A week after the opening of “Sharif Bey: Homecoming”at The Andy Warhol Museum, the multiple meanings of the exhibition were still reverberating in the Pittsburgh artist’s mind. There was the literal return to the city where he grew up, studied art and began teaching. There was a professional homecoming, bringing his latest work back to the community that first nurtured his ambitions. There was a spiritual homecoming, rooted in his continuing artistic efforts to connect with cultural traditions fractured by the African diaspora. And there was a personal, familial homecoming to a community where his forebears’ labor helped build the city itself — and where his own talents now build its cultural capital.
Those overlapping ideas lie at the heart of “Sharif Bey: Homecoming,” on view at The Andy Warhol Museum through Oct. 12.
His return has also meant the pleasure of reunions with former teachers, students, mentors and even his kindergarten teacher. All came to the opening night reception on June 26. It happened again during a recent tour of the galleries, when Bey briefly interrupted an interview to greet a former colleague who had come with his family.
Over opening weekend, the exhibition attracted nearly 2,000 visitors.
The 52-year-old artist with a boxer’s physique apologized for what he claimed, with little evidence, was his fatigue after a busy week, including driving from Syracuse, N.Y., the previous night.
“I didn’t get enough sleep last night,” he said. “I promise you I’m much more charming than I am here today and much more energetic.”
The exhibition represents a lively juxtaposition between the latest evolution of the artist’s work — monumental clay sculptures, with clear African and Oceanic influences — displayed alongside the collaborative works of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol.
Nicole Dezelon, the exhibition’s curator and the museum’s senior director of learning and public engagement, has known Bey for a quarter century. The two met while teaching ceramics together at the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild, a nonprofit arts organization on the North Side where Bey was a student before becoming an instructor.
“Homecoming” came about almost by happenstance. Dezelon learned that Bey — who has had solo exhibitions around the country, including at the Carnegie Museum of Art — would be returning to Pittsburgh from Syracuse. He had just held a show at his New York City gallery, Albertz Benda.
“We had an opening in our exhibition schedule and one of those 3 a.m. moments [occurred],” Dezelon recalled.
Transformative figures
After years of teaching at Syracuse University, Bey decided the time had come to request a sabbatical and return to his hometown.
“I’m moving back to Pittsburgh,” he recalled thinking. “As I get to this point in my life and think about where my family is, my mother in her late 80s... it’s a ripe time professionally in terms of what’s possible here as a professional artist.” Though he is represented by a gallery in Chelsea, there was no need to live in Manhattan.
“We used to think about having to go to New York City to be an artist in a big professional sense,” he said. “But now we can be global but also be local and we could benefit from both.”
Bey bought a house in Knoxville, about a mile from Beltzhoover, where he grew up.
“I’m fixing up the neighborhood,” he said. “I’m actually encouraging my retirement-age brothers to do the same thing. If we all buy a house on this block, the block comes back.”
His commitment reflects a larger conviction about what successful Black professionals owe the communities they leave behind.
“There is some significant disparity in this city with regards to race,” he said. “And if everybody who goes off to get a Ph.D. and does great things leaves the block, the block becomes desolate.”
That sense of obligation may be rooted in family history. His father, a boilermaker, and other relatives literally helped build Pittsburgh.
“He and all of his brothers ... were a huge part of the evolution of this city,” Bey said.
“They worked in industry. They kept the boilers going, which is a huge part of the energy grid in this city. Moreover, they were involved in … helping to create and restore all the tunnels and the major buildings and the department stores and the schools.”
He draws a line between his forebears’ creativity and his own.
“My family’s blood and sweat is invested in this city — but physically,” he said. “And despite them being amazing creatives, that cultural capital was not seen in that generation. But it will be in this one.”
A three-way conversation
Though Bey believes he gets his artistic talent from his father, who was an avid wood carver, especially in his later years, the women in his family also had a decisive influence.
The 10th of 12 children, Bey remembers a household where women were predominant. His father and uncles often had to be away for weeks at a time as jobs in the area became scarce for some professions.
The women stayed behind.
“Those were the figures that protected us,” Bey said. “Those were the figures that guided us. Those were the figures that nurtured us. Those were the figures that coddled us.”
This upbringing had its effect on his current exhibition of larger-than-life female figures. In one sculpture, “Southside Princess,” Bey sought to transform a figure of scorn or derision into one of dignity.
“‘Southside Princess’ is about this female figure that’s not really getting its reverence being brought into the center and being acknowledged for her strength and grace,” he said.
In the galleries, Dezelon has placed Bey’s sculptures in conversation with works by Warhol and Basquiat, creating visual and thematic connections.
The most obvious visual connection is that both Bey and Basquiat were influenced by nkisi, Central African power figures crafted from wood with nails or metal fragments pounded into them.
The pairings point to other visual echoes as well. One of Bey’s sculptures features multiple tiny heads with exaggerated teeth; it hangs near a Warhol-Basquiat collaboration featuring a Basquiat figure with similarly prominent choppers.
Collaboration is another organizing theme. Bey worked with a glass artist, a welder and other technicians to realize his sculptures, while Warhol’s partnership with Basquiat was both fruitful and fraught. Dezelon notes that all three artists were “on the margins, fighting to be accepted as fine artists.”
Though it is gaining acceptance, clay, Bey’s medium, has long been seen as a decorative or applied art. Warhol began as a commercial illustrator, while Basquiat was a graffiti artist.
Elsewhere, Bey notes that like Warhol’s appropriation of commercial imagery, he transforms found objects — chains, spoons, keys and other everyday materials — into new symbols whose meanings shift depending on context.
For some, chains may represent bondage. Bey says they might also suggest hair, curls, a cloak or a veil.
“A lot of these works are about re-signifying materials,” he said.
Bey points to a childhood spent in museums for the multiple allusions in his artwork. “I always refer to myself as a museum kid.”
As a youth, Bey attended the Carnegie Museum of Art’s Saturday classes, roaming the galleries freely.
“I grew with these institutions,” he said. “I had the natural history museum ... and the art museum, but the third and kind of additional curriculum was the Carnegie International.”
Every visit added to his artistic vocabulary, from African ceremonial sculpture and oceanic wood carvings to neo-expressionism and Damien Hirst.
References to traditional forms represent Bey’s grappling with his heritage.
“I’m an artist from the African diaspora and the way that I see it is a lot of my ideation comes from me picking up fragments of my own history and trying to make sense of them.”
But inspiration could also come from another culture — or pop culture.
“You could look at one of these things and you could see a Polynesian sculpture and you could see an nkisi sculpture, but you also might see a figure related to ‘Star Wars,’” he said. “I’m from the ’70s.”
Piecing together fragments
The fact that most of the works in the exhibit are human figures raises another issue that Bey, a practicing Muslim, has grappled with. Islamic traditions often discourage figurative representation.
He decided to go to Senegal and Gambia to study how those countries reconciled figurative iconography created by an indigenous population with later-arriving Islamic practice.
“How do contemporary Muslim artists negotiate and reconcile these things? I felt like I had those same questions.”
His answer ultimately circles back to his own mission as an artist trying to make sense of his past.
“I’m an artist from the African diaspora,” he said. “A lot of my ideation comes from me picking up fragments of my own history and trying to make sense of them. And many of those fragments represent figures.”
But, he points out, when you put together fragments, there are seams, liminal spaces. And there is power there.
“They become creative fodder,” he said. “You got to figure out what the glue is. How do you integrate these two disparate cultural pieces, these disparate historical fragments? And to me, that’s where creativity comes into play.”
Sharif Bey will hold a free artist’s talk at the museum’s Warhol theater on Aug. 28, 6-8 p.m. Register at warhol.org for complimentary tickets.
