An African American artist who through his art has investigated racial stereotyping will be lecturing today at the Bermuda National Gallery.

Michael Ray Charles is the second lecturer in the PartnerRe Art Lecture Series, which starts this evening with a 5.30 p.m. reception and 6 p.m. start time. He has been reputed as one of the most important and controversial African-American artists working in the US today.

Mr. Charles was included in the PBS Series entitled ?Art:21-Art in the Twenty-First Century? alongside such artists as Barbara Kruger, Matthew Barney, Andrea Zittel, Mel Chin, Maya Lin and Laurie Anderson.

His graphically styled paintings investigate racial stereotypes drawn from a history of American advertising, product packaging, billboards, radio jingles, and television commercials.

Mr. Charles has drawn comparisons between Sambo, Mammy, and minstrel images of an earlier era and contemporary mass-media portrayals of black youths, celebrities, and athletes images, which he sees as a constant in the American subconscious.

?Stereotypes have evolved,? he said, ?I?m trying to deal with present and past stereotypes in the context of today?s society.?

Caricatures of African-American experience, such as Aunt Jemima, are represented in his work as ordinary depictions of blackness, yet they are stripped of the benign aura that lends them an often unquestioned appearance of truth.

?Aunt Jemima is just an image, but it almost automatically becomes a real person for many people, in their minds,? he said, ?But there?s a difference between these images and real humans.?

In each of his paintings, notions of beauty, ugliness, nostalgia, and violence emerge and converge, reminding us that we cannot divorce ourselves from a past that has led us to where we are, who we have become, and how we are portrayed.

Mr. Charles was born in 1967, in Lafayette, Louisiana, and he graduated from McNeese State University, in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in 1985.

While in college, he studied advertising design and illustration, eventually moving into painting, his preferred medium.

He received a Masters in Fine Arts degree from the University of Houston in 1993.

And he is an associate professor at the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas, in Austin.

There will be a 5.30 p.m. reception for 6 p.m. lecture. Tickets are $10 and $5 for Members. Telephone 295-9428 to reserve or pay at the door.