ONE BAD CAT - The Reverend Albert Wagner Story, the award winning film documentary by Thomas G. Miller and Tesseract Films of California premiered early in 2008.    It won Best Documentary at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival and the Roxanne T. Mueller Audience Choice Award for Best Film at the Cleveland International Film Festival. One Bad Cat toured U.S. film festivals from coast to coast for the past year.

Ovation TV, the cable network devoted to the arts, featuring programming on visual arts, theater, opera, music and dance, purchased ONE BAD CAT  and will  premiere the film on cable television Sunday February 1st and Thursday February 5th, 2009.

Two paintings by the Reverend Albert Wagner are included in the upcoming exhibition and catalog entitled Each In Their Own Voice:   African-American Artists in Cleveland 1970-2005.  

"Last Days with Albert" and "Moses and the Ten Commandments"  are two superb works by Wagner chosen to represent him along with the works of 23 other prominent African-American artists active in Cleveland during that time period.  This exhibition is a sequel to the previous Yet Still We Rise: African American Art in Cleveland 1920-1970.  

The exhibition will be held at the prestigious Cleveland State University Art Gallery, 2307 Chester Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio January 23-March 7, 2009.   Gallery information  216-687-2103.

Before he passed on, Albert Wagner donated his seminal painting "Flee from Egypt"  to the Permanent Collection of the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland.  "Flee from Egypt" was painted early in Reverend Albert’s career; and it remains his largest and most recognized canvas.  His portrait of Moses, with arms raised and outstretched, is the dominating central figure in Flee’s composition, populated with thousands of individuals who believe they are traveling to the Promised Land as they perilously cross the Red Sea that Moses has just parted. 

Albert’s daughter, Reverend Bonita Wagner Johnson, shares the story of Albert’s first brush strokes on the canvas of Flee.  He chose a large brush and dipped into his rich blue paint stroking broadly across the huge canvas.  Following that initial moment and before their eyes that first brush stroke turned from blue to red.

A major Gus Wilson retrospective exhibition of his diverse carvings is in the  preliminary planning stages. The exhibit is being organized by Gene Kangas and John Dinan in conjunction with a Maine museum. The exact place and time is yet to be determined. Your participation is welcomed. Please email either Kangas or Dinan digital photos of Gus Wilson’s decoys as well as his bird and animal carvings in your collection. The organizers are especially interested in learning of previously unpublished and undocumented examples as a first step in surveying the range of images created by Gus Wilson during his lengthy career. Contact Gene Kangas at Kangas@CreeksideArtGallery.com or John Dinan at captdinan@yahoo.com.

WATER BOY
The Art and Life of Reverend Albert Lee Wagner

Edited by Gene & Linda Kangas

INTRODUCTION Excerpt from BOOK
by Linda Kangas

The emancipation of slaves following the end of the Civil War did not guarantee that insidious racism and bigotry were over, far from it. Southern blacks especially continued to suffer unspeakable intrusions into their everyday lives. Slavery was illegal but segregation was not. Voting and openly speaking one’s mind were not possible. Fear dictated how one acted and how one expressed him or herself. Southern black folk artists were acutely aware of the suffocating burden of these limitations, yet they bravely struggled to find a voice. To protect themselves and their families from potentially deadly reprisals, critical messages were necessarily disguised within their visual creations. Openly expressing ideas might be dangerous. Social commentary could have serious consequences. "Thornton Dial hid his work in the tool shed, he buried it in the backyard, he tore it up and made something else out of it. He was not hiding and recycling merely to appease Clara Mae (his wife). He knew somehow that whatever he was making could bring far more danger than a tongue-lashing from the wife. As his work became less practical and more aesthetic, it began to reveal Dial’s emotions about his plight and how the civil unrest around him, and these feelings — too dangerous to let escape his ever-closed mouth — now seeped from his whirring mind into his hands and out through metal and cement." (From The Last Folk Hero by Dietz p19) The "civil" war was not over. The struggle was just beginning.

As Albert Lee Wagner grew up in poverty stricken rural Arkansas, he heard horrific stories of atrocities dealt upon his people. Racism, rape, whippings and even murder were remembered as commonplace events. Unfortunately, such nightmarish memories were inescapable and were thus burned deep into his psyche to emerge much later as ingredients in his visual vocabulary. Basic life just prior to, during and following the Depression was extremely challenging for poor black folk; in 1941, Wagner and his family emigrated from desperate dead-end circumstances in rural Arkansas in search of better jobs and a new life in Ohio. The North, he pleasantly found, not only offered much better pay and greater opportunities but also previously unknown freedoms. Albert Wagner unexpectedly discovered that he could boldly speak his mind on any subject without fear of receiving a beating or worse, getting hung from a tree. Life was dramatically different in the North. Life was good. Albert Wagner was free to express his experiences and memories in any liberated manner he preferred. Freedom gave him permission to be brutally candid and affectionately picturesque. Freedom opened the exciting door to uncensored artistic expression. Freedom differentiates him from his Southern folk artist peers. Inhibiting social censorship and cultural repression were left miles behind.

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