Arthur Monroe was active as an Abstract Expressionist painter since the 1950s. He was a professor of African American studies at the University of Berkeley and San Jose State College. He also worked as a registrar for the Oakland Museum for 35 years. Monroe was the original artists to make the Cannery, Oakland’s oldest live/work, a live-work artist studio. He worked to gain cooperation in stabilizing live/work spaces for artists and helped develop the first state-wide conference of black artists. Arthur was a speaker at the First International Ecocity Conference and served on the Steering Committee for all of the International Ecocity Conferences.

Brooklyn-born Arthur Monroe spent his formative years in New York City. It was during those years that he became a close friend of Charlie Parker, who advised him "to know his axe;" that is, to know his craft, advice that he adhered throughout his life.

Abstract Expressionism was the prevailing American art style in the 1950s and was generally recognized as being the most important modernist art to have occurred after World War II. As a young artist, Arthur Monroe immersed himself in the exciting milieu of the East Village. He had a studio facing that of Willem De Kooning's, and he hung around the Cedar Street Bar, where he knew some of the most acclaimed Abstract Expressionists, including Franz Klein.

The young Arthur Monroe felt a need to examine non-European sources of visual art and left New York to travel in search of them in Mexico, particularly the sources inherent in the cultures of the Mayans, Zapotecans, Michteans, and Olmecans. He wished to become involved intimately with cultures that offered spiritual, philosophic and aesthetic viewpoints different from his background in the mainstream art world of New York.

Monroe returned to America, first to Big Sur and then to San Francisco during the legendary Beat Era of North Beach in the late 1950s, becoming an important participant in an art scene that included a host of other artists.

However, Arthur Monroe remained committed to his Abstract Expressionist roots providing him with an approach to express himself in his search for new visual truths. Anguishing over each stage of the painting process, Monroe would spend up to three years on a painting. Unable to paint anything that wasn’t an expression of a laboriously-evolved visual truth, Monroe eschewed drawings as an executional expedient, feeling that this will only reflect what comes off the top of the mind superficially. Initial ideas become extensively transformed as inner truths struggle to be realized.

Nothing is clear ahead of time; Arthur Monroe worked more as a scientist asking a myriad of questions before he found his hypothesis. Many painters bypass this process because they don't even know that it exists. An artist learns from mistakes, as if the stone knows more about the sculpture than the sculptor himself. Arthur Monroe faced his materials as a challenge; the more he handled them, the more he appreciated what they might do.

Visual innovations are a by-product of the same laborious process of Monroe's involvement with the medium. A finished painting is unique unto itself and never serves as a prototype for linearly-serialized visual statements. As in the purest era of Abstract Expressionism, extraneous concerns such as ideological stances never dictate the outcome of a painting.

Arthur Monroe remained enchanted by the Abstract Expressionist penchant for large-scale work. He observed that while European Modernist art before World War II was monumental in concept, it wasn't always large in scale. He was initially attracted to American Abstact Exprssionistic paintings that had the potential to make their impact much greater on the viewer by altering the scale of the work. Monroe continued to find that the space between the painting and the viewer becomes more charged because of the enlarged forms, colors, and brushwork.

After leaving New York, Monroe immersed himself in an investigation of non-European cultures extending from Nigeria to the Amazon. He took his cue as an artist from T.S. Eliot and Langston Hughes, who said you really can't write poems until you learn to think in another language. Monroe remained the prototypical underground artist who believed, as Hughes did, that you really don't understand yourself, your culture, or your art until you understand what is in the person who has the least. Monroe also believed that this applies to the art scene, with each art movement being an important link and none being more important than another. Ultimately, all artists are part of the chain; these are some of the ideas that Monroe's art is nourished by, as well as Charlie Parker's teaching about living and life: "know your axe: know your instrument before you talk with it."

Photo Credit: Torre McQueen and Kirk Crippens

Q & A Between Brett Amory and Alistair Monroe