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By Robert Ross Al Hinton is slowly rubbing his hands together, as if to loosen a persistent ache in the knot-sized knuckles. Hands that in the mid-1960s threw 250-pound men to the ground on football fields across the U.S. and Canada. Today, they throw bright flashes of paint onto stretched canvas. His hands had always assured him of a livelihood-as a play-breaking tackle for the Toronto Argonauts and the Montreal Alouettes and as an artist and a professor of art at the University of Michigan. Until one day in June 1989. One moment he was working on a metal sculpture, a second later he'd sliced through three tendons, an artery, the ulnar nerve, and numerous veins in his right, dominant hand. The near-amputation came at a time when Hinton had satisfied his need as an artist to express his experience as a black man in the United States, and it plunged him into a crisis that marked a turning point for him. Back in 1965, finished with professional football and fed up with the daily indignities of racism in the U.S., he had settled in Toronto, where he created art for a fashion designer and stage sets for a theatrical company. But five years later, he returned home. "I realized I could grow as an artist only by overcoming the difficulties, by going beyond what was defined for me," he says. "Based on my background and the expectations of my generation, I wasn't supposed to succeed. In this country, no matter what I achieve as an African American, I always have to wake up and wonder what will happen to me based on my race that day." He winces. His creased face looks like a Ben Shahn drawing, the spaces between the lines filled in dark brown. He took a position on the art faculty at Western Michigan University and began drawing upon Michigan's landscapes and automotive industry to create mysterious canvases that wove natural hues and land shapes together with steel strips and the byproducts of the factory. His artworks from that period are as much sculptures as they are paintings. The day after he nearly cut off his hand, Hinton began work on art he had promised for a show that was to be held in three months at the University of Iowa. "I fell back on the lessons I learned from playing football, the need to play through the pain, to get the job done regardless of obstacles," he says. "I was terrified I would never paint again. I painted continuously and passionately. I had to use my left hand to make the images in my head take shape." Although he completed the art for Iowa, the accident had robbed him of 40 percent of the use of his hand and left him increasingly depressed and in doubt about his future as an artist. Then he heard about the "Little Cripple." The son of a Portuguese architect and an African slave, Antonio Francisco Lisboa, 1738-1814, became one of Brazil's most famous artists in spite of a crippling disease so severe that assistants had to strap special tools onto his hands each day. In 1991, Hinton obtained a Minority Faculty Grant from the U-M to meet with Brazilian artists and to study Lisboa's art and the tools he invented that enabled him to work as a designer of Catholic churches and a sculptor of religious art. What he found was art that broke from European traditions. Lisboa's figures of Jesus and the saints look like the ordinary Africans, mulattos, and Portuguese he saw around him in Bahia, Salvador, the main port of entry for Brazil's slave trade and today one of the centers of African culture in the New World. "I had previously gone to Rome and Florence, but I didn't have the same feeling as when I entered the churches he had done. It spoke to me in such a profound way!," Hinton says. "That, and the circumstances of his life, turned around the depression I'd been feeling about my future as an artist after my accident. I met with other Brazilian artists and learned how they respond to the combination of Africans, Portuguese, and Indians there. There's a richness in the fabric and culture of Brazil." The trip gave him a new optimism and direction as an artist. "I saw that I wasn't necessarily defined by the U.S. My definition here had become too confining. I've become more linked to the rest of the world and to other African cultures." People are often surprised and a little skeptical to learn that Hinton played college and professional football before becoming an artist and an art professor. "It amazes me that people have trouble seeing how an athlete, supposedly brutish, can be a sensitive artist," he says. "Athletes are just like the rest of us. People need to have their fantasies about their image-makers. Look at the madman image of Van Gogh and how he cut off his ear." Not that he wasn't a "tough competitor," as they say euphemistically in sports. "Football let me get rid of a lot of my anger about being black in America," he says. "But I'm not in the business of scaring people anymore. I view life as a wonderful adventure. "I always saw art as what I wanted for a career and football as a hobby. My father told me that football was short-lived, but that I could work as an artist until I die." Hinton values his time with students as much as that spent in his studio. 'Teaching keeps me pushing, communicating, trying to improve," he says. "The questions are the same for me as for my students: Where do you get your ideas? Why did you use that red instead of blue? I'm trying to help them to be aware of what they're trying to communicate, to be responsible for what they put on the canvas, to gain more control over their material and their art. "The other day, a former student told me how much my teaching meant to him, how it made him more responsive," he says. "Feedback like that can keep me going for a year!" Hinton's recent artworks combine symbols from different cultures-the cross, triangle, pyramid, serpent, turtle, and fish, for example-and are more daring and playful in their use of color. "A lot of people who go into the gallery where I currently have a show in Birmingham, Michigan swear they've seen these pieces before," he says with a smile. "The gallery owner was concerned and asked me if I was copying. I said these are symbol systems that appeal to people across race and class lines. It's touching areas and memories in their subconscious." His new world view has led to collaborations with artists Set Shinohara in Tokyo and Louis Jaquet in France, in which they work on similar ideas or images, have group shows, and help market each other's work. He's also working with others at the U-M School of Art and Carlton College in Ottawa, Canada to help good Brazilian artists get exposure in North America. Although he's regained some use of his damaged right hand, Hinton has no use for the little finger, which is numb and frozen in an L-shaped hook that catches on things. "I'm thinking about having it cut off," he says, then laughs. "Maybe I'll hang it from a chain around my neck like a talisman." Did you hear that, Van Gogh? This article first appeared in the Summer 1993 issue of VISUALIZE, published by the University of Michigan College of Art and Design. |
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