CONSIDERING THE NEXT ART LOOK — PREAMBLE
There is a rumbling, more than just a casual pull, but more like an unavoidable draw to LOOK at something of a whole continent almost ignored. An ART LOOK I never thought I would write, but here I am LOOKING again at something I avoided all too long.
One looks at Africa as a “white person” —who came from a small midwestern town with hardly any negro people—and is almost frightened at how much is Unknown to me. And then add to that the “guilt” carried over from my own white race’s enslavement of these people for so many hundreds of years, one almost shirks with shame and guilt about the dark side of one’s own caucasian roots.
But just to be clear, though not to condone the European industry of the slave trade—”Several Black African kings and chieftans supported and profited from the transatlantic and regional slave trades, notably rulers of the Kingdom of Dahomey, the Ashanti Empire, and the Oyo Empire. These elites traded human captives—often acquired through regional warfare or as judicial punishments—in exchange for European manufactured goods, firearms, and wealth.” (Reddit +2) The slave trade was a collaborative venture, then, between powerful black African leaders and powerful white European leaders.
Fast forward ’til now. Africa looms large, like a kind of Dark Continent of my own ignorance, and even its tribal customs and regalia freak me out. Kings and leaders with whole harems of wives, and cadres of manly ministers, are elevated in their grand tribal chiefdom to levels of unassailable predominance. It’s kind of a shocking suggestion of a male chauvinism on a scale far greater than any royal right to dominate sexually over one’s subjects.
This seems rooted in the nature of the animal kingdom itself that roves over the African plains and inhabits the forests of the most dominant male impregnators. It is rooted in survival of the fittest that favors the strongest of the species to assure the continuity of the race. Of course, we have our own versions of animal kingdom predominators in the Epstein affairs. Patriarchal control of women is not subject to a particular continent, historic era, or even specific culture or race.
But that said, some kind of undeniable nobility comes through in the African sculptures that have been around there for eons, and passed down to us in the now. As recent as 2011 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York published a book, Heroic Africans, by Alisa LaGamma, on the beauty and scope of African sculpture. It was thorough. I do not pretend to know such things, but to sense there are people, “white folks,” who do Know, somehow made the task of this ART LOOK possible, and even essential to my whole view of Art in my world. A hard edged ebony, like the darkness of the skin, the Black that is beautiful, has long evaded me until now.
I am willing to look, finally, in my unabashed innocence, at an incredible contribution. And directly “dropped down” from the predominance of Western Greco-Roman culture, the African continent is no more to be ignored, but rather considered as an indigenous contribution to my deeper understanding and acceptance of the entire human reservoir of artistic achievement.
There will be pictures, mostly of heads, sculpted and elevated in nobility. They will all be undeniably sacred in their own shockingly present way. Here we go with this preamble. THE BLACKNESS OF HUMANS WHO LIGHT UP MY WORLD. —Markus Ray, Washington DC, Friday, July 31st, 2026
BLACK GODDESSES
I suppose an inkling to write something meaningful begins with an impetus. My impetus in this case would be my direct relationships with a couple of people, African Americans, who transformed my life. One was, and is, TED NEWMAN; and though he passed into the Spirit Realms nearly 16 years ago, he still inhabits a prominent place in my heart of remarkable beings I have met and known.
The other is ASTARIUS MIRACULII, whose largeness of Being nearly defies description. Sondra Ray has known him for nearly 30 years, or more, mostly through his music. More recently we have had direct contact with him through phone conversations, as well as through exposure to the full scope of his music and offerings in the “realms of invocation” that we could have hardly fathomed before these direct conversations.
The exploration of this ART LOOK, The Blackness of Humans Who Light Up My World, was inspired by an inkling, as mentioned, when I wished to find some Black Version of the Divine Mother, with even some sexy overtone, if you will, to send to my now well-established friend, Astarius. I Googled “African Goddess” and found some things remarkable. I was taken to a site that had these carvings in wood, (perhaps only virtual, as one does not know what is “real” or “unreal” these days with Photo Shop, AI and the like). Nevertheless, I was certainly struck by their perfected Beauty. Indeed, Goddesses they are. Though carved in a kind of “middle ground” wood tone of Burnt Sienna with a tinge of Raw Umber in the shadows, they could be as beautiful as they wanted to be—altogether “Black Goddesses” in all particles of their Being (though predominantly “Brown.”)
I downloaded 25 of these remarkable carvings of the Divine Mother, African style, and set them aside, not quite knowing what was next. Then I Googled “The Most Famous African Sculptures of Royal Heads” and entered into a whole new world of heads and busts, standing figures and masks, that blew my mind. The first one that literally “gripped my soul” was this “Ife head: Brass head of a ruler, 1300–1450, brass, made in Ife, 35 cm high (© Trustees of the British Museum)”
“Ife head: Brass head of a ruler, 1300–1450, brass, made in Ife, 35 cm high (© Trustees of the British Museum)”
This is what is written about this head from a site called smARThistory.org: ( https://smarthistory.org/ife-head-ruler/ )
The finds from Wunmonije Compound were published in 1938–9 and created a sensation in the western world. It was initially assumed that these beautiful sculptures could not have been made in Africa by African artists. The life-like modeling was compared with the classical traditions of Ancient Greece and Rome. It was even suggested that these heads were evidence that Ife was the site of the legendary lost civilization of Atlantis as described by the Greek philosopher, Plato. The sculptures from Ife are now rightly seen as one of the highest achievements of African art and culture.
I had another look. Before you knew it I was collecting real life historical heads of African origin that blew my mind. An ART LOOK began to take shape. Then I chanced upon a book, a downloadable PDF, called “HEROIC AFRICANS” by Alisa LaGamma, curator of African Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, published for a show there in 2011. I was well on my way, immersed in a new art of an African nature. So began this ART LOOK— The Blackness of Humans Who Light Up My World.
TED NEWMAN’S PLACE IN MY HEART
I had just got out of Art School, for the second time, living in Philadelphia. This was 1982, forty some years ago. I was fed up with academia, though I now had my Masters Degree; I was passionate about painting, drawing… and that visual mode of self expression. Yet, I was not gregarious enough to move to New York and throw myself into the jungle of the Art World to hack out a name for myself; nor was I trained to “fit into” any kind of corporate machine that would make me a slave to the 9 to 5 world.
I was good with tools, and I could put together just about anything. I was surprisingly attracted to setting tile and marble. Building bathrooms and kitchens became my niche to earn money. In the Spring of 1983, I got a call from a gentleman in Powelton Village in West Philadelphia to set a few hundred square feet of tile in his basement. Nothing special. He was an architect, and wanted to convert his basement to a living space. So I took this on.
Powelton Village, right next to the University of Pennsylvania, was an old Victorian section of town with huge three and four story residences of the grandest Victorian nature. 100 Plus years old, many of these homes in the 1980s were being renovated. Upscale folks were buying up these old grand places and turning them into multi family dwellings.
As I was working away one day in the basement, a middle aged black man came half way down the stairs, looking like he had a cocktail on the rocks in his hand, and poked his head in my affairs. With the biggest smile of cordiality, he said, “Hi, how are you? I’m Ted Newman. I live across the street.” That was our first meeting that bonded us for life. Indeed, Ted lived across the street. It turned out, he was gay. He was the boyfriend of Calvin Hotchkiss, a very waspy executive for the Movie Department of KODAK Film Company in New York. He owned the glorious Victorian house next to Ted’s, and commuted to New York every day for his work.
Cal and Ted were inseparable. And my ex and I got to know them very well. They were “interested in the arts,” mostly in music. Ted had season tickets to the Metropolitan Opera in New York. And often I would be the lucky recipient of a trip to NY with Ted to see a stunning performance of Grand Opera, at its best, at the Met. Not to mention the huge MARC CHAGALL murals in the Lobby of the Met.
Ted was the first black person I had seriously befriended. His heart was like gold. His generosity of Spirit flowed out of him like a spring of living water. And, to some incongruent surprise, he was a guard in the Philadelphia House of Correction. In other words, he worked in a prison. Cal was an executive in New York—and Ted worked in a prison—and they both had a passion for music. And the culinary arts. Ted drove a Mercedes, and Cal drove a Jaguar. They both had a flair for the panache.
Ted would have us over for dinner in his third floor apartment, and Cal would play the piano. These were grand bohemian times. I built a marble bathroom in Cal’s first floor apartment. And after that, the four of us became the closest of friends. I did some tile work for Ted as well. And for his mother, “Fats,” who was as thin as a rail and addicted to “diet pills.”
In the 1990s Cal contracted Aids, sold his Powelton Village place, and moved back to a family estate near his two daughters in Rochester. We visited him with Ted once up there, and faced the shocking facts of his rapid decline. Within a year of us finding out his situation, he was gone. Ted remained in Powelton Village as my friend until he passed around 2010, shortly after I married Sondra Ray and began my new life. He occupies a permanent place in my heart, as A Black Human Who Miraculously Lit Up My World.
Modern Carved African Goddesses
ENTER ASTARIUS
There is a Presence of Being emanating from certain individuals that creates a Energy Field of exceptional well-being. When you enter their space your are transformed by them, not by anything they are particularly doing, but rather by all the inherent qualities of their Being that rush forth and fill your field of awareness with something exceptional. You know for certain, “There is no one I have ever met like this before.” They have certain gifts that they give, certain creations that are beautiful and good, and when you receive them you feel so grateful to have blundered upon a relationship with them that your Life will never be the same. You are blessed by them, and you know it. You are blessed by them and the Divine Grace you possess now as a result of receiving them into your life, elevates you into the realms of the angelic.
When I got together with Sondra Ray in 2008 she introduced me to the music of Astarius. The main piece she played, often in trainings, was an album called “Spirit Rap.”
Kind of a Shaman, Aboriginal, Sound Healer, Incanter, Invoker, Dream Awaker, and all around “Waker-Upper,” rolled into the Power of One, Astarius and his music became the medicine for what people needed to shake, rattle and roll them out of their deep seeded complacency and conditioning—including my own—and transport them into a newer version of themselves that had access—In This Now—to more expansive and creative possibilities.
Astarius is a Master of Invocation. What does he invoke? Higher Dimensional realms that can help us ascend into our truest and more loving nature. Really. He is the second black man I have know directly who totally turned my life around.
AN HOMAGE TO BLACKNESS
I wanted to “pay homage” to Ted and Astarius through some acknowledgement of their BLACKNESS, to their African roots. Something in the visceral presence of their Blackness made itself known in the form of carved, shaped, sculpted, cast, and hand hewn busts and masks. Something in the beauty of the “head,” not disembodied, but rather whole in its complete depiction of the Divinity that they are, pays homage to these two Black Humans Who Have Lighted Up My Life, and who brought to my ART LOOK new vistas in ways that only they could bring forth.
They cracked open my world, and obliterated my own opinion of myself, my own limited definition of what I could do and not do, say or not say. They brought me forth into the Human Race, liberating me from my Caucasion race, or the Negro race, or the Chinese race, or the Arab race, or the Red, Blue, Purple, Yellow or Orange race, and even took me completely out of the Rat race. Any artificial division that kept me inadvertently “prejudiced” whatsoever, has been rendered obsolete through my association and friendship with them. And I am eternally grateful for Life having sent them into the Royal Courts of my highest good.
This mask above, of a Chokwe woman, demonstrates something, or even someone to whom I pay homage. A muti textural and omnipresent assertion of Divine Presence comes forth in the encounter with something real and unique like this mask. What may in the beginning shock us through the dumbness of our unfamiliarity, then, by the same token of being so new and different, takes us into relationships with a state of mind beyond our thinking. We suddenly find ourselves transported into the miraculous space of somewhere beautiful we have never been.
This Pwo mask from the 19th century transports us to somewhere exotic that takes us beyond mortal boundaries. It is sophisticated, not primitive. It is culturally rich, not emotionally and intellectually deprived. It is harmoniously balanced, not brandied around in the chaos of technical ignorance. It is spiritually charged in us, not figuartively innert and dead. It is intensely as alive as its maker, and as present as the person or archetype of persons we are compelled to encounter.
Remember now, this homage started out with me mousing around on Google to find African Divine Mother Godesses. O course, these carved wooden ones I found are higly idealized according to men’s erotically fanciful standards—the sexy Goddess, Black Venus Versions, that one finds in the fantasic virtual world of the internet. But there still is something direct and beautiful about them, and even wildly authentic to the real feel of the whole African art legacy and artistic outpouring.
This Nigerian Bronze Head of an Ife woman changed the whole picture of Western interpretations of the artistic prowess of the African Artisans. The skill and sophistication needed to pull off a “lost wax” casting technique, over 600 years ago, was long thought only possible from the Greco-Roman world. And the naturalism of this face was not thought possible amidst the more abstracted and severely geometrically featured heads and masks of other tribal areas of the African continent.
The geometry of the Pwo Mask above is by choice, not by lack of techinical skill, which establish its elegance and geometrical power. And in contrast, this more naturalistically rendered sculpture from Ife, Nigeria, proves… beyond a shadow of a doubt… that African artisans possesed an equal and naturalistic ability comparable to the Classical Western models of craft, long thought to be unique to European (and caucasian race) Cultures.
I have found a praising beyond my notions of high artistic accolades in the presence of these Lords of the African Continent. Sondra and I are inspired to go there in the coming year, and explore new vistas and possibilities for our work and worship. I am humbled by their attracting Power and Grace.
We are in a cross cultural time in the dawning of our human unity. There is too much at stake here. Will we “get” this necessary unification of the Human Experiment, that has been going on in an earthly fashion for the last couple hundred thousand years? Or will we fail to unite, and thus exacerbate our “divisions” through the concentration of power and control in the hands of the few, which keeps us fragmented and in a constant state of competition and conflict with ourselves?
The Blackness of Humans Who Light Up Our World is something we all need to apply to any group of people we cordon off according to race, socio-economic, educational, national, political, or religiously imposed and artificial divisions. I was fortunate to have TED NEWMAN and ASTARIUS MIRACULII to rock my world and help me get my head straight. We are more the same than we are different. Love binds us together. And art is the expression of this Love in one of the highest forms possible.
My trips to the Metropolitan Opera with TED, my totally altered state of mind listening to the Angelic Invocations of ASTARIUS, and my newly found love for African culture and sculpture, is the very Blackness I needed to Light up My World. Without this Blackness I would have remained in the Dark. They saw my shortcomings of vision and opened my eyes with grace. They forgave me for being “white,” and for discounting a whole continent of people out of my own conditioned ignorance.
To TED and ASTARIUS, and all the beautiful people of AFRICA I am yet to meet, and to the artisans of Ife, Nigeria, in a bygone and modern era, I pay my deepest homage to you for enlightening my soul that would have remained unevolved without you! Praise to the Wisest Ones on the African Continent awaiting us with open arms. Bole Baba Ki Jai! Praise to the Simple Father.
—Love,
—Markus Ray— Washington DC, 2-AUG-2026
