The spirit of Black History Month is currently on display at the Elyria Arts

The Broad Street venue, which is currently showing work by appointment, features a six-work exhibit related to Black history or racial equality.

“I’ll never miss a chance to talk about the healing power of art,” Elyria Arts Council founder Clint Rohrbacher said. “More than ever, in these very dark and unsettled times, we need art to help us build bridges that were burnt, toss light into the darkness and give us all a public square to express and celebrate what we have in common.

“In the best of times, our differences mean little. In a time like this, to use them to attack each other is utter madness. Art is the song and the dance that drowns out the shouting and tramples the falsehood into common ground.”

Contributing to the exhibit is Elyria Arts Council artist Megan Rowe, whose impressionist paintings explore racial identity.

“The square acrylic painting depicts black vases and white vases — all with faces and filled with white flowers,” Rowe said. “This was a study in using black and white paint with very little other color.

“The message of the painting is these are vases with faces, different, yet the same vases with faces. My hope was that humans would understand that we really are all different, yet, the same — humans.”

Rowe’s second work — inspired by a 1950s photo — has in some fashion been in the planning stage for years.

“The oil painting shows two boys, friends, walking on the sidewalk together,” Rowe said. “One with his arm around the shoulders of his friend. I’ve saved this image for many years waiting to have the courage to paint people.

“I gained the experience to paint from working on the Pioneer Plaza murals for two summers. I felt it was appropriate for these times when we all should be thinking of friendship transcending what color we all are.”

As for David Pavlak’s contribution to the Black History Month exhibit, the artist presented works celebrating two familiar figures — President Barrack Obama and Lorain’s own Toni Morrison.

“I called the Obama painting ‘Eclipse’ because I painted it right after (husband) Clint and I came back from Kentucky in August 2017 to view the total solar eclipse,” Pavlak said. “It was my state of mind at the time, early on in the Trump presidency, so I put the Capitol dome in dark shadow.

“The term eclipse can be used metaphorically as to how Trump early in his term undid a lot of the Obama administration programs through executive orders. It ended up being a prophetic vision in my own personal opinion.”

As for the Morrison painting in the exhibit, Pavlak said it’s actually the print of a painting he sold a year ago to a New Jersey buyer.

“I decided to do a painting of Morrison after hearing of her passing in the summer of 2019,” Pavlak said. “We then added a picture of her in the mural on our building.”

Alongside the Elyria Arts Council’s Black History Month exhibit is also its new collaboration with Leaders Of Today featuring the work of creative Lorain County high school students inspired by themes of unity, community building and positive mental health.

“To see the awareness these young men and women actually have of these issues and to see how creatively and powerfully they can express them, that just gives much-needed hope in the face of so much challenge and discord,” Rohrbacher said.

“Our resident artists were invited to create or select previous work that addressed these same themes. We felt it was important to show that art has long dealt with these themes and that there will be continuity in the arts with a new generation. They’re inheriting the power of art to teach, to heal and to craft a force more potent than hate and bigotry.”

For more information, visit elyriaartscouncil.org.

Contact John Benson at Ndiffrence@att.net.