The current exhibit at Nazareth College's Art Center Gallery is a love letter to African-American parents and children, but anyone with kids can appreciate the show with a measure of common understanding: parents at perpetual war with culture over what identity gets passed on to their children. Dr. David Anderson and Shawn Dunwoody are community leaders, artists, and fathers seeking to convey the struggle to reclaim a strong sense of identity for children through symbolism, moving portraiture, and the written word.

Dr. David Anderson "has worked with the Nazareth College Center for Service-Learning to engage students in reviewing the Underground Railroad freedom struggle as it unfolded in the Rochester region," says Assistant Professor and Director of the Art Center Gallery, Cathy Sweet. "Anderson chairs the Freedom Trail Commission, striving to make the personalities and events that characterized the Underground Railroad more accessible." He performs living-history reenactments, including embodying Civil War veteran George Brown; Reverend Thomas James, who founded Rochester's 179-year-old A.M.E. Zion Church; and pioneer freedom fighters Austin Steward and Frederick Douglass.

Dr. Deborah Dooley, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Nazareth, conceived and set in motion the evolution of this show, says Anderson. Dooley proposed and facilitated Anderson coming aboard as a visiting community scholar. "She has always expressed the view that my experiences were needed in this environment," says Anderson, "and her deeds have spoken with great force."

Anderson's photographic work in this show spans a 50-year period, and is influenced by the work of documentary photographers, which "underscored my desire to feed back to African-American people the principled behavior of ordinary folk, as well as the issues we needed to address." he says. As a student at RIT, "I encountered the work of Jacob Riis, the early social documentary journalist, and the Farm Security Administration photojournalists. I was privileged to meet Gordon Parks and charted his work at Life Magazine."

In this show, Anderson's nostalgic photos range from adults with children picketing to end segregation, to loving domestic scenes with families, to a tree in front of a low-on-the-horizon sun with golden light pouring around it. In one image, a woman looks up at her daughter, haloed by a frilly hat, sporting what my mother would call a stubborn "thundercloud face." Words from the will of a slave owner, directing how his human property will be delegated to his wife and children, are positioned near images of modern black fathers cradling and caring for their own children.

Another series of black-and-white photos reveals a meeting of men in deep discussion, speaking, listening, smoking, and thinking. "Periodically, men gather and spontaneously engage in assessment of the circumstances we find our people in," says Anderson. "Agencies, governmental bodies, religious orders, all may be cited, but at the core it's about what we can, oughta, might, supposed to - in short, there are times of self-examination. How to sustain that energy is not yet known."

"I chafe at the indecent label ‘minority,' so often, so loosely ascribed to people of color," says Anderson. "There is such an abundance of data, of evidence of struggle - internal as well as external - that better defines the humanity of African-American people. Yet, access to such treasure seems old-fashioned, passe, bor-r-r-r-ing. Unlike in my childhood, only meager efforts are made to preserve and guide children - and those who produce them - to the autobiography of a people who refused to let slavery, jim and crow define them. ‘If My Child Should Ask,' is a feeble, yet sincere attempt to provoke question-asking, searches for the meaning in that ‘junk' that Great Aunt Shirley left behind. It is feeble, because it is cast in the unhip language of some ‘ol' dude.'"

Anderson has three children, and raising each one has been "a major learning experience for me," he says. "I am more humble because of this; I am more aware of my role as a functionary in the challenge to make community. The curriculum resides in the memories of how and what people regarded me as a human being of great potential. The grandparents of my children are at the core of that curriculum because they influenced me to listen - every now and then - that I might receive the generosity of persons I have encountered; people of various complexions. So, ‘If My Child Should Ask' continues to be framed by the memories."

Dunwoody's mixed-media sculpture incorporates domestic servants' trays and farm tools, as well as painful cultural imagery - vicious caricatures of African-Americans that have lingered to this day. Take Aunt Jemima, or Uncle Ben: white CEOs in black face, insidiously mocking hard-won advancements with an innocuous grin.

One wall of the gallery holds a host of what looks like crude crucifixes or human forms made from farm tools, rope, and rags, some holding black-painted dolls or more painful pop-culture caricatures. A pedestal is capped with crushed can, painted with the words, "Dingling Bros Circus," and "The Greatest Show on Earth." On top of the can, a black cloth doll stands with a padded rear and a purse in front with a long, black, central appendage, longer than the legs. Dunwoody's work deals in ways that imagery has been used to reduce people to caricature and stereotype.

Two subtle and yet key works in the show seem to articulate the problem, and the solution. Dunwoody's work is a light-box reliquary with a tin gas can and a cold white hand holding a caricatured black baby eating a watermelon. Anderson's image is of delicate minutiae that I found to be incredibly symbolic of strength and legacy: a curved stem poking out of the sparkling ice, a bridge and its shadow bridge caught in a window of bright light.

"I had planned to build a segment of the show around a photograph of my great-grandfather, who served in the United States Colored Troops," says Anderson. This man, Private Sam Bibb, died when Anderson's mother was 4 years old. "It is from that image; from my mother's lament that she had never seen the man that was her grandfather; it was Private Bibb, and the other unseen forebears that comes the demand, ‘If My Child Should Ask.'... They spoke, and yet speak to me. I am mature enough, chastened enough to listen, and, while life remains, commanded to nudge a few people with whom I share space, to ask again, and again."

"We Are Stories...If My Child Should Ask..."

Works by Shawn Dunwoody & Dr. David Anderson

Through November 6

Arts Center Gallery, Nazareth College, 4245 East Ave.

Tue-Thu noon-5 p.m., Fri-Sat noon-8 p.m. | Free

389-5073 | naz.edu