Robert Pruitt, "Dreaming Celestial."
By -- Leah Ollman, Los Angeles Times | August 19, 2011 | 6:45 am
The figures in Robert Pruitt’s engrossing drawings at Koplin Del Rio are individuals that he knows, transformed through costumes and props into characters within a larger narrative of cultural, historical, ethnic self-realization. Pruitt folds a panoply of disparate ingredients into the mix — comic book graphics, hip-hop style, science fiction futurism, ‘60s-era black power activism, a romanticized vision of precolonial Africa — and delivers a jarring kind of symbolic realism, equal parts heat, humor and humanism.