’t receive that invitation to creative dreaming until much later in life. He recalled how he was dissuaded from pursuing his passions as a child, told repeatedly that he could never make a living as an artist, and especially as one living in Ohio. “I was 38 when a man called Nicholas Hill, the artist, said, ‘What do you want to do?’ And I was like, ‘I have a choice?’” said Brown. “And that’s what this gallery really asks us all: What do you dream of?”

There are deep similarities between Obadina’s gallery, steadily carved into a single-family house over the course of decades, and the East Side home of the late Aminah Robinson, which sits just over two miles away on a stretch of Sunbury Road. Both spaces exist as physical extensions of the artists, each of whom embedded their artwork and personalities into the bones of the structure, from the kitchen floor Robinson tiled with bric-a-brac to the hand-carved wood circles Obadina laid underfoot from the front door extending through the living and dining rooms. Both homes are also filled with artwork and items amassed by each and reflective of their interests, be it Robinson’s jam-packed bookshelves or the LPs piled beneath a glass case in the front room of Obadina’s home.

“You’ve got the old records stacked, and African sculptures that look like Benin sculptures, and there are the pieces of wood that Baba actually carved,” Brown said. “Then there’s the floor he built, and the dragon that’s in the yard, and the murals outside that are faded and decaying, and that in Baba’s words will go back to the Earth where they came.”

These various parts and pieces were well in place when Carrington first visited the gallery in middle school and remained when he returned years later in a role with Central Community House and Transit Arts, introducing the next generation to Obadina’s work through a wood-carving demonstration led by the elder. “And that brought back that core memory of me being here in middle school,” Carrington said. “And that’s something that’s good to look back on at the end of the day, knowing I was here, and that this place is still here. … I want people to see the community he brought into this space and all of the beauty that comes with it.’

It’s a community central to the artwork on display within “Time…with Baba Shongo,” the bulk of which centers on representations of those people who either helped to shape the gallery’s legacy or have embraced its core mission of connecting younger generations with the past. A series of portraits on wood by Brown depict those pioneering figures who worked alongside Obadina, while paintings by other artists portray everyone from Aminah Robinson and Grandpa Smoky to poet, author, and cultural critic Scott Woods, whose nearby Streetlight Gallery exists within a similar spirit of community as the Gallery in the Hood.

“Baba, he held this house, and he always stayed in close proximity to all of the artists,” Brown said. “And he’s always represented Columbus, Ohio in a way where we can overlook him, because he is so accessible. And at the same time, he deserves his space, too. … We wanted to have a show and just honor Baba for Baba’s sake. Not for his birthday and not for anything else. But just to seize the moment and to have time with Baba, to have time with family.”