Myth, Magic, and Religion in Art

BALTIMORE - Oct. 5, 2016 - PRLog -- Emerging Artist Stephen Towns delivers a stunning multi-series of new paintings and work for his new show Take Me Away to the Stars (The Myth & Magic of Nat Turner) at Galerie Myrtis in Baltimore, Maryland. Opening on Saturday, November 5, 2016, and closing on Saturday, February 18, 2017, Towns uses the most successful slave uprising in the USA, led by Nathaniel "Nat" Turner in Southampton County, Virginia, 1831, as the backdrop for his most breathtaking body of work to date.

Towns, having been reared in a strict religious household in the small southern town of Lincolnville, South Carolina, population 1,100, unfolds a gripping collection of interwoven series presenting Nat Turner, his forgotten men, the unsung women and the innocent children. Threw symbolic butterflies, gold leaf, dangling nooses and angelic halos, Towns transports the viewer from the plantation to the metropolis. Black, male, married, literate, a preacher and a slave, Nat Turner affirmed he was chosen by God to lead the enslaved to freedom. On February 11, 1831 everything went black as a solar eclipse majestically unfolded, Nat believed this was his divine signal from God, and with this heaven sent confirmation, Nat Turner would weave myth, magic and religion into the American fabric and US history unlike no other.

Two centuries later, through portraiture, quilting and mixed media, Towns transforms and interprets Nat Turner's unearthly dreams, emancipated visions, celestial premonitions, and religious notions as ceremony to celebrate the many invisible, brave individuals who sought freedom in delivering their own bodies from the shackles of plantation life in the most successful slave insurrection in our nation's history.

While as a nation, we prepare to wave goodbye to the nation's first African American President, Barack Obama, as he and his family, exit the White House in January 2017. Towns says "As an African American man and artist, I am exploring the uncomfortable issues, we, Americans, continue to face each day,"

For more information contact Kirk Shannon - Butts at 917-545-4360 or email at kirk@flickeria.com and visit our website at http://www.StephenTowns.com.