Piedmont Arts Commemorates Black History Month with Exhibit, Performance Celebrating Negro League Baseball

Piedmont Arts will celebrate Black History Month with an exhibition of works by Kadir Nelson, whose large-scale paintings vividly depict the story of Negro League baseball and a performance highlighting the life of baseball great Jackie Robinson.

Safe at Home, Kadir Nelson. Collection of the Negro Leagues
Baseball Museum.

We Are The Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball

Feb. 2 – March 30, 2013

Piedmont Arts, 215 Starling Avenue, Martinsville, VA

Admission Free

Artist and author Kadir Nelson spent seven years researching, writing and creating the 33 paintings and 13 sketches included in the exhibit, We Are The Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball, for his brilliantly illustrated children’s book of the same name.

During the process of creating the paintings and the book, Nelson interviewed former Negro League players, traveled to museums around the country, poured over old photographs, firsthand testimonies and documentaries, collected baseball memorabilia, sports equipment and uniforms, then posed and photographed himself in them, all with the intention of putting himself in the shoes of a former Negro League player to recreate an authentic depiction of life in the Negro Leagues.

The resulting exhibition embodies the story of the Negro Leagues – the story of gifted athletes like Jackie Robinson, Satchel Paige and Willie Mays; of determined owners; of racial discrimination and international sportsmanship; of fortunes won and lost; of triumphs and defeats on and off the field. It is a perfect mirror for the social and political history of black America in the first half of the twentieth century. But most of all, the story of the Negro Leagues is about hundreds of unsung heroes who overcame segregation, hatred, terrible conditions and low pay to do the one thing they loved more than anything else in the world: play ball.

The New York Times named Nelson's book one of the Best Illustrated Children's Books of 2008. Nelson is also the 2009 Coretta Scott King Book Award Recipient for We Are The Ship.

Works by Rupe Dalton will also be on display in the Lynwood Artists Gallery. An airbrush artist from Axton, Virginia, Dalton has been painting since childhood. His dynamic scenes of old-time African-American life celebrate the simple things, like playing cards on a Sunday afternoon. Dalton has won numerous Best in Show and People's Choice awards at Lynwood Artists' and Piedmont Arts' annual exhibit, Expressions.

A Members-Only Reception will be held in conjunction with these exhibits on Friday, February 1 at 6 pm in the Piedmont Arts galleries, with a gallery talk at 6:15 pm. Piedmont Arts members and guests are invited to attend. Please RSVP attendance to 276.632.3221 or online. Babysitting is available at this event for $5 per child. Please RSVP for this service.

Also in conjunction with We Are The Ship, Piedmont Arts and River Community Bank will host Game Day, a baseball-themed community day at the museum, featuring games, crafts, hotdogs and other activities on Saturday, March 2 from 1 – 3 pm. Game Day is admission free. 

Mike Wiley will portray Jackie Robinson
in A Game Apart on Feb. 11.

A Game Apart: Mike Wiley As Jackie Robsinson

Mon., Feb. 11, 2013, 7 pm

Piedmont Arts, 215 Starling Avenue, Martinsville, VA

Acclaimed actor and playwright Mike Wiley has spent the last decade fulfilling his mission to bring educational theatre to young audiences and communities across the country. In A Game Apart, Wiley provides a glimpse into the life of baseball great Jackie Robinson during a bygone era of separate and unequal locker rooms, of whites only hotels and of restaurants with only a back door for athletes of color to enter. Witness the hopeless humiliation of a star player who was showered with adulation on the field and became a second-hand citizen when he walked off the diamond.

Mike Wiley has a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is the 2010 Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor in Documentary Studies and American Studies at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In addition to his numerous school and community performances, he has also appeared on Discovery Channel, The Learning Channel and National Geographic Channel and has been featured in Our State magazine and on PBS’ North Carolina Now and WUNC’s The State of Things.

Tickets to A Game Apart are $15 for adults and $10 for students and can be purchased at www.piedmontarts.org.