Exhibit spans career of UB emeritus professor Jim Pappas

“James G. Pappas: Relative to Music,” opening today at the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, features a selection of paintings, drawings, screenprints and photographs that span the prolific career of the UB emeritus faculty member and internationally recognized visual artist.

It’s on view in the Corridor Gallery, the Margaret L. Wendt Gallery and the R. William Doolittle Gallery through May 1.

Pappas’ practice pulls strong influence from music — he has been listening to jazz from an early age — as well as architecture, color theory and design composition. Taking a page from the avant garde process of jazz greats like John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, he employs techniques that start from an understanding of one’s foundation and move from there to freely destroy, deconstruct and make something completely new from the original.

This simple, yet nuanced process reflects an intuitive and improvised rhythm and harmony that brings the heart of jazz into the visual realm. Pappas’ screenprints further exemplify this experimentation, moving across media in new ways to push the bounds of process. His drawings, with intermittent linework, are reminiscent of notes as they move across space; his photographs document some of the most influential jazz icons in real time.

Pappas’ abstract expressionist style is representative of the strong influence of jazz, while simultaneously contending with the artist’s experience of the socio-political realities of American life for Black communities. Moving to Buffalo to attend UB in 1959, the growing momentum of the fight for civil rights, the burgeoning Black Arts and Black Power movements of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as Pappas’ own prior experiences with racism in the south would all inspire him to contemplate the ways art can be a tool for social change.

Among the founders of UB’s Department of Black Studies — now Africana and American Studies — Pappas served as department chair for 13 years, and also was headmaster of Black Mountain College II, a collegiate unit offering visual and performing arts programs for the general student population at UB. At the same time, he was co-founder and director — with fellow artists Allie Anderson, Clarence Scott, Hal Franklin and Wilhelmina Godfrey — of the Langston Hughes Center for the Visual and Performing Arts, a space for Buffalo inner-city youth to explore creativity and self-expression.

The legacy of the formative years of the Langston Hughes center and the influence of each of its artist founders are explored in depth in the exhibition “Founders: The Early History of the Langston Hughes Center for the Visual and Performing Arts,” running concurrently with “Relative to Music” in the BPAC’s West-end Gallery.

The exhibitions are co-curated by Tullis Johnson, curator and manager of exhibitions, and Tiffany Gaines, curatorial and digital content associate. Gaines is also a full-time, first-year MA student in the Visual Studies Program in the UB Department of Art.

Pappas, who retired from UB as an associate professor in 2019, has received numerous awards for his work and community service. He has consulted on many projects and played an important role in furthering the arts in New York State as a member of numerous boards and committees, including the City of Buffalo Arts Commission, New York State Council on the Arts, County of Erie Arts in Public Places Board, the Niagara Frontier Airport Art Selection Committee, Burchfield-Penny Art Center and the CEPA Gallery.

His artwork has been exhibited in the United States, Canada and Europe.