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- Ayé Aton (born Robert Underwood, January 29, 1940, Versailles, Kentucky; died October 30, 2017, Lexington, Kentucky), was an American painter, designer, muralist, musician and educator. Aton played percussion in Sun Ra's Arkestra for several years in the 1970s. As a visual artist, he was known for his outer space-themed murals, which he painted in private homes and on building exteriors in Chicago during the 1960’s and 1970’s. He later became an arts educator in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and rendered hundreds of fine art paintings with African, Egyptian, Native American, Afrofuturist, and abstract motifs. In 2013, historian John Corbett collaborated with artist/author Glenn Ligon on a book entitled Sun Ra + Ayé Aton: Space, Interiors, and Exteriors, which featured previously unpublished 1960s and ’70s photographs of Aton’s large-scale murals, as well as stills from Sun Ra’s feature length film, Space is the Place. "[Aton's] murals, with their images of blazing suns, pyramids, comets and planetary bodies painted on the walls of black homes all over [Chicago's] South Side," wrote Ligon, "were about a future that he, by way of Sun Ra, was reaching his hand out to take them to. Commissioned from the early 1960s through the beginning of the 1970s, the murals were backdrop to house parties, birthdays, heated arguments, fucking, heartache and life. They were the album sleeve art for Afrocentric and Afrofuturist philosophies that helped a generation reimagine itself." Ian Bourland, in Frieze magazine in 2015, wrote that "[Aton] drummed for Ra’s Arkestra, whose synthesis of occultism and sci-fi aesthetics found their way into Aton’s large-scale, pop-psychedelic wall paintings in homes throughout Chicago’s southside – an update of the visionary panoramas of black deco artists such as Aaron Douglas." (en)
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- Ayé Aton (born Robert Underwood, January 29, 1940, Versailles, Kentucky; died October 30, 2017, Lexington, Kentucky), was an American painter, designer, muralist, musician and educator. Aton played percussion in Sun Ra's Arkestra for several years in the 1970s. As a visual artist, he was known for his outer space-themed murals, which he painted in private homes and on building exteriors in Chicago during the 1960’s and 1970’s. He later became an arts educator in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and rendered hundreds of fine art paintings with African, Egyptian, Native American, Afrofuturist, and abstract motifs. (en)
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