Rebecca Camacho Presents is pleased to announce solo exhibitions by gallery artists Stephanie Crawford and Jamil Hellu. Crawford inhabits the front gallery with Portrait of an Ex-Drag Queen, a vibrant and vulnerable suite of acrylic and charcoal self-portraits centering her years as an internationally celebrated jazz vocalist. While Hellu’s project room installation, In the studio, allows viewers a behind the scenes look at recently completed works in his ongoing Odyssey series.
Stephanie Crawford (b. 1942) grew up in Detroit, Michigan during the Golden Age of modern jazz. Always a lover of music, she did not, however, sing in public until she was 36, after working on a Chrysler assembly line and as a short-order cook, and earning a bachelor’s degree in painting from Wayne State University. Along the way, at age 26, she underwent a new “male to female gender reassignment surgery” offered by the University of Michigan.
Crawford moved to Manhattan shortly after her public vocal debut and receiving a scholarship to pursue her MFA at Pratt Institute. She became a fixture in the 1980s Downtown New York performance scene, bridging the worlds of blues and drag. Crawford performed regularly as a vocalist in renowned jazz clubs such as the Blue Note and the Pyramid Club. She found invaluable mentors in saxophonist/composer Frank Foster and Detroit-reared pianist Barry Harris, a brilliant Charlie Parker acolyte beloved for the generosity he’s extended to generations of aspiring musicians.
“I didn’t get to the legitimate stage until I was long in the tooth,” Crawford says. “But after I enrolled in the Pratt Institute things moved fast. New York was jumping in the early 1980s. I met Barry Harris and he was a wonderful teacher. At some point I realized that I don’t want to paint a masterpiece. I want to be one.”
In 1989, with some French fluency and an understanding that jazz still commanded a strong European audience, Crawford moved to Paris. She spent almost a decade there, earning an avid following and critical plaudits. She made several records and won a prestigious Django d’Or award for Best International Jazz Vocalist in 1993.
By the mid-1990s Crawford was back in the United States. After a brief return to New York and then Chicago, she moved to the Bay Area to pursue certification as a French Wine Specialist with Sommelier training, enjoying an almost 20-year career as a wine steward.
Throughout the multi-faceted, international trajectory of her life, Crawford quietly continued to draw and paint. Retiring in 2016 at age 74, she recommitted to her visual arts practice. Crawford paints from observation, moving freely between representation and abstraction. Often working in series, she frequently revisits the conventions of still life painting, repeatedly returning to a composition and thereby exploring the generative possibilities of artmaking.
Portrait of an Ex-Drag Queen marks an important transition for Crawford, amidst a life of transformation. Her most personal and reflective body of work, the exhibition centers a suite of self-portraits of the artist documenting varying moments throughout her vocal career. An evolution of time and experience, filtered through memory, Crawford debuts 9 works on paper; 7 in bright combinations of watercolor and acrylic and 2 in deep charcoal, marked and smudged around the edges. Each image captures Crawford in a moment that was. We see her in her 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, sometimes looking directly out, other times escaping our direct gaze, always center stage. Crawford’s nuanced application of paint is tactile and absorbing. With clear evidence of stroke and hand, the surfaces of her paintings are fluid and active.
The exhibition also marks Crawford’s return to painting on canvas. After decades focusing exclusively on works on paper, Crawford re-engages canvas for the first time since her years at Pratt. Shown alongside a similar figuration articulated on paper, the piece reinforces her interest in the depth of subtle shifts through iteration.