The African American Museum in Philadelphia

(Art in America, January 2000)

A growing involvement with Voodoo religion, culminating in his initiation as a Voodoo priest, underlies this change in his work. The more declarative idiom he has developed to engage this material has a naive quality, almost reading as folk signage: Hearts Opened Here. The heart, the kitschiest of visual symbols, is everywhere. The pale pink heart of "In Appreciation Of..." lies on a plate, with several other symbolic objects (a rattle, a pineapple, a scarf) laid on it; branches grow from its center. This and other images can be taken as altar-paintings, dense with ritual suggestion.

In returning to vigorous, recognizable forms, Dowell has found new arenas for ambiguity. Horizons zig-zag, and a play of flatness against depth jazzes every canvas. Many of the big, pulpy hearts (which feel somehow like human stand-ins) open up inside to deep vistas--clouds or oceanscapes--or tableaux of food and other offerings. The black heart of "Initiation" carries sunset clouds in its interior; it floats in a plate-like boat on a blue-pink ocean. Lapping inside the plate-boat is a chopped-meat salad, or bubbling organic soup, spiced with offering-objects. Scale is slippery: the pink heart's plate (in "In Appreciation Of...") may be sitting on a a wrinkled tablecloth, or a field of dunes; the offerings are tiny, or the hearts carrying them are huge. In this transformative realm, you don't want to mess with the loas without a confident guide.

Similar formulas animate an earlier, companion series of lithographs (Dowell is head of Printmaking at Temple University's Tyler School of Art), in which the heart first entered his work. Combining brushwork with photographic and fabric techniques, their effect is prettier and lighter.

It takes courage (another heart-word) to try to revive such an overused symbol as the heart, pointing it without quotation marks toward some of its original meanings. Other artists of the African Diaspora have tapped into the power of African-based religious iconography: Jose Bedia, Manuel Mendive and others with roots in the Cuba and the Caribbean, for example. Dowell's new work is notable for its attempt to reconfigure his artmaking as part of a working belief system, without losing the bite and complexity of contemporary experience.

--Miriam Seidel