“Yihla moja / Yihla moja / The man is dead / The man is dead!” — excerpt from “Biko” by Peter GabrielArtist vanessa german served up the best eulogy imaginable on her Instagram account a month ago for fellow artist Emory Biko upon news of his passing on Aug. 16. “What I really knew about Biko in my soul,” she said of the creator of the ever evolving Museum of the African’s Experience in America “is that Biko loved being alive and he loved creating and he loved Black people.”German included a short video of Biko visiting her studio in Homewood a few years ago when he was about to turn 60 and called it miraculous because the artist didn’t show signs of the debilitating stroke he’d suffered the last time she’d seen him. He moved easily, seemed alert and pleased to be in the company of someone who appreciated his work. She documented the visit by asking him a few questions. Biko told german that back when he was “in the world,” he never expected to see 50, much less 60. His gratitude was palpable. Soon the two artists were exchanging riffs on their favorite subject.“I love it so much,” german said, “I feel lucky to have art.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by Vanessa German (@vanessalgerman) “Art is it,” Biko said as he stared at a piece she was working on at the time. “It saved my life. If it wasn’t for art, I don’t think I’d be here.”At that moment, it seemed that german’s phone had recorded a miracle. Biko was lucid and in the moment. He spoke briefly of his hopes and dreams of producing his own art again after his long convalescence. He carried himself like a man in the middle of his life, not near its end.That encounter in german’s Homewood art studio took place six years ago. The man who was born Frank Johnson in 1957, but rechristened Emory Biko in 1995 in tribute to the famed South African dissident Stephen Bantu Biko murdered by South African police in 1977, suffered several more strokes and the onset of dementia that has silenced him in recent years.It would be up to family and friends to provide the voice the Hill District-born artist could no longer muster at the nursing home that had become his home.“You can blow out a candle / but you can’t blow out a fire” — excerpt from “Biko,” by Peter GabrielWhen Biko graduated from Schenley High School in 1975, he didn’t go to art school. Instead, he joined the Marines and was posted in Hawaii, Asia and Australia. While overseas, Biko didn’t forget his spiritual indebtedness to the Black Panther Party that began in middle school. He was deeply moved by their fight against racist injustice — a fight he had internalized as his own and expressed in his work as a self-taught artist.After his stint in the military, Biko migrated to Omaha, Neb. He worked at two art institutions that would have a profound impact on his imagination and his aesthetics going forward — the Black Rainbow Art Gallery and Oran’s Black Americana Historical Museum. Both were created by artist Oran Z. Belgrave, the founder of the Black Facts & Wax Museum in Los Angeles. Emory Biko’s Adinkra symbol on diagonal canvas from Pat McArdle collection. Photo by Tony Norman. Biko was impressed by the collection of Black memorabilia from the antebellum era through Jim Crow to the modern era and treated each of the 3 million objects encountered during his years of apprenticeship like cultural tuning forks. He understood the energy each object vibrated in its original form and taught himself how to subvert the insulting power of even the most hurtful images produced by the various industries of white supremacy over the centuries. All of the objects that once ridiculed Blackness with impunity lost the power of intimidation under his skeptical gaze.Biko’s paintings, sculptures, mixed media, papier-mâché figures and found objects operate on enough levels to horrify and edify viewers simultaneously. The beauty of his work, sometimes an ugly beauty, is undeniable. His mystique as a friendly, but taciturn explainer of his own art added to its appeal. Biko had his first one-man exhibit in New York in 2021 at the famed 601Artspace in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. It was curated by Abigail DeVille and featured some of Biko’s most stunning work to date, including “The Night Before Easter,” a life-sized papier-mâché sculpture of a mother with a fearsome albino face hot combing a young girl’s hair. The only time I crossed paths with Biko personally was at the opening of a show at the Kingsley Association when it was still at its original location in the heart of East Liberty’s shopping district more than two decades ago. The center was packed that evening with both Black and white folks with plenty of money. They seemed willing to open their check books if they could be convinced that a chipped Black lawn jockey or a classic Aunt Jemima pancake poster or a Sambo watermelon figurine was the bohemian accent their homes in the suburbs needed.Since 1995, when he returned to Pittsburgh with his new name and an artistic mission he was determined to fulfill, Biko had been engaged in a long range scavenger hunt and reclamation project he called The Museum of the African’s Experience in America. It was a pop-up exhibition that featured an authentic Ku Klux Klan outfit, varieties of mammy and pickaninny commercial art, Whites Only signs, lynching postcards and other objects from the era of American apartheid he found cruising flea markets, junkyards, mail order houses and trash cans in more affluent areas where the attics and basements of recently deceased parents were being cleared out by embarrassed relatives. Some of the pieces on display were allowed to stand on display for themselves, while others were manipulated in some way so that they subverted the original messages they once carried. It was a walk across a tight-rope given the explosiveness of some of the images. Emory Biko’s Adinkra symbol on diagonal canvases from Pat McArdle collection. Photos by Tony Norman. I don’t recall what I said to Biko at the time, but I remember it being generally complimentary even as I struggled with the affront of so many reminders of what it is like to be a second-class citizen in America. “He was comfortable broaching subjects and themes that some of us shied away from,” said Christine McCray Bethea, a former president of the Women of Visions collective and a current art commissioner for the City of Pittsburgh. “We all admired that. He was the one that got me interested in doing mixed media.”Bethea, a longtime friend and interpreter of Biko’s work, used to cruise flea markets in Eastern Ohio and Western Pennsylvania with the artist and their friend LaVerne Kemp looking for objet d’art and other miscellany that fit into Biko’s narrative of American struggle and progress.“He was a historian in his own right,” said Kemp, a fellow artist who did group shows with Biko. “He lived and breathed Black memorabilia. He used to say that all the time.”With a hint of mock annoyance in her voice, Kemp recalls going to antique shops with Biko only to leave minutes after arriving. A renowned weaver/fabric artist with four decades of experience behind her, Kemp wanted to spend quality time browsing for inspiration and material while Biko always knew exactly what he wanted and would usually find it quickly. “If he could find [the object] right off the bat, he was ready to go,” Kemp said. “That’s all he was concerned about; that’s all he was interested in — fulfilling his dream to add to the collection [of the Museum of the African’s Experience in America].”Biko’s niece, Lisa Robinson, a mental health professional who lives in Delaware, now finds herself playing a role in protecting her uncle’s legacy from exploitation. Because he was such a prolific artist and collector, accounting for all of the 13,000 pieces of his catalogued and uncatalogued work is difficult because so many collectors, galleries, friends and strangers across the country have individual pieces that aren’t registered in reliable data bases. He sold a lot of his work, but didn’t keep careful records. Art historians will have to mount what will amount to a treasure hunt for much of it to catalogue for posterity.“I want to find a home for his work,” Robinson said when asked if she would be interested in seeing what had previously been a pop-up exhibit ensconced in an institutional setting or gallery space (most likely in Pittsburgh).“I want to keep his legacy going,” Robinson said. “His art was important to him and to his community. He loved art and had something to say [with] his art. In conjunction with his art, he was a collector of anything and everything Black. He’s been doing that since he was an adolescent.”Emory Biko exhibit art. Courtesy of Christine Bethea. For Tony Norman column.Robinson recalls a time after one of Biko’s strokes when she stepped in to make sure that hundreds, if not thousands, of his books were neatly packed away in enormous storage tubs. Every book Biko owned shed light on some aspect of the Black experience. It is a vast library of literary, scientific, historical, mundane and esoteric thought providing a testament to Biko’s omnivorous curiosity. Robinson is open to finding partners in Pittsburgh or in the region who would be interested in making Biko’s Museum of the African’s Experience in America an actual place with coordinates on a map. At the very least, she feels it should be a regularly occurring exhibit that children and other curious people could regularly access.Pat McArdle, the Edgewood-based art collector, exhibit curator and patron of the arts, knew Biko as well as anyone who wasn’t married to him or grew up with him. McArdle was a regular visitor to the nursing home where Biko resided in his final years. Their friendship stretches back to the early 2000s.In many ways, their nursing home visits were a continuation of the days when they would pile into a rental car for road trips that would take them to flea markets, antique shows and gallery openings several states away. They went as far as Atlanta, Georgia on one road trip.Back in the day, McArdle and Biko looked liked a postmodern version of Laurel and Hardy with echoes of Warhol and Basquiat barnstorming Appalachia and Middle America. McArdle was always at the wheel since it was usually his rental, but he remembers those days as among the happiest and most interesting he’s ever had with anyone.“When we talk about Biko, it’s two separate things,” McArdle said. “The art that he made, which is spectacular in telling a story, but [also] the untold hours he put in collecting the items that told the story of the greatest shame of this country.“He gathered the history of slavery, Jim Crow and every other ugly, inhumane thing that was done to the African American in the United States. It was a one man operation. He would take it to schools to educate the youth,” he said.“His love and his mission was boundless,” he added. “He was unstoppable. He was indomitable in the mission that he had to have his museum seen and talked about.“He loved to show his art. For years he carried a small album of snapshots of his work. He wanted to get the word out about what he was working on, but not in a boastful way,” McArdle said. The art collector believes there will be a fitting showcase for Biko’s work sooner rather than later because of the sheer enormity of his appreciators and the quality of his work. Photo of Emory Biko in 2019 courtesy of Christine Bethea. Emory Biko doesn’t have the name recognition of fellow Hill District native sons August Wilson or Teenie Harris, but there is a similar range and genius to his work that makes it an obvious candidate for a prominent platform in his home town.“Most artists and musicians are kinda’ quirky in their own way,” said Reverend Glenn Grayson, the pastor of Wesley Center A.M.E Zion Church and founder of the Jeron X. Grayson Center in the Hill District. Rev. Grayson owns two Biko pieces — a wooden walking stick and a large portrait painting of the later rapper Tupac Shakur. “It’s their gift, it’s their talent,” he said, adding that an artist’s calling is often hard to explain, but it is obvious once you see and experience their work. Biko’s funeral, with full military honors was held at St. Benedict the Moor Church on Aug. 26. The repast was at the Jeron X. Grayson Center where many friends and admirers gathered to reminisce about his impact on their lives.“Biko was one of a kind. He was authentically genuine,” said Bethea who played a role in helping facilitate his New York solo show in 2021. “You never had to feel uncomfortable with him. I used to go to his backyard just to watch him work. He had twisted wire, cans and was putting things together. Anyone who spent time with Biko felt honored.“Almost every [artist] in Pittsburgh has either worked with or been in a show with Biko,” she added.Tony Norman’s column is underwritten by The Pittsburgh Foundation as part of its efforts to support writers and commentators who cover communities of color.The post Tony Norman: R.I.P. Emory Biko, a Pittsburgh artist who translated the Black experience into a visual feast appeared first on NEXTpittsburgh.