Philadelphia artist Barbara Bullock’s lifetime of creating art is on display at the Woodmere Art Museum

Spirit houses invite you in, a black panther stalks, African dancers exult, snakes slither, and birds fly off the walls at the retrospective, “Barbara Bullock: Fearless Vision” on exhibit at the Woodmere Art Museum in Chestnut Hill.

Very few of Bullock’s works are two-dimensional. She did two-dimensional paintings early in her career. But over time, Bullock chose to create mainly three-dimensional paper-and-paint collage sculptures that seem to jump out from the gallery walls.

There are the sculpture pieces that stand alone: a Magic Theater, a Time Capsule Project, representative of her lifelong teaching in schools, community centers, and the Ile Ife Black Humanitarian Center in the 1970s, an African Garden, a chair that becomes an altar, and other works that flow from her travels to many African countries and to the Caribbean and Brazil as well.

“I was always making things.”

Bullock, who lives in Germantown, turned 85 on Friday. The Woodmere exhibition, which runs through Jan. 21, 2024, is presenting more than 60 of Bullock’s works that span her nearly 60-year career, that continues to this day.

“People ask me, ‘Are you still painting?’ I said, ‘Of course, what else am I going to do?’“ Bullock scoffed.

She often describes art as “a language,” and as “life” itself.

Art, Bullock said, “is the language I’ve always used to express myself.” As a child, while she was constantly drawing and taking art classes, she didn’t think of herself as an artist then, she said, but as someone who was “creative. I was always making things.”

The retrospective contains several pieces from her Katrina Series that reflect the horror Bullock felt as she watched television coverage of thousands of Black people stranded by the floods that swept New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Then there are these pieces: one simply titled George Floyd, about his killing by a police officer who pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck in front of onlookers in 2020, and Trayvon Martin, Most Precious Blood, a piece of a vivid red-and-black-painted paper sculpture that shows two broken hearts intertwined.

“It’s a masterpiece,” William Valerio, Woodmere’s director and CEO, said of the Trayvon Martin work. After seeing it in Bullock’s studio as they were making plans for the retrospective, he went to his board and said he had to purchase it for the museum’s permanent collection. And with the help of donors, he did.

As a child growing up in North Philadelphia on Newkirk Street, Bullock attended Most Precious Blood Catholic Church. She said she was always captivated by the names of churches.

Born in 1938, Bullock said she felt safe growing up in North Philadelphia. But as a young adult, she saw the violence of the city. She first associated the church’s name with the murders of young Black men. .

After seeing the aftermath of one shooting and the mother’s pain and anguish, Bullock said, “I said to myself, ‘That’s her most precious blood.’”

After Trayvon Martin, 17, was killed in 2012 by neighborhood-watch volunteer George Zimmerman, Bullock took that memory of her childhood church, Most Precious Blood, and connected her empathy with Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton.

Walking through the two-story exhibit space at the Woodmere, it is clear to see, from her Katrina Series and the George Floyd and Trayvon Martin pieces, that Bullock responds to tragedies she witnesses.

There are also several pieces created in the 1980s that responded to the AIDS crisis, including a portrait representing a close friend of hers who died from the disease.

But don’t try to ask Bullock to describe the meaning of her work.

“I very seldom answer that question; it can be personal,” she said. “I’m hoping people will take the time to look at a piece and get from it what they feel about it. That’s the best way to look at art, to look at any art. What do you see when you walk in front of it and really look at it. What do you get out of it?”

“People try to say my work is spiritual, but that’s not where I’m coming from,” Bullock said. “I just do what I do.”

She said mostly she is just “open” to all different religions and cultures.

“I never say that I am Barbara from Philadelphia, I am from the planet. I always felt that way. I hate the words about ‘being local.’ I never felt that way. Even as a child, I used to say, ‘we live on a planet.’ I went to Africa and you just feel like you’re a part of this world. I never thought I was a part of [just ] a community.”

Bullock talked with The Inquirer on Tuesday evening, after a day spent cooking to prepare for the Thanksgiving Day meal she was to share with her sister and other family members.

She lost her brother, Jack Bullock, who was a year older, to COVID in 2021. Bullock is the youngest of three children.

Bullock was always drawing and scribbling and taking art classes in school and at after-school programs as a child.

She took classes at the Fleischer Art Memorial for about a year when she was 10 to 11 years old. Later, she studied at the Hussian School of Art, which mostly taught commercial art.

In the 1970s, she was director of the arts program at the Ile Ife Black Humanitarian Center, founded by Arthur Hall; it is now The Village of Arts and Humanities.

Hall had an African dance and drummers ensemble that brought noted artists like Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and the Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji.

Bullock worked at the Ile Ife center with other artists, like Charles Searles, Winnie Owens-Hart, and Martha Jackson Jarvis, who also taught there. These artists had all studied at, respectively, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), the University of the Arts, and the Tyler School of Art. The late Nigerian painter and sculptor Twins Seven Seven also taught there with Bullock.

She was friends with the artist Richard Watson, who studied at PAFA, and he and another classmate would talk with her about art for hours. They talked about being young artists, active in a burgeoning Black Arts movement, but not being able to have their works shown in major art galleries. Still the network of artists worked together and inspired each other.

In an interview Bullock had with Valerio and art historians Leslie King Hammond and Lowery Stokes Sims that is published in Woodmere’s Fearless Vision catalog, King Hammond told Bullock:

“I often say that Jacob Lawrence was educated in the ‘University of Harlem.’ Barbara, you were educated in the ‘University of Philadelphia,’ in those inspired communities and workshops who recognized your artistic capacity. That becomes a really pivotal moment in your development … .

“You are much like the Jacob Lawrence of Philadelphia.”

To see Barbara Bullock: Fearless Vision retrospective at the Woodmere Art Museum, at 9201 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia, visit its website here:. Or call, 215-247-0475.