"Frank Walter: To Capture a Soul” at the Drawing Center

Frank Walter’s typescript autobiography “You know I am Sugar King! So you seek to kill me!”; 6,284 sheets (1974-1985) Private collection.

By JOHN DRURY October 2, 2024

The Drawing Center had on offer a lot to see, and digest, in its space throughout the summer months – that inside its SOHO footprint which is relatively small in comparison the city’s mega-galleries; but that an effort which tackled the huge subject of Antiguan artist Francis Archibald Wentworth Walter, was nonetheless thorough and informingly dense. The result, was simply mesmerizing, and challenging to the sometimes seemingly vague interest invested in the city’s grander spaces. The exhibition organized by the center’s Chief Curator, Claire Gilman, was as informing as it was also sensibly installed, by topic – the visual, as juxtaposed with Walter’s extensive prose, and his musical scores – as grouped in wall space and table-top vitrine. And as virtually none of Walter’s voluminous production, was dated by the artist – that absent practice which would have allowed a chronological reading - this first retrospective look in the US, at the artist’s broad versatility, was nonetheless encyclopedic and informing for its great breadth.

Frank Walter’s autobiography alone, is the stuff of a life’s work – written by Mr. Walter over more than a decade’s time (1974-1985), in the home void of electricity and running water that he built for himself overlooking the ocean. Were it simply stacked atop the planked floor of his humble abode (it is presented here, a plexi-boxed heap), it would have reached well above Frank’s knee. It is composed of 6,284 type-scripted pages, and as one would imagine as a result, it remains unpublished. It is daunting. Frank Walter was the first company foreman of color on the island of Antigua, and while that fact was a source of personal pride and a historical benchmark, it also unleashed an invigorated racial prejudice, which the black Walter had acutely experienced since childhood. At the top of the first page of his autobiography, Frank’s foreward, is his intended title for this girthy tome, “You know I am Sugar King! So you seek to kill me!”. Enough said.

Only a portion of the amassed ephemera from the home of Frank Walter, on Bailey’s Hill, in Antigua, including his own creations and the things that inspired him.among the objects, are an exhibition plan Walter drafted describing how he would like his work to be shown, photographs of the artist, genealogies tracing his heritage and notes on everything from space to spirituality.

Frank Walter had created works of art, from the time that he was a young boy, in Antigua, and an included group of eleven carved wood figures and animals record some of his earliest efforts and undeniable gift. It is believed that Walter made 600. But the “lion’s share” of his work, presented at the Drawing Center, were drawings and paintings. While drawing was not his primary medium, it was the “anchor” of his practice, be it painting, his musical scores or his charts investigating his family’s murky history. Drawing, painting, prose, sculpture, photography and sound reveal the man’s genius, as inspired by his immediate surroundings, his travels, his studied knowledge on a variety of subjects and unique (if subversive) thought. Monumental is not a size, and works are modestly proportioned; one included and intimate example, measuring only a few square inches. It is said that Walter would often work from his lap – or even the palm of his hand, by the light of a candle.

“Frank Walter: To Capture a Soul”; n.d., Untitled (Heraldic dots), oil on Masonite, the Joyner/Giuffrida Collection.

There exist others of the sun-soaked makers, those of Walter’s generation (1926-2009) and also from the Caribbean islands, who warrant comparison; the great Haitian, master painter and houngan Hector Hyppolite (1894-1948) with whom Walter shares a muted and earthy palette, the clean and direct works of Jamaican intuitive Ras Dizzy (1932-2008), Bahamian housepainter and artist Amos Ferguson (1920-2009) and the Bajan Francis Griffith (1916-2001). What is it about the blazing sun? Does it drive an artist inward? While some will turn to the candied-colors of their environment (Ferguson, for example), the purposely multi-hued businesses and homes, others will seek shelter in the shadowed greys. All will look at times, to the moonlit sky of night, for reprieve - the hue of shadow, rich and fecund.

“Frank Walter: To Capture a Soul” at the Drawing Center, June 21-September 15, 2024. Assorted Polaroid cartridge framed paintings

But it would be a blatant disservice to a maker of the polymath Walter’s stature, to allow only a regional reading of the artist’s output – his oeuvre also bringing to mind the diagrammatic charts revealing governmental improprieties, of the conceptually driven artist Mark Lombardi (1951-2000), and those so heavily handled in life, by Melvin Way (1954-2024). Here as especially relevant the tabular, are the dense records Frank Walter’s ever-insatiable task, at documenting a murky (and sometimes fabricated) family tree with painstaking and believed precision. What is at hand at the Drawing Center, records the seemingly feverish and urgent drive to track, to record, and to legitimize a past marked by racism, colonization as newly addressed by post-colonial thought, and a personal history including both slaves and slave owners; recorded tempestuously, and on whatever was immediately at hand.

An avid photographer, the world that Frank Walters built for himself included a small photo studio catering to locals of the island, and a meager tourist trade. All finds use, in an island economy, where funds and material are sometimes scarce. His work on cardstock and presented “framed” in recycled, Polaroid film cartridges reveal a sweet simplicity. Works are often produced on the slick backsides of photographs – today doubling as documentation the time’s island’s people. There does exist a sophistication to Frank Walter’s work, easily overlooked, for its refinement…a simplicity however, lean and precise. One sign of a great painter, is the ability to recognize when enough, is enough; to understand that plenty, is perhaps spare. Many a maker will continue to work, losing sight, to deaden a surface beneath mark and piled material. In the works of Frank Walter, there is the pictorial simplicity of a Forrest Bess artwork; the small and intimate, seeps love for self, and place, and the imagined other. A healthy self-esteem is granted the pioneer who finds passion in constitution. There is freedom, and joy, in that least attached, and in isolation, the artist-reclusive Frank Walter found what is most cherished amongst his peers, the truly unique voice. All who find worth in the arts, find it in psyche. WM