By Jim Knippenberg
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Artist Brian Joiner is all about being different.

Different like this: "I was traveling all over the world looking at art. I saw all these masterpieces and I couldn't help but notice that there were almost no people of color. Or if they were there, they were servants or slaves.

"I thought, I should put a different spin on things. I should do a show of nothing but black women."

And different like this:

"I was at the (Cincinnati) Art Museum, I used to go every Saturday, and it just hit me, like a cartoon moment. In my mind's eye I saw all these paintings broken into pieces and stuck back on the wall.

"I thought that would be different: Break the surface into multiple pieces and layers and then paint the portrait."

So he did. Since 1996, Joiner has created portraits of 200 African-American women on broken, three-dimensional surfaces. Twenty are on exhibit at the YWCA's Women's Art Gallery.

Women of 'a new order'

Oh, and this is different, too: Joiner is the first male to have a show there.

That's because of his women: All have at one time or another served on the Y board, committees or made significant donations of time and/or money.

Among the portraits: Judges Nadine Allen and Deborah Gaines; broadcasters Michelle Hopkins and Edna Howell Parrish; lawyer Jan-Michele Lemon Kearney; former Cincinnati Councilwoman Marian Spencer; educator Sharon Draper; entrepreneur Mamie Earl Sells; and, Joiner's first portrait and still his favorite, his grandmother, Evangeline Joiner, first African-American board president of the YWCA of Cincinnati.

"To me, these are women who represent a new order," he says. "They help us stay connected in a world that's easily shattered."

Shattered like the surfaces he paints? "That's why they're broken. To represent that new order not only in culture, but in art. That Saturday in the museum, I thought, 'Why do paintings have to be square? Why shouldn't I break away from the quadrilateral form? It would be another way of saying something with the art."

Art all the time

Joiner, a prolific 41-year-old, grew up in Wyoming, lives in Hartwell, paints in a Northside studio and sleeps only when his body forces the issue.

"I graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1985 and went 11 years without doing art. I worked as a temp and learned to make mirrors, toys, everything but any money. I worked at SenMed making surgical instruments, I was a stripper in Cleveland and Columbus, I did everything but art.

Now, art is all he does. "Sometimes 20 hours a day, until my eyes can't take it anymore," he says, adding, "then I go sleep or work out."

This has led to a problem storing his mountain of work. He has filled the second bedroom of his home and a storage shed he built in his back yard. Then he filled the addition he tacked on to the shed, then the addition to the addition.

"I can't stop and the reason is that I love life now even though I haven't always. I made a lot of bad decisions in those 11 years without art when I was exploring and finding out who I was.

"I had some major issues with myself. I felt I was ugly, undersized, I thought I had no purpose. Or if I did, I didn't know what it was. It's only now after the counseling and with the help of art that I'm beginning to like myself. And I think that shows in my art."

It does. As a guest at the Black Women Series opening last week said: "I used to say Brian was one of Cincinnati's most promising up-and-coming artists. I don't say that anymore - he's already here."

He's scheduled to do a show in 2004 at the Weston Gallery in the Aronoff Center.

"That's going to be different, too," Joiner says, using that word again. "It will open at the same time as the Underground Railroad Freedom Center. It's a show about victimization, but it will also show us as heroes and heroines. One of the things that will be different is the paintings will have the fugitive slaves running out of the frames and onto the walls of the gallery."

Like so many of Joiner's other series, this one also will have a Wizard of Oz component. "I can't get away from it,'' he says. "I'm obsessed with it. About how slaves came to this country and found they couldn't click their heels and go home."

He's so taken with the theme that he commissioned 50 pairs of ruby slippers like those worn by Judy Garland for a yellow brick road surrounding an exhibit he's doing this summer at Newport's Artery Gallery. "The yellow brick road will have footprints, symbolic of us finding our way home."

Sometimes, too different

Sometimes, being different can be controversial. Consider the Christ/Dracula Series he did last year at Flowers and Beyond in Over-the-Rhine: A fellow artist who was supposed to be in the same show pulled out, calling it blasphemous. Even his own mother told him it was blasphemous. "I don't think it was. I had always wanted to do a series that was driven by religion, but I didn't want it all soft and mushy.

"At the time, I was also obsessed with Vlad Tepes, the real Dracula, and how to me he represents Hitler, Saddam, Osama, all the bad guys of the world. One of the paintings showed Christ and Dracula running a race. Christ had already crossed the finish line, which was actually the Rankin House. But Dracula was still running. I had him running the race through a lush plantation.

"I know it scared some people, but honestly, I thought it touched on important issues. Or at least the issues that are important to me, like environmental issues, human rights, our place on the food chain, freedom, peace."

Happy now

And how's this for different? Joiner's show at the Artery, the one with the ruby slippers, is all about lynchings. He'll paint vintage advertising posters showing people whooping it up having fun. But every one will have, somewhere on the surface, a lynching.

"What I like so much about Brian's work is everything he does has a purpose," says Artery owner Laura Hollis. "His work always has some social or racial issues that are personal to him, yet they're always universal too."

"I've been called weird and strange since grade school," Joiner says. "Even at the Cleveland Institute, among all the oddball artists, I was an oddity. It's because my way of looking at things is so different. I didn't like it then, but now I like being different."

If you goBrian Joiner's Black Women Series hangs at the YWCA Women's Art Gallery, 898 Walnut St., downtown, through June 13. It's open 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday through Friday.