Ronald Lockett (1965–1998), Rebirth, 1987
Wire, nails, and paint on Masonite, 12 x 18 1/2 in.; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum purchase and gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation
Rebirth, created when Lockett was twenty-two, remains a gateway into all his subsequent artistic thinking. In the work, a quadruped skeleton ("a baby," Lockett called it), a matrix of wire and nails, exits a blue and green zone at right and moves into a black emptiness engulfing most of the picture. The skeleton of Rebirth investigates the liberating potential of non-life. The animal moves backward through the picture, forsaking right for left, adulthood for youth, bigness for smallness, light for dark, terrestriality for absence. Rebirth announced Lockett's lifelong search, as fervid as religion, for new beginnings amid the non-life of urban Black male existence that had been his starting point in the world.
