Roger Buckley News

Harlem sculptor Leah Poller first heard Fred Ho in his performance of the Cal Massey magnus opus symphony "The Black Liberation Movement Suite", presented in its entirety for the first time in jazz history at the 2012 inauguration of Marcus Samuelsson's Red Rooster Supper Club 'Ginny's'. "The music was soul-rendering, and the performance by baritone saxophonist Fred Ho was mesmerizing", declares Poller. "The sheer bravado, the invention and the scope of this performance shook me to the roots, and I knew I had to meet Ho as a fellow artist seeking to break barriers of preconception of what something should be. Ho pushed the envelope, something I could relate to in my own work."

Harlem sculptor Leah Poller first heard Fred Ho in his performance of the Cal Massey magnus opus symphony "The Black Liberation Movement Suite", presented in its entirety for the first time in jazz history at the 2012 inauguration of Marcus Samuelsson's Red Rooster Supper Club 'Ginny's'. "The music was soul-rendering, and the performance by baritone saxophonist Fred Ho was mesmerizing", declares Poller. "The sheer bravado, the invention and the scope of this performance shook me to the roots, and I knew I had to meet Ho as a fellow artist seeking to break barriers of preconception of what something should be. Ho pushed the envelope, something I could relate to in my own work."

As Harlem's 1920's cultural renaissance officially re-emerges as the "New Harlem Renaissance", it remains true to its origins by offering richly diverse programs of exceptional talent. For the visual arts, Harlem born Charles Knox LaSister III, founder and director of his eponymous Knox Gallery in Central Harlem offers a dynamic program of exhibitions and encounters this April with a one person exhibition entitled "Mirrors of the Soul, portraits by Harlem sculptor Leah Poller".

Since her classical training at France's most prestigious fine arts academy, Les Beaux Arts de Paris, Harlem sculptor Leah Poller reaffirms her attachment to figurative art in her upcoming exhibition “Mirrors of the Soul” (Knox Gallery, NY, April 2013). The portraits in bronze, while simultaneously real and surreal, personal and universal, embrace figuration with vigor, in opposition to the years of abstraction most familiar to the art world.