{"id":556,"date":"2010-09-06T15:30:06","date_gmt":"2010-09-06T19:30:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.wabash.edu\/fyi\/?p=556"},"modified":"2010-09-06T15:30:06","modified_gmt":"2010-09-06T19:30:06","slug":"phil-dewey-89-substantial-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/2010\/09\/06\/phil-dewey-89-substantial-power\/","title":{"rendered":"Phil Dewey \u201989: “Substantial Power”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Dewey's portrait of Hilton Smith: "An outstanding contribution to American art that significantly betters our visual understanding of Negro League history."<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Steve Charles<\/em>\u2014The judges who named Phil Dewey \u201989<\/a> the 2010 winner of the Jerry Malloy Competition for Outstanding Negro League Art<\/a> call his portrait of Kansas City Monarchs pitcher and National Baseball Hall of Famer Hilton Smith \u201ca small piece with substantial power.\u201d<\/p>\n

They say it\u2019s a \u201chaunting piece\u201d that \u201cbrings to life\u201d a tremendous talent who was \u201cas overshadowed by his teammate Satchel Paige as Negro League Baseball was overshadowed by Major League baseball.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust as the Negro Leagues were part of the silent history of the United States, so Hilton himself was a secret,\u201d the judges wrote. \u201cBringing him to life in the way that Dewey does is a tremendous accomplishment. This is an outstanding contribution to American art and significantly betters our visual understanding of Negro League history.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such art may seem an imaginative stretch for a white art teacher raised in rural Pennsylvania. But sit down with Phil Dewey at his home in Ann Arbor, Michigan\u2014as I did last Wednesday afternoon\u2014and you\u2019ll learn that the deep respect and empathy his work reveals for these men he never knew and the \u201csilent history\u201d they embody is both hard-won and genuine. We\u2019ll have the details in the next issue of Wabash Magazine, <\/em>but here are a few interesting quotes and favorite moments of mine from our conversation.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Phil was raised by his dad, Tom Dewey \u201958, who became a cabinetmaker, in part \u201cto be able to stay home and keep an eye on me,\u201d Phil said. \u201cI was pretty much the only kid on the street who had a single parent family, much less their dad at home.<\/p>\n

“In a lot of ways I think this work was what he wanted to do.\u201d A table that Tom made in the eighth grade now serves as Phil\u2019s coffee table. And Phil proudly showed me an\u00a0 intricately crafted chess board with drawers and chess pieces that was Tom\u2019s 10th<\/sup> grade project.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Phil\u2019s grandfather was a shop teacher. With his father and grandfather both craftsmen, \u201cI spent a lot of time in wood shop,\u201d Phil says. \u201cI was always encouraged to do what I wanted to do.”<\/p>\n

His Negro League pieces are as notable for their use of found objects and craftsmanship as well as Phil\u2019s skill as a painter.\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019ve gone from strictly painting to combination of woodworking and painting on found objects. Sometimes painting gets boring and I need to get dirty, get some sawdust in the air, do some work that makes you have to take a shower, not just clean paint off your hands. The physicality of my father and grandfather\u2019s work carries over in me.\u201d<\/p>\n

And this quote: \u201cIn a way, shop class scares you straight: If you mess up, you cut off your finger!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 That led to an interesting conversation about working with your hands versus working with your mind. \u201cWe all work with our hands and our heads, no matter what we do,\u201d Phil said. \u201cSome of the smartest guys I know are the guys who go to work everyday and get their hands dirty.<\/p>\n

\u2022 After earning his MFA in painting at Brooklyn College (where his mentor was of friend of Wabash Professor Bert Stern), he taught art (and, on occasion, music appreciation) in New York City and New Jersey from 1992 to 2001. He immersed himself in the culture of his students.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I first got to New York I was blown away by the architecture, the speed, and angles, the trains, the highways,\u201d he said. \u201cA complete antithesis of the woods in Pennyslvania, where I\u2019d grown up.\u00a0 The speed and the hustle, the movement and the attitude\u2014being confronted by someone trying to hustle you. Watching three card monte down the street. The subway hucksters.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was jazzed by it, I\u2019d take my camera into the neighborhood at all hours.\u00a0What I ended up doing was getting into teaching, not just to know the area, but to know the people in the area.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 \u201cI was teaching and hooking this up, the culture of the city, particularly black culture, that was an incredibly new experience. At first, I was just trying to keep my head above water, Phil said of his early days as a teacher. \u201cDuring this early period teaching full time, I didn\u2019t do a lot of art. But I had picked up the guitar and blues in grad school\u2014players like Robert Johnson, Skip James, Son House. My students weren\u2019t even listening to jazz, so when I taught music, I\u2019d introduce them to jazz and the blues. for jaz and blues. In a way, reintroducing them to their own culture and heritage. I was so into it that one day one of the students yelled out, \u201cIf I have to listen to any more blues music, I\u2019m gonna go crazy!\u201d<\/p>\n

“I think I gave them something many of them hadn’t heard before,” Phil said (as I transcribed the interview, I recognized Herbie Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island” on Phil’s CD player.)<\/p>\n

\u2022 He doesn\u2019t remember exactly where he found the postcards of some of the famous Negro League players, but the first he painted was James \u201cCool Papa\u201d Bell, one of the fastest men to ever play the game.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe more I got into it, I realized there was this interesting part of American history I\u2019d completely missed growing up,\u201d Phil said. Ken Burns’ documentary Baseball<\/em> was airing on PBS about this time, and Phil was captivated by the episodes about the Negro League players, both the content and Burns\u2019 approach.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Dewey at work on his most recent project, which features Jackie Robinson (center).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cHe was doing exactly what I was thinking about doing, but in a different medium,\u201d Phil said. \u201cHe said he had met his new hero doing the project\u2014Jackie Robinson\u2014and that making the documentary revealed to him this man\u2019s character. Robinson became his new standard of what it means to be a man, a human being.\u201d<\/p>\n

Phil said he felt much the same way.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Phil was seeing \u201ca lot of the same things in the kids I was teaching,\u201d he said. \u201cKids facing a lot of adversity. Poverty. Kids taking the train, or the ferry, for an hour just to get to a school that was safe. And this was the 1990s.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I was painting was history\u2014I was looking at this history through the lens of these students lives.”<\/p>\n

One day a student told Phil that the custodian at his middle school had been in the Negro Leagues. He showed up for class with an autographed postcard of the man and wanted to give it to Phil.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t want to take it, that\u2019s a piece of your history,\u201d Phil recalled telling the student. But the young man wanted him to have it.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe said he respected what I was doing,\u201d Phil recalled. \u201cThat meant a lot to me. That added even more steam to what I was doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 Phil said that the way he frames the pieces harkens back not only to his dad and granddad, but also to his mentor, Wabash Professor Doug Calisch, and his work with \u201cfound objects.\u201d<\/p>\n

He also wants the frames to be \u201crepresentative of these people who made something out of nothing, had to scrap for everything they could get in an era that didn\u2019t want them to succeed. And these were the men who brought so many innovations to the game: the first night game, base stealing barnstorming, not to mention Satchel Paige\u2019s pitching.”<\/p>\n

\u2022 One of the most innovative and coolest elements of Phil\u2019s pieces, the \u201cbillboards\u201d in the background of many of his paintings are actually vintage matchbook covers cut to fit around the figures he paints. And the frames around many of the pieces are old glass negative holders from antique box cameras.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Phil regrets not having taken the time to meet one of the players he most admires, Buck O’Neill. O’Neill was on a short list of Negro League players considered for the National Baseball Hall of Fame, and deservedly so: He was league’s MVP in 1945, the first African American coach in the major leagues, and an invaluable scout who brought Ernie Banks, among others, into the majors. But O’Neill was inexplicably not inducted, a slight that figures into Phil’s ceramic\/wood piece honoring him. O’Neill died within a year of the voting.<\/p>\n

“One of the greatest regrets my life is that I didn’t fly to Kansas City to meet him,” Phil said. “I really blew it; I really would have enjoyed that.”<\/p>\n

See a photo album from my visit here<\/a><\/em>. More in the upcoming “Milestones” issue of Wabash Magazine<\/span>. See even more of Phil Dewey’s artwork here<\/a><\/em>. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Steve Charles\u2014The judges who named Phil Dewey \u201989 the 2010 winner of the Jerry Malloy Competition for Outstanding Negro League Art call his portrait of Kansas City Monarchs pitcher and National Baseball […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"w_featured_image_url":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2010\/09\/hiltonsmith.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}