Broken Time

The dexterous improvisations of sculptor Martin Payton

by

Time is not always linear. You could try to draw a timeline of African-American art and write “Charles White,”“John T. Scott,” “Lamidi Olonade Fakeye,” and “Martin Payton” in the “right order,” but to get the full story, you must pull this line up off of the page, wrap it into a circle, and look around and behind it. You will see the year the last slave ship reached the Americas, the first time McCoy Tyner touched piano keys—you can make out every moment silhouettes of dancing bodies paraded down Coliseum Street and across the fields of Mali. Within this simple circle you’ve made, space and form can expand but never disconnect. In the LSU Museum of Art’s exhibition of sculptor Martin Payton, Broken Time, each work in the impressive show (which features over twenty-five sculptures and an installation) is likewise a polychronic expression of the world. 

“It was never broken,” said Dr. Eloise E. Johnson, contributor to the show’s catalog, retired professor of art history, and former curator of the Southern University Museum of Art. “The cultural connections African Americans have with the Africans that were brought here has never been broken; there are so many references, and Martin is an heir to not only to those early traditions brought by the enslaved—woodcutting and bronze casting, the reverence for material—but his work is also a descendant of modernist and postmodernist practice.” 

It’s a lot to hold in one’s mind: the nonlinear history of African American cultural practice intersecting with sequentially-oriented Western visual art movements. Payton’s work sits on a circuitous line of art history that includes American Abstractionism and weaves through Kinetic art, Social Realism, and Neo-Expressionism while never fraying the thread tying it back to the Gold Coast of Africa. The synchronicity of these diametric oppositions may become easier to understand when you trace the New Orleans-born sculptor’s influences back to music. 

“Growing up in New Orleans, music is what I understood as art,” said Payton. “There were not paintings or sculptures in my home but there were records. Art Blakey, Louis Armstrong, Sarah Vaughan, these were the heroes. In this music everyone is soloing but also finding a space with one another, and I realized later you could compose sculpture in the same way.”

Indeed, without thinking about music, the show’s title, Broken Time, would seem like a misnomer, given Payton’s, and Johnson’s, focus on continuity. But in the parlance of jazz, broken time is what you hear when the drum or bass denies a predictable beat, and the music becomes non-uniform and unexpected. It is intermittent without being discontinuous—broken but not incohesive—just like a people, subjected to a forced diaspora, can maintain a singularity oceans and centuries apart. The ideology of jazz shows up not just in the titles and instrumental figuration of works like “Tyner,” “Rahsaan,” and “Arpeggio for Louis” but in the very act of creation. Welded from unaltered pieces of scrap metal, the core of Payton’s oeuvre in this show is dexterous improvisation.  

"Art Blakey, Louis Armstrong, Sarah Vaughan, these were the heroes. In this music everyone is soloing but also finding a space with one another, and I realized later you could compose sculpture in the same way.”

“People think improvisation is making something up on the spot, when really it’s about arriving at that spot damn well prepared,” explained Payton. “When I go to the scrap yard, climbing around … shapes call to [me] like certain phrases might call to a writer. Sometimes those pieces will lay around for years. But that’s the process. I never enter the studio with a title and a form in mind… I try to put my heart into it.”

Getting up close to pieces like “Jarrett” and “Ammons,” it is immediately apparent that only someone who has mastered line and form could eye these individual elements among miles of discarded metal and then assemble them in an intentionally expressive way while giving the quality of the material—the gritty texture of worn steel or the eroded edges of wrought iron—equal weight. 

“People think improvisation is making something up on the spot, when really it’s about arriving at that spot damn well prepared,” explained Payton.

If this is improvisation, the 69-year-old Payton certainly arrives at this spot in his career well prepared. The journey to this point included studying under Charles White at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. “I was inspired by Charles White,” recalled Payton, “but I realized that art was not a fixed notion that had to manifest in a certain set of skills. As long as I labored under that idea I was in serious trouble.” 

Returning to New Orleans in 1975 with a MFA in painting and drawing, Payton rejoined his former teacher John T. Scott at his undergraduate alma mater, Xavier University. As instructors and friends, the dynamic between the two would be a major influence on Payton’s move from drawing to sculpture. A peak in their artistic partnership can be seen in “Spirit House” (2002), an installation composed of drawings by the artists and schoolchildren from Medard H. Nelson Elementary School and St. Leo the Great Catholic School in New Orleans. 

“We asked the children to draw images of what their parents did, what the adults in their lives do,” said Payton, grinning over a photo of the turquoise structure at the intersection of St. Bernard Avenue and DeSaix Boulevard. “You see musicians, cooks, dancers. This was to recognize the contributions African Americans have made to New Orleans, to Louisiana.” 

“... but I realized that art was not a fixed notion that had to manifest in a certain set of skills. As long as I labored under that idea I was in serious trouble.” 

Payton’s work with children preceded this project by eighteen years, as he taught elementary talented arts classes for Jefferson and Orleans Parish public schools from 1981 to 1985. During that time, however, he also recognized a creative turning point that would launch a stylistic trajectory that culminates in the current exhibition. 

In the early ‘eighties, Payton would take a few more steps away from his painting background by stripping color from his sculptures, embracing kinetic features, and allowing the metal to “more aggressively” inhabit the space. 

“‘Bamboula’ was the first fully realized sculpture of my mature work,” said Payton, of the sculpture now on permanent display at the Runnymede Sculpture Farm in Woodside, California. “It was a move toward something that wasn’t about illusion but something actual.” 

×

1 of 2

Payton,-Bastrop-Bamana,-2017,-6.jpg

Courtesy of LSU Museum of Art

"Bastrop Bamana" (2017) by Martin Payton.

×

2 of 2

Payton,-Arpeggio-for-Louis,-2009,-13A.jpg

Courtesy of LSU Museum of Art

"Arpeggio for Louis" (2009) by Martin Payton.

In 1990, Payton filled the teaching position at Southern University left in the wake of Frank Hayden’s death. During his tenure, spanning two decades, he showed in over thirty group and solo shows from Spelman College to the Ogden Museum to the Epcot Center. Throughout, he made it his practice to continuously search for honesty in the act of creating art and to project that honestly in the work itself. 

“When [woodcarver] Lamidi Olonade Fakeye [came to Xavier] from Nigeria he demonstrated the power of art for us. It was like the tools he used were connected as much to his heart and his hand,” Payton said of the UNESCO-recognized artist. “It didn’t feel contrived...And in traditional West African societies when a work outlived its usefulness, it was discarded. There were no museums. Every new generation had work to do.”

His generation may “stand on some big shoulders,” as he puts it, but for Courtney Taylor, LSU Museum of Art curator, Martin Payton’s continuous presence in Louisiana has meaning all its own. 

“Payton has been consistently present in the Louisiana art world for a long time,” said Taylor. “His work—its message and material—is especially relevant to Louisiana and deserves regional and national recognition. I wanted to do a project that would add to the scholarship about him in a lasting way.” 

The exhibition includes work from the mid-‘90s, when Payton’s work shifts to a more expressive, less “muscular” form, as Taylor describes it, to his most recent compositions.  Most of the collection on display consists of work that foregoes fabrication, the ultimate test of the improvisation the artist has been honing for over forty years. This skill is seen in pieces like “Bastrop Bamana,” composed of found, unaltered pieces of scrap metal, where the shape of an animal totem that blesses the harvests of the Bamana people takes form. 

“I’m still drawing ... it’s still figurative,” said Payton with a smile, as if some things were inescapable. Then he pointed to the center of the piece, “This is a part off a combine harvester.” In these details Payton includes, there lies both a conceptual and material connection to lands of West Africa and the crops of southeast Louisiana.  The centuries of Bamana farmers seeding and reaping their fields, the years a mechanical combine harvester raked over soybeans and then, in disrepair, lay rusted in a trash heap: It is these points in time that Payton welds together, in a lifelong pursuit to bring a seemingly disparate history to the visual present.