Search Terms: Looking for Phillip Linsday Mason
Over Summer 2019, MFA candidate and MCAM’s publicity assistant, Yetunde Olabgaju, took over the museum’s Instagram to solicit information on the whereabouts of Phillip Lindsay Mason, an Oakland-based artist, prolific in the 70s, whose work is currently receiving a resurgence of attention. The following is a reposting of Olabgaju’s effort.
Dear friends, Yetunde here again with some report backs on my findings surrounding a piece in our collection called The Hero by Phillip Lindsay Mason. When I first saw this painting, it was out in the Mills College Art Museum’s collection room, propped against a wall. It was being pulled for inspection and condition reporting. Immediately, I was struck by it. The painting was bright and graphic. Clean lines give way to a large yellow burst right behind our hero…seemingly propelling towards something. Perhaps us? May be danger beyond the frame?
It also strikes me that our hero is a Black man, with an afro, with chains around his waist. I begin to get curious about these details. What was Phillip’s intention with the piece? Was this a kind of character design or a possible comic?
I began where most people would in this situation and looked through the Object Files the museum has on each piece in the collection. It would prove somewhat helpful. Looking through the object file there is only one piece of paper. This condition report is dated as 1979. There’s a simplistic, almost crude, drawing at the top right of the report and notations on the existing stains, dirts, and residues that are on the painting. However, when you flip over the condition report, you find a photograph of the painting, as it was in 1979 — it’s as bright and bold as it is today
With the lack of information in the folder, I set off to try and find Phillip Lindsay Mason. I wanted to ask him about his Hero. Where was he bolting off to? How could he still move so fast and be so powerful with chains around his waist? Were there more paintings of him?
You know, this isn’t the first time that I’ve come in contact with Phillip Lindsay Mason’s work. I remember being draw to The Hero and finding a kind of recognition in the piece. I’ve seen this style before, I knew it. After initially seeing the piece I went back to my house and looked through all of my Black art books. After sifting through many I discovered a book in my collection called Black Artists on Art Volume 1. It’s a book from 1976 (only a few years before Mills would acquire The Hero) that is a compilation of young Black artists and their work I look at the cover and realize…this is a Phillip Lindsay Mason piece. His work “Women As Body Spirit” graces the front. I’ve seen this image floating around the internet for a while now and it makes sense. It’s an alluring, striking image. I look through the rest of the book and continue to find Mason in it — there is even a small picture of him in it
I am in awe of his description. My favorite line is: “My work is concerned with the calling of one’s bluff with one’s self. Nitty gritty. Bugaloo. And outer space too. My work is concerned with what black people have been. What they are now. And what they could be.” — — same Phillip, same ❤
I lastly want to share a piece by Mason that is currently up at Oakland Museum of California in their Black Power exhibition called Rainbow Dream. It’s a piece completed in 1970 (although the signature says ‘69). A Black person is closing their eyes. Their face and shoulders rest in front of a blue starry sky and seems to be illuminated, shining, calmed. Perhaps by the moon? Anabrupt line of horizontal colors is above them. Those lines don’t feel particularly threatening. In fact, they feel stable, watchful, protective of this person’s state of calm…to me this piece is all about a calm introspection, a chance to breathe, and imagining the possibilities on the horizon
If you or anyone you know is in contact with Phillip Lindsay Mason, please tell him I say “thank you so much, from the bottom of my Black people loving heart.”
You know, Phillip seems to be a mystery. Someone not particularly interested in being found. I looked through sources at Mills College Art Museum, reached out to curators at Oakland Museum of California, and even the DeYoung — with no success. No one seems to have a direct line to the artist. Through some channels, I was able to get a few AOL email addresses and phone numbers for “Phillip Lindsay Mason”. All of them have proven to be dead-ends.
The closest I got to getting in touch was a friend and fiber artist Lise Silva (@lisesilva). I put a call out on my Instagram to see if anyone in my community was in touch with Mason. I figured that with the amount of fake and real Aunts and Uncles I had, someone is bound to be in contact with him. On top of that, Phillip had spent a lot of his time here in Oakland. Lise told me that her uncle Ben Hazard (an artist from Oakland) came up with Mason as art students at CCAC (now better known as @ccafinearts). They’re even mentioned together in a book called The Black Arts Movement and the Black Panther Part in American Visual Culture. We also suspect that both Hazard and Mason were included in a show called Dimensions of Black here at Mills College Art Museum. I’m still working on getting that confirmed
This tip proved to be helpful. I discovered that Mason got his MFA from CCA in 1971 and that he depicted Black people as superheroes and priestesses because he was “dedicated to imagining a new African America” and that he “sought the strength and hopefulness that underlay the Panthers’ aggressive activism.”
