Curator’s Note

I have followed Mark Steven Greenfield's work since the 90s. His work has been a decades-long commitment to reify his feelings and knowledge of the world in his paintings. While his work has been inspired by the black experience in America, his paintings are far more than reactions to history. Above all, they are structuring a new language of expression that benefits from the strata of historical information processed in the crucible of his fires.  His Black Madonna and HALO series presented in this exhibition "AURAS" reframe the black experience and European history as it was replanted on a newfound soil. 

Mark Steven Greenfield is a painter of phenomenal insight whose work exemplifies issues at play regarding the black identity and history in the United States. These two series, Black Madonna and HALO, reflect the spirituality permeating the black psyche as they reach back into the earliest experiences of their presence on the American continent and their exposure to European Christian narratives. Halo conveys the black spiritual experience through various social, political, and religious signs and symbols.  By appropriating and repositioning these signs and symbols, Halo colonizes the colonizer.  

Each image is the truth resurfaced as the story is retold. To put it artfully and adroitly, each of his images is born of the black bosom of love and the black experiences of pain, and yet it exemplifies their struggle, survival and victory. From all perspectives, these images are a fusion of European and African experiences. They are a unifying sign that undermines differences, biases, and historical fractures. Greenfield's art transforms the European and American imagery into what is familiar to one group in regard to color and familiar to another group in regard to the narrative and history of art. I have no other path of understanding but to conclude that the stories belong to those who have lived them and processed them in their own settings and through their own experiences. Most importantly, in today's political and philosophical arena of the American experience and its masked racial divisions, the Black Madonna and Halo series offer a new vision of the black persona and of the white history that transcends the narratives of the injustices experienced. 

I am delighted that Ronald H. Silverman Fine Arts Gallery has once again the opportunity to present work by Mark Steven Greenfield, "AURAS," the Black Madonna and Halo series, which a majority were accomplished between the years 2018 and 2024. The gallery looks forward to robust discussions regarding the artistic and social merits of Greenfield's work.

Mika M. Cho, Curator, 2024