Christina Reed: Confronting Whiteness and its Exclusions

 

 

Christina Reed’s exhibition  “Reckoning” confronts us with our own whiteness and oblivous racism head on and with ingenuity.

 

The exhibition consists of three parts. The first is Reflection, a wall filled with large black and white prints based on historical photographs of white people: juries, business men, families, picket fences, interspersed with the words of the declaration of independence, maps of redlining.

The white people are passive, but collectively they create a wall of oblivious privilege. Interspersed with the images are repeated quotes from the declaration of independence underscoring the racism of the white founders as they wrote of equality even as slavery was perpetuated and black people denied all rights.

Inserted every few feet is a mirror. We can see our own white faces as part of the white racist gaze, or for a visitor of color, surrounded by this wall of privileged exclusion.

 

 

 

We turn from this immersion in whiteness to the second part of the installation, Regard: White Gaze. Thick glass squares hanging from the ceiling painted with blue eyes that gaze directly at us.  A literal white gaze, the glass feels claustrophobic as we observe it more closely, suggesting the feeling of being watched, judged, monitored, and even threatened simply by the act of looking. It is very difficult to walk through this intense forest of glass panes, another wall of privilege, so we walk around it.

 

 

The third part of the installation Repair suggests actions to counter racism. There is going to be a closing on February 17 5-7 pm(hopefully) in which people wear signs that have references to various aspects of ways to counter racism. On one side of the sign is an oblique reference. You have to turn the sign over in order to know what it means. In other words you have to do more than look at the sign.

 

Then once you turn it over a wide range of possible ways forward are offered some educational, some personal, some joining with others.  They include references to the 1619 project, a history of slavery and the roots of racism. Another explains red lining, a third “12 out of 18” lists the 12 Presidents out of the first 18 who owned slaves. Other actions suggest observing microaggressions, euphemisms. And of course speaking to our elected representatives about racism is one of the suggestions and supporting diverse cultural organizations. Revolution is not included but volunteering on projects related to the Criminal Justice System is one of the more specific community actions.

 

 

 

The Rosetta Hunter Art Gallery Seattle Central College 1701 Broadway, 2BE2116 Seattle, WA 98122

206.934.4379 Hours10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Monday through Thursday Admission is free. They have briefly closed because of COVID concerns but new dates are  February 8 – March 24 

 

Christina Reed received support for this project and did much of her research at the historic home and library of the James and Janie Washington Cultural Center 1816 26^th ave in the Central District. If you want to know more about this important artist, come to the unveiling of a bronze statue of Dr. James W. Washington and the restored “Fountain of Triumph” Washington’s last public monument. The “Fountain,” formerly located on 23^rd ave, addresses salmon migration as a metaphor of the difficulties of survival for African Americans. The Event will be at 24^th and Union part of the newly built Midtown Center,  February 26, 2022, 6:30pm to 8:30pm. Call the Washington Foundation for Information 206-709-4241.

 

Two Murals in Women’s Prisons: Lucienne Bloch and Faith Ringgold

 

 

 

This is a detail of the center of Lucienne Bloch’s mural
“Cycle of a Woman’s Life” sponsored by the WPA in the mid 1930s. Above are photographs of Bloch painting the mural.

 

 

 

 

Here is Faith Ringgold’s mural “For the Woman’s House,” also painted in a woman’s prison, in 1972. It was her first public art commission.

 

Both artists consulted inmates about the content of the mural.

 

Bloch’s mural showed an ideal life of children playing happily together in a playground.

 

Ringgold shows careers that the women thought were “outside their reach” as the NYTimes article puts it.  Not sure if that is accurate, why not careers they might want to aspire to have when they got out of prison.

 

Both artists wanted to alleviate the dreadful environment in which the inmates found themselves.

 

Bloch’s mural was covered up almost immediately, the claim of the administrators was that it gave the inmates false hope. when the prison was demolished, it disappeared forever.

 

Ringgold’s mural at Rikers has been moved several times. It is currently being moved to the Brooklyn Museum.

Art Historian Michele Bogart  stated ” I keep wondering if they are doing a disservice to the people who are still at Rikers.”

 

Both of these artists believe that art can make a difference.

Bloch worked with Rivera on his mural at Rockefeller Center before it was demolished.

 

Ringgold has spent her whole life engaging in art with social content. Early in her career she created work on fabric she could roll up and bring with her to save the cost of shipping,so, she said she could collect that money as an honorarium.I remember hearing her speak about this in Austin Texas in 1978.

 

Bloch worked for the WPA during the 1930s,  then spent her whole life making murals and teaching workshops on mural making. I was fortunate to attend one of those late in her life in El Paso, Texas, as well as to go to a one person show she had in California. Here is Bloch with her lifelong love and partner in art Stephen Dimitroff in El Paso.

The real tragedy of this story is the prison itself. The prison where Bloch worked was intended to be an ideal new prison, but it deteriorated into a dreadful place and was demolished in the 1970s

 

Ringgold’s mural was moved several times, after it was threatened, then it was also covered up.

We all know how ghastly Rikers is as a prison.

 

Where can art fit in these places? I know of artists who do art in prisons with the prisoners, art and poetry, and drama, and other creative activities. this may be more productive than painting something on a wall, but the dreariness of these places is hard to fathom.

 

There are no easy answers. But I respect both Bloch and Ringgold as well as the government entities that sponsored them, for trying to add something positive to a dreadful place.

 

Carrie Mae Weems The Shape of Things

Carrie Mae Weems the Shape of Things

included 7 parts!

It was in fact partially a retrospective

The  first  installation at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City is a set of megaphones in the large space. this called “Seat or Stand and Speak” was an opportunity to sound off or not, as we began to think about our current times. Mostly people did not sound off.

The next stop was inside the blue cyclorama you see in the background: called Conditions,  A Video in 7 parts with original music by Jawwaad Taylor.

This image of performer and choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili sitting in a chair with papers falling like leaves around her begin the video. As Aruna D’Souza wrote in the New York Times: “Weems’s voice, with its deep, round tones, tells us that to navigate the now, “she needs to look back over the landscape of memory.”

 

Weems stated in the press release:

“I am fascinated by 19th century media, so for the Drill Hall I created a cyclorama that contains a new film that pits the rise of the right along with its puppeteers, clowns, jokers and two-faced speakers & spies, charlatans & prophets of fake news, conspiracy theorists against the emerging forces of progress. In this world, ‘normal’ is turned on its head and all bets are off.

 

“It is a time of murder, mayhem and mass protest and when covert operators of corruption bear their heads for all to see. My work centers on what happens when all facades are stripped away, and the people are left standing face to face with the realities of our time.”

 

 

The artist also narrates the film which is 40 minutes long. As Marley Marius put it in Vogue: ( I didn’t find this information anywhere)

“Weems mostly narrates these vignettes, employing her richly resonant speaking voice to discuss, among other things, the ubiquity of police brutality (“Imagine the impossible. Imagine the worst of the worst. And know that it is always happening”).”

 

Here is one still from the film of a black man walking, probably referring to the recent murder of Ahmaud Arbery, but it could be any black man. The recording of the woman who called the police in Central Park against a black man birding can be heard in the background of the two women seated in silhouette at the top of the post and here

Shadow puppets of slave owning women.

 

Another theme was migration, both in boats and on land.

 

   

 

and the border fence on our Southern border.

 

But there were images from the treacherous crossing of the Mediterranean. You can see it is footage from the news. In front is one of the seats where we watched the film, keeping in mind that we were completely surrounded by the images as in the 19th century Cyclorama.

 

The video also included some historic images of circus performers and a clown ( evidently referring to T, keeping in mind that clowns are smart people who pretend to be someone they are not)

The clown is blurry, but he was moving a lot, and it seems appropriate somehow that he is hard to see.

 

The January 6 riot was also included and below a reference to white racists from the earlier Civil Rights era or before.

There were people silently marching, with no signs. I wondered if they represent BLM marchers, although we all had signs, or is it a staged march representing protests against injustice everywhere. The artist photographed them in summer 2020

 

There was a lengthy segment of various people standing in the rain  I don’t know what they mean. Suggestions welcome. It has the title Conditions

As well as numerous silhouettes of people marching

Finally I give you this repeated image of three women holding up globes.

 

There were three more segments to the exhibition. Here is a  diagram of the whole piece to orient you. I have so far mentioned A and B

 

A long corridor (on right of diagram ) started with

C “Its Over – A Diorama, with memorials honoring some of those who have died. The theme of the globe reappears

 

A segment from earlier works

B Missing Links from 2004  various animals  such as zebra, elephant sheep and wolf, dressed up in fancy clothes, In the brochure an earlier version is called The Louisiana Project 2003

and E The Weight 2021, more globe/balloons on  African heads.

OK that’s three segments.

There are two more!

F was like a cabaret in a darkened room called Lincoln, Lonnie and Me 2014, it included the Gettysburg Address, in what the press release calls a Pepper’s ghost illusion with music by Jason Moran,

I like that my image looks like a ghost! Lonnie is Lonnie Graham an artist and activist.

This second image is from the press photos

Nearby in the darkened room were carnival promoters, another globe

and finally

G All blue, A Contemplative Site 2021

It was an old door at the top of some steps with a full moon. Here it is

 

and with me

 

I am trying to assimilate this incredible multipart installation. It is meditative, angry, hopeful, historical, contemporary, a compendium of images that together speak to our moment, our fragile moment in history. I am glad that Carrie Mae Weems seems to see the forces for good as stronger than those for evil. Or do we see a Civil War here that is still being fought?

 

In these dark days coming up to the anniversary of the attack on the Capitol, it is hard to believe in that, but if we all stay actively resisting evil in what ever small or large way that we can it will make a difference. Weems leaves us to figure that out for ourselves.

 

Subversion: The Art of Slavery Abolitionism

We saw this provocative exhibition “Subversion and the Art of Slavery Abolition,” at the Schomburg Library for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, when we stayed there last week.

Curated by Dr. Michelle Commander, Associate Director and Curator of the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery, it is an astonishing work of research in the New York Public Library archives.

As it happens, I am immersed myself in the theme of black creativity in the US as I am reading Charles Johnson’s astonishing book
The Middle Passage, which, it seems to me, is a type of partner to Moby Dick. Johnson details the realities of a slave ship in horrifying detail with a narrator, Rutherford Calhoun, who tells all. Moby Dick of course was focused on the horrors of the whaling industry and only mentions passing slave ships in the sea. all narrated by

Ismael, a sole suvivor of the disaster.

At the same time, I am also reading a novel by Walter Moseley, brilliant writer of “gum shoe” detective stories that are much more a commentary on black life in America ( in this case 1970s ). His descriptions of many many skin colors alone is worth reading, but of course, the pervasive violence against blacks by the police is a dominating theme. Easy Rawlins is the hero, outsider, renegade private detective survivor in 12 novels by Moseley over thirty years.

 

On this same trip to New  York City we also saw Carrie Mae Weems exhibition, about which I will write separately, as well as a contemporary artist, Leonardo Bezant at the Claire Oliver Gallery in Harlem.

“Reliquary For The Black Boy Who Sits At The Window Dreaming(A Collection Of Conjurings and Letters)”

incredibly intricate work with beads with several metaphorical layers.

 

In addition I am reading “The Matter of Black Lives” compiled by Jelani Cobb and David Remnick , New Yorker articles over decades on Black life in America.

 

So this exhibition at the Schomburg was extremely timely for me to see. All of the works are in the public domain on the website for the NYPL. The credit for all of them includes Photographs and Prints Division. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden, but I will only include the collection in the caption, which is an intriguing study in itself.

 

I am simply quoting from Dr. Commander in the text of this post. I am not able to rephrase or paraphrase her ideas. That means it is a bit long, and wordy, but worth reading. Also worth going to the website where every single one of the art works are reproduced.

(there is also an audio tour of the exhibition on the website that goes into the imagery and the topics) :

 

Dr. Commander introduces the exhibition with the following statement

She divided the exhibition into six themes

 

1 Brutality and Avarice

 

“The items in this section have been selected to show the early roots of capitalist avarice/greed in the Atlantic World. The items not only highlight that slavery was seen as an everyday business in its accounting practices and uses of brutality to keep enslaved people in their places, but also gives a sense of the racist philosophies that maintained and even used the Bible to rationalize the “need” for the institution.”

 

2 Resistance and Rebellion

 

“This exhibition begins with examples of enslaved people’s resistance and rebellion. Their actions– running away, fighting back on slave ships and in the Atlantic World, establishing maroon communities– most shocked and alerted the world to the injustices and inhumanity of the slave trade and slavery as it existed across the Atlantic World.

It should be noted that abolitionists argued mightily over the use of violence and force. Some felt that fighting back and being otherwise belligerent in everyday interactions would only support enslavers and other pro-slavery individuals’ arguments that slavery was beneficial because it tamed and educated so-called “primitive” people of African descent.

Smaller forms of resistance, too, were important as they kept enslavers on their toes and gave enslaved people some sense of power and control over their lives.”

 

3 Abolitionism

“Art denotes strategy, ingenuity, and imagination. Abolitionists of all stripes participated in the cause, prompted firstly by the refusal of African captives to abide slavery’s many violences. Enslaved people worked slowly, fought back, and set plantations aflame, giving pause to enslavers. They fellowshipped with one another and created kinship networks, despite all efforts to break their spirits and resolve to live and love. Self-liberated fugitives from slavery banded together as well as with freepersons to establish maroon, mocambo, and quilombo settlements in hills, valleys, swamps, and mountains. As instances of insurrection intensified on ships in the Middle Passage and across the Atlantic World, objections to the institution of slavery by social reformers and everyday citizens also increased, reaching fever pitch by a diversity of anti-slavery proponents in the nineteenth century.”

 

“Sojourner Truth (1797–1883) was born enslaved in Ulster County, New York. In 1826, she escaped the bonds of slavery with her infant daughter in tow and successfully sued to gain custody of her minor son. She later became an outspoken abolitionist and suffragist, giving the famous address known as the “Ain’t I a Woman” speech in 1851 before the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio.”

 

 

 

 

4 Poetics and Music
“Abolition-minded poetry and music got to the heart of the matter using few lyrics, generally. Poetry and musical lyrics were printed in collections as well as re-published as complements to essays and speeches in anti-slavery newspapers, almanacs, and children’s books. They were also printed and sold as broadsides at anti-slavery meetings and other events. The items in this section include those that take on the persona of enslaved individuals to address their inner turmoil and longings. Other pieces recount the everyday horrors with which the enslaved were forced to contend from the Middle Passage to the plantation.”

 

5 Narratives of Fugivity & Fidelity
“The items in this section include several fugitive slave narratives, anti-slavery fiction (Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin), and the ways that Black loyalty to the nation was encouraged and expressed through participation in the Civil War. Narratives of enslavement were important to the cause of abolitionism because they offered first-hand accounts of the many horrors of the institution. These narratives appealed to the sympathies of white Northern men and women, with the texts that were written by men very much reflecting on honor and manhood. Women’s narratives often delved into sentimentalism and the authors’ affective experiences as a mother and/or wife, which were feelings that women of the time, regardless of their backgrounds, might be emotionally moved by. These narratives also revealed a sense of enslaved communities’ cultures and beliefs, the restrictions that were placed upon enslaved people, the violence that undergirded slavery, as well as some of the artful ways that enslaved people resisted, banded together, and escaped their enslavement.”

 

“Encampments that were established near Union forces during the American Civil War by liberated enslaved people. This prayer meeting portrays its attendees worshipping charismatically. They are fellowshipping, singing, clapping, and dancing with one another perhaps in celebration or, at the very least, in hopes that liberation—worldly or heavenly—was truly to come”

 

 

6 Anti-Slavery Children’s Primers

“Abolitionists did not forget the very impressionable new generation. Within many larger publications (almanacs, newspapers, and other periodicals), there was a children’s section to help groom an abolitionist future. The Slave’s Friend is one example of a publication that was dedicated solely to children. Authors also wrote children’s books on slavery and various versions of the alphabet of slavery to appeal to children as well as to assist parents and other adults as they broached the difficult topic with youth. This section also includes an image of The New York African Free School, a critique of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s representations of Black children in her anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the Nautilus Life Insurance companies death ledger, containing the records of enslaved people.”

 

 

“Eva and Topsy, major characters from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, are shown here in an affectionate pose. Throughout the novel, however, Topsy is portrayed most memorably as a naughty “pickaninny” who needs corrective whippings and consistent instruction to behave because she has no family and simply does not know better.

 

While some readers felt a moral dilemma about slavery as they read about Topsy’s behavioral struggles, others found that this storyline was evidence that slavery had a good overall effect on improving what they viewed as inherent Black pathology. Like many of Stowe’s other presumably well-intentioned, though exceedingly stereotypical characters, derogatory minstrel shows featured the Topsy character to poke fun at the intellect of Black people. As Stowe discovered from the backlash she received from abolitionists, literary and visual representations of Black people were and remain political.”

 

Each theme has detailed information sometimes tracts, sometimes books, photographs, prints. You can see them all on the website. Scroll down to the online gallery.

 

Seeing this exhibition at this time of so much new awareness of racism in the US both past and very much present gives us an appreciation of the huge power of resistance in creative expressions. Collectively these tracts, images, poems, songs, photographs, tell us the power of the human spirit to resist unspeakable brutality.

 

 

 

 

Morgan Peterson on Greed, Power, Control and Murder

 

 

 

“Born of our Culture: American Excess” a recent installation at Method Gallery by Morgan Peterson tells it like it is in our contemporary moment. Morgan Petersen has long been fascinated by true crime and the amplifying role that media plays in our culture starting with the 1969 Charles Manson murders

My fascination with true crime began as a small child reading about the Tate/Labianca murders committed by the Manson Family Cult late in the evening on August 8,1969. This installation mirrors events that transpired that evening which captured the attention of the world as they unfolded while revealing the driving forces of racial discrimination and profiling that repeat throughout history. 

 

She interweaves references to media hyped events with her commentary on the American culture of Excess.  It could not be more timely in the age of the insanely overpriced and climate destroying NFT and bitcoins.

 

The exhibition actually consists of three interrelated  installations:

we first see a giant reflective glass surface with oversized components of drugs and their use referencing the opioid epidemic. A huge bottle of oxycontin makes it hard to miss the point. Here is

Once Upon A Crime, The American Epidemic

The epidemic is based in greed:

the installation specifically references Martin Shkreli on the credit card who raised the price of life saving drugs from 13. to 750. per pill.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Peterson also comments on excess more subtly in the pattern of the glass  surface.  It is based on the cover of an album  which the artist describes as “the most expensive album ever sold, Once Upon A Time In Shaolin . . .  This piece speaks of the overreaching power in politics, being born with a silver spoon in your mouth, the opioid epidemic and all over corruption.”

 

A second installation features Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton’s  iconic Emmanuel chair.

 

It  refers to Black Panther Fred Hampton’s  horrific murder by police just after Charles Manson’s effort to link Black Panthers to multiple murders by his cult members in 1969 in order to start a race riot. The Charles Manson cult murders of Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, Steven Parent, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca were followed shortly  after by Fred Hampton’s assassination by the police, and twenty years later by Newton’s murder.

 

Newton and Hampton were both brilliant founders and spokespersons for the Black Panthers.  Their programs  such as “giving breakfast to children and creating alliances among street gangs, food banks, medical clinics, sickle cell anemia tests, prison busing for families of inmates, legal advice seminars, clothing banks, housing cooperatives, and their own ambulance service” were incredibly successful which is why the FBI decided they were terrorists. They were disrupting the capitalist machine and the racist oppressions that keep it running.

Morgan Peterson honors their deaths with this installation which includes specific vintage furniture and props from the 1960s that she carefully located. On the coffee table you see  a book and matchbox precisely recreating the scene of the murder of Hampton.  The stone sculptures of the Black Panthers suggest by their small scale, the oppression of our dominant gaze

 

A third installation refers to our very present moment

This carefully constructed wooden gallows with its lynch noose made of 11000 small pearls woven by the artist in a special Russian spiral stitch, speaks for itself. The horror of our January 6 attempted coup, as well as the role of greed in racism in our country is spelled out here.

( The artist bought the pearls with the stimulus check from the government during the pandemic. She made the work in collaboration with wood working master Alexander Pope.)

 

Peterson speaks to the current insanity of our country, the thirst for power at all costs.

 

Peterson was trained as a glass artist, and glass is prominent in several elements of the exhibition. But these glass works move way beyond any traditional idea of glass. The simplicity and familiarity of the material belies the complexity of the technique needed to create art with it and as a material that can speak to political issues.

Above the Emmanuel Chair are three glass engraved cameos, two are portraits of people murdered by Manson.

Morgan honors these people  with so called cameo “mourning portraits.” The third cameo is a specific image of mourning, a quote from a sculpture of a veiled virgin.

 

Cameos are demanding to create: they are based on reductively carving away a glass layer to reveal what is underneath.

Paula Stokes, a founder of Method gallery,  suggests in a fascinating interview with Peterson that carving away of the surface reveals imagery underneath that can become sinister.

 

One other group of works in the exhibitions using mirrors and various luxury accouterments refer to cocaine use by the wealthy.

The intertwining of the rich use of cocaine, the opioid epidemic, and the overpricing of life saving drugs, lead directly to the pearl encrusted noose held in the hands of those in power to entrap and destroy the powerless.

 

The Black Panthers were taking power from the ruling class and therefore had to be stopped. We can draw a straight line from them to the present moment.

 

Embedded in both history and the present moment, “Born of our Culture: American Excess” suggests the true state of our world, in the massive disparity between the practices of those who control power and will murder those who threaten it, and those who seek simply to survive day to day.

 

As Ann Applebaum wrote in a recent article in the Atlantic, “The Bad Guys are Winning,”  the big shift is the level of impunity with which the wealthy now operate. Autocracy operates across national lines and with absolute disregard for the well being of individuals.

Also explaining the depth of our problem is Sarah Chayes book

On Corruption in America and What is At Stake.

Chayes speaks of the many headed Hydra of greed , when  you cut off one head another grows, and she traces greed in her book all the way back with Midas. She and Applebaum both point to the intersections of autocracies and kleptocracies, as a network that ensures their own survival above all else.

 

Likewise Morgan Peterson addresses the hydra of greed is this compelling group of installations. But she connects the dots right to the racism that underlies greed, as well as its outcome in assassination and lynching.

Ghost of a Dream and Elizabeth ‘Mumbet’ Freeman

 

 

“Any time, any time while I was a slave, if one minute’s freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told that I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it, just to stand one minute on God’s earth a free woman, I would.” Elizabeth “Mumbet” Freeman

 

 

Joana Vasconcelos, “Valkyrie Mumbet,” 2020, 384 x 672 x 504”,Stephen D. Paine Gallery all photos of Valkyrie by Will Howcroft. Courtesy MassArt

 

 

Ghost of a Dream, “Yesterday Is Here”, through December, 2021

Gudrun Arsaelsdorrit Edelsten and Lynn Puritz Warner Lobby all photogs of Yesterday is Here by Daniel Berube ’21.

Courtesy MassArt. (3)

Installation views at MassArt Art Museum, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA

 

I have once again invited my good friend in Boston, Pamela Allara. to provide a post!  The shows are up until the end of December.

 

The gallery at Massachusetts College of Design in Boston has always held innovative exhibitions, but in an inadequate space that frequently dulled its impact. In February, 2020, MassArt Art Museum,(MAAM) held a grand opening for its new gallery, a large, airy, two-story space with its very own entrance for the first time! Unfortunately, March, 2020 followed closely thereafter, and the beautiful space has been closed until its recent re-opening on October 9.

 

Don’t miss the two exciting exhibits now open, one in the lobby/reception area and the other in the main space. They are well worth a visit  both for their intrinsic aesthetic value and for the introduction they provide to the work of less familiar artists.

 

Ghost of a Dream is an artists’ collective based in Wassaic, New York. Led by Adam Eckstrom, GoaD sponsors Art for Artists (www.artforartists.org), an invitational, curated art exchange, as well as an ‘edition exchange’ which includes works for sale. (The latter have been donated to the Southern Poverty Law Center and elsewhere).The collective makes works from ephemera that center, in their words, “on people’s hopes and dreams.”

As the MAAM looks to the future, GoaD reminded visitors that the new exhibition program should not entail leaving the past behind. On the lobby’s walls they installed a collage created from cut-up and spliced-together images from over 30 years of MAAM’s exhibit catalogs and announcements.  Combined into geometric patterns on the wall, they created a handsome, site-specific installation, “Yesterday Is Here,” that caused the viewer to pause and acknowledge the important work the gallery has done before seeing the new work in the main space.

 

The multi-media work installed upstairs, “Valkyrie Mumbet,” is both monumental and intimate. Its tentacles spanning the entire two-story gallery almost like a giant octopus, it might have been threatening if it were not apparent that the delicate artwork had been constructed out of crochet, embroidery and fabrics, including capulanas from Mozambique, where the artist’s parents grew up. Also known as African wax print or Dutch Wax cloth, European traders mass-produced and profited from capulanas, but more recently they have been reclaimed by local designers in Mozambique. As the exhibit label points out, the cloths “…exemplify the fluidity of cultures and reflect a complicated and intertwined history of cultural exchanges across continents, as well as the legacy of European exploitation, colonization, and slaveholding.”

Vasconcelos is among a number of contemporary artists using fabric and crocheted cloths in their work to reference culture and history: Ernesto Neto, Ibrahim Mahama, Nick Cave and Olafur Eliasson, among others.

When the gallery, which is on the second floor of the building, was renovated, the 1906 steel vaulting and girders were exposed, which allows artwork to be suspended from the ceiling, as in this instance. From below, “Valkyrie Mumbet” seems to float, increasing the sense of its delicacy.

As we approach for a closer look at the ‘tentacles,’ the variety of the swatches of hand-embroidered and crocheted fabrics remind us of the history of women’s craft work, undervalued for its historical and aesthetic significance until recently. Clearly these fabrics have stories to tell us, but what are they? It will be important to read the label more carefully than usual. So much for skimming!

The work is part of Vasconcelos’ ongoing Valkyries series, which honors inspiring women and has been shown at the Venice Biennale and other prominent venues.

 

Surprisingly, this is the first U.S. exhibit of any of her multi-media work. When she was approached by Lisa Tung, Executive Director and curator at MAAM to create a site-specific installation, Vasconcelos requested information about notable women from Boston’s history.

 

According to the account of the staff they provided her with

“a list of individuals whose legacies include suffrage, poetry, charity, cycling, nursing, and activism among others.  Vasconcelos was strongly drawn to Elizabeth “Mumbet” Freeman’s story and wanted to honor her. This monumental installation is the artist’s own distinctive homage to Freeman”

 

Elizabeth “Mumbet” Freeman, was an enslaved woman who in 1781 sued the state under the Massachusetts’ Constitution’s Bill of Rights, which stated that “all men are born free and equal.” Between 1764 and 1780, 30 enslaved people had sued for their freedom citing the Constitution, but Freeman was the first to sue under a ‘natural right to freedom.’ Despite the fact that slavery was still legal in Massachusetts, and moreover, “men” meant white men, she won her suit and was freed.

Subsequently, she purchased a home in Stockbridge, MA, where she lived comfortably until her death in 1829.  Her eloquent statement explaining the reason for her suit is memorable: “Any time, any time while I was a slave, if one minute’s freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told that I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it, just to stand one minute on God’s earth a free woman, I would.”

 

 

Given the context, the fact that the work floats rather than being adhered to the flooring, and that the tentacles reach out and up, even to the second-floor balcony, underscores the theme of seeking freedom. Again, in that context, each patch of fabric or handwork becomes the record of an enslaved individual, part of their clothing or of cloths used for cleaning, as well as fabric referencing colonial histories. History is made concrete.

 

Youth Climate March in Seattle October 29 A Great Success!

 

Yesterday’s march entirely organized by  youth and featuring speakers who were almost all BIPOC, was beautifully organized by them as well as carried out.

We started at Pier 62 on the waterfront. here is the beginning with 

both a land acknowledgement and a song/prayer by a native youth.

 

The signs were really good.

 

Here I am with one of the terrific signs.

 

There was some important information handed out about the fraud of carbon cap and trade, and the huge pollution from the military.

 

We marched up first avenue up Union to Chase Bank, one of the funders of the pipelines. We had speeches, songs, and a  die in. The Seattle Times managed to put a photo on the front page without including Chase Bank in the background, it showed mainly knees!

Here is where we lay down ( not me). Then I took a video, hopefully coming soon   

 

There was more beautiful singing, and then we made a memorial in front of Chase Bank to all we are losing . I contributed a small ceramic grasshopper. Maybe you can see it in the midst of the candles. I was just reading about how many insects are disappearing.

 

Here is the memorial with some details. It was really moving. ( There were a few cops with bikes standing by and I heard one of them say, we are preventing the windows from being smashed, and we will stay until maintenance cleans this up. I guess they don’t have any children)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Impressive sign with  Paul Cheroketen Wagner’s image

in the middle

then we went on to Liberty Mutual Insurance Company. they are insuring the pipelines that are going through native lands all over the place, including most famously in Northern Minnesota with the horrific line 3. the second image is some street theater with Emus  sticking their heads in buckets of tar sands, then convincing the employees of Liberty Mutual that they have agency to do something, and finally freeing the emus.

 

 

Below is a young Tlinglit woman was really articulate about resisting pipelines. I am hoping to make You Tubes of my video recordings and add them to the post, as the songs and speeches were really eloquent.

 

 

 

 

 

Firelei Báez, To breathe full and free

 

Pamela Allara, Ph.D., my colleague in art history and all things, contributed this post about a stunning exhibition in Boston.

Firelei Báez’s installation, “To Breathe Full and Free: a declaration, a re-visioning, a correction…” at the Institute of Contemporary Art’s Watershed gallery was one of the most exciting exhibitions that the ICA has mounted in the three years since it opened at this location.

 

It is certainly the most memorable.

 

Firelei Báez was born in the Dominican Republic in 1981. Baez’s mother is Dominican and her father Haitian. Because the Dominican Republic was settled by the Spanish, and  Haiti by the French, there has always been tension between the two countries. It is this unsettled history that Baez brings to the surface in her installation.

In the main exhibit space, a monumental series of arches rise up from the marina where the Watershed is located.

 

From the color photograph at the exhibit’s entrance we learn that the installation references the ruins of the Sans-Souci palace in Haiti.  Sans-Souci was built by Henri Christophe, a former slave. He became a revolutionary general who crowned himself king. He is part of the heroic history of Haiti as the site of the first successful revolt by slaves against a colonial power in this case France.

 

The palace itself was destroyed by an earthquake in 1843, its ruins a potent symbol of the region’s turbulent history.

 

The artist  created a smaller version of Sans Souci on the Highline in 2019

Báez further layers that history with Boston’s own. As one approaches the Watershed space along Marginal Street in East Boston, one passes the decaying former docks on the harbor where for two centuries Boston entrepreneurs actively traded goods, including until the early 19th century, human goods.

 

As generally told, Boston’s history is a triumphant one, emphasizing the shedding off of oppressive British rule, but Baez reminds us that history is often more complex, and more morally conflicted.

 

Ironically, Báez was told when she was growing up that as a Dominican, she had no history. The installation makes clear that we all carry histories with us, and it is important to acknowledge and reflect upon them.

 

 

On the entry wall, has painted a large, impressive mural. On the upper left is an inset reproducing a 19th century map of “Boston Harbor and ‘The Sea of New England.’” – the artists fascination with maps has appeared in other works as here

The waters of the harbor, occupying the majority of the mural’s space, are appropriately turbulent, and on inspection one finds that immersed in the waters is a map of Boston and Cape Cod. It also includes the barnacles so common in the nearby waters.

Below the map, Báez has painted a large bouquet of marine flora, ferns and feathers, all native to the Caribbean.

She has stated that the bouquet also contains a mythological figure from Dominican folklore, Ciguapa; perhaps those are his wings we see at the top of the image.  Where one would normally find texts and images provided by the curator, here we have a seascape whose history we must attempt to navigate before entering the main space.

Once, there, we leave Boston and its maritime history behind, and are plunged into a different space altogether. As if rising from the ocean floor itself, a monumental ruin punctuated with arched openings she constructed in the space from foam, plywood and plaster tilts across the space. A pierced blue fabric draped from the ceiling provides the illusion that we are perhaps underwater. The sense is both unsettling and exhilarating.   One is drawn to walk through and around the arches in order to get a feeling for the palace it references.

 

 

But as with all ruins, much is left to the imagination. We must reconstruct this history on our own. The blue references the ocean, to be sure, but also, according to the artist, the valuable indigo dye used by the Yoruba in Nigeria for their cloth, which brought them wealth through its trade.

 

The history of this trade is explored in the accompanying installation by Boston artist Stephen Hamilton. The images Baez has screened onto the structure initially hold some clues, but why a lion and a panther, neither native to the Caribbean, obviously, and what do the abstract symbols refer to?

 

This civilization remains obscure and remote, and what’s left of its history, as indicated by the barnacles that ring the bottom of each arch, is decaying. But before the arches sink back into the (ocean) floor, we are drawn to repeatedly walk in and around them as if they might reveal the cause of the structure’s demise. Of course, as we walk, it is impossible not to ponder the decline of all past civilizations and the inescapable fact that our own seems to be on the same trajectory.

 

Even though this is a created ruin, I found it as compelling as visiting actual ruins. Why do we go to Knossos or to Chichen Itza? For me, and I suspect for most visitors, they bear witness to human creativity, which endures even as civilizations decline. Thus, the monumental architecture is a metaphor for human achievement in general. And finally, the works, even in their ruined state, are beautiful, and in their beauty, remain inspiring.

 

Photo Credits

Artist Portrait Antoine Boontz

Artist at work, and Untitled Terra Nova: Amani Willett for The New York Times

Installation view, ICA Watershed, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Chuck Choi. © Firelei Báez

 

Close Up of Sans Souci arches Jesse Costa/WBUR

Mural details and Sans Souci on the Highline Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Chuck Choi. © Firelei Báez

Barnacles Pam Allara

 

Imna Arroyo: Immersed in Yemaya and Iroko Water and Life

 

 

 

Imna Arroyo’s work, taken as a whole, creates a puzzle of intersecting chronologies, which appear to form the subjective representation of an aesthetic philosophy that reaches toward celestial planes. Humberto Figueroa Iroko, Tree of Life, p. 56

 

Imna Arroyo bridges art and spirituality in a deeply personal and effective art.  She embraces several large themes in her work, that she rethinks and alters each time she creates an installation. Thse two portraits capture two sides of Imna Arroyo, her connection to art and her connection to nature.

 

Of African, Taino and Spanish heritage, Imna Arroyo is an Afro-Puerto Rican artist deeply committed to acknowledging her multiple heritages and to transforming that heritage into a contemporary artistic statement. Throughout her career she has consistently reached beyond her current work to the next level of creativity, complexity and technical proficiency. She has never settled for a formulaic answer, a single concept, or even a single media. As a result she tells a layered story of her life that resonates with history, place and spirituality.  She frequently turns to the symbolism and language of  Yoruba poetry, proverbs, legends, myths and imagery.

 

As an artist printmaker Arroyo has had an exceptionally rich training, as she constantly explores new techniques.

 

As a young woman in the 1960s she studied with José Alicea in Puerto Rico. After coming to the United States , she earned a BFA from Pratt Institute in 1977 studying with Michael Ponce de Leon and Robert Blackburn. Only two years later she completed an MFA at Yale University. With Gabor Peterdi and Winifred Lutz and later Krishna Reddy she further explored etching, aquatint, and color intaglio techniques. In the ’80s Arroyo moved onto mixed media, multi-color Japanese traditional woodcut techniques with Francisco Patlán in Mexico, and aluminum plate printing at Tamarind Institute.

 

 

Part I

The Middle Passage

Starting in the late 1500s more than 12 million Africans were transported as slaves from Africa to the Caribbean, then sold for sugar and other raw materials to take back to Europe. The horror of this crime is so great that we are all still processing what it means.

Many artists of African descent address this topic from different perspectives.

 

Imna Arroyo’s major installation Ancestors of the Passage focuses on those who did not make it through the three week voyage in unspeakable conditions

Those who were sick or died were simply thrown overboard. Ancestors emphasizes the spirits of those who died, making them visible in prints and sculptures. She speaks to the presence in the lives of those who survived in memories and cultural practices that came to this country.

Ancestors of the Passage overwhelms and embraces us with its striking blue sea on the floor, the ceramic busts and hands of those lost in the sea, and a series of prints that cover the walls with haunted faces.

 

As the artist describes it

 

Ancestors of the Passage: A Healing Journey Through the Middle Passage is composed of twenty-seven life size terracotta ceramic figures each extending their (54) hands reaching out to the audience. The figures are in a sea of acrylic canvases and blue and green silk fabric, surrounded by (60) black and white collagraphs representing a multitude of people witnessing the journey. The terracotta figures depict the African ancestors that died and are coming back to tell us to remember our gifts. This artwork attempts to gives a visual voice to the untold story of the millions of people who died during the Atlantic crossing.

 

Arroyo’s awakening and exploration to this horrendous act came when she visited the Door of No Return in Ghana:

In 1997 I traveled for the first time to Ghana. It was at the Elmina Castle, standing in front of the Door of No Return that I had an epiphany that we are all part of a spirit continuum. It was an experience that made me aware of the ancestral realm and forever changed my perception of time and space.

 

In 1999 she created a series of watercolor paintings called Prelude to the Door of No Return with doorways evoking the shape of the original Door of No Return in Ghana. The artist filled the space of each door and the space around it with references to the Middle Passage, bodies, hands, slaves packed into ships. We can see the roots of the larger Ancestors installation in these abbreviated references.

 

The Prelude to the Door of No Return was reinstalled in “After Spirituality” at the Fitchburg Art Museum from February to September 2020, at the height of the pandemic. It was paired with an altar with a segment of the Ancestors installation to honor those who died in the Middle Passage as well as in the pandemic.

 

Arroyo has another moving installation referring to death in the Middle Passage, Trail of Bones, an immersive experience in which floor to ceiling black and white prints hover over us. We experience the spirits of those who died and those who survived. A moving video of Trail of Bones appears on her website.

 

Arroyo began exploring Yemaya, Goddess of Water, as a theme in her work in the summer of 2001. It is a logical step from exploring those who drowned in the sea during the Middle Passage to invoking a spiritual presence that both looked over them and looked out for the survivors.

 

The video The Many Faces of Yemaya first appeared in 2001 in an exhibition “The Voices of Water” in Oregon and the Czech Republic, a collaboration among several artists including Native artist Gail Tremblay.

 

The video was the partner to an eight-foot-high expressionist woodcut of the sea goddess, the archetypal great mother, printed on satin (visible on the right in the image). The video and the woodcut invoke the seven avatars of this divinity.  Yemaya is a deity of orisha worship that originated in Nigeria and later came to the Caribbean and the Americas.

 

“Voices of Water” was a crucial turning point for the artist in both multimedia and interdisciplinary collaborations, which is still a central part of her work. Her interest in Yemaya has expanded in many directions.

 

Initially the artist explored the meaning of Yemaya in books such as Yemaya y Oshun , Kariocha, Iyalorichas y Olorichas by Cuban anthropologist Lydia Cabrera. Then she herself engaged with the spiritual practice. In the summer of 2005 Imna Arroyo was initiated into the Lukumi tradition in Cuba.

 

She received the honorary title of Chief Imna Arroyo/Chief Yeye Agboola of Ido Osun, (Chief Mother of the Garden of Honor) conferred by his Royal Majesty Aderemi Adeen Adeniyi-Adedapo, Ido-Osun, Nigeria, West Africa the morning of his 50th birthday in 2007.

 

The House of Yemaya woodcuts are printed on fabric framed with Batik cloth. Yemaya is depicted as a mermaid on the inside and the Virgin of Mercy on the outside referencing secret relationship between the African and Catholic religion practices in Cuba.

 

The Many Paths of Yemaya is a multi-media installation composed of seven panels 2’x 8’ woodblock prints and floor installation recreating the Atlantic and the Caribbean oceans made of fabric batiked by the artist accompanied by handmade paper sculptures, shells, glass, wood sculptures. The panels are printed on Satin and framed with Batik fabric from Ghana, West Africa. A six-minute video is also part of the artwork.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yemaya floats in midair in the installation Legacy: Ancestral Thread Series:

 

Arroyo describes it:

The installation is composed of five African Orishas or Deities that served as guardians to the ancestors while they were crossing the Middle Passage: Trans Atlantic slave trade. Those who survived the journey brought their multitude of memories from the homeland. My work attempts to re-capture these memory fragments of the Diaspora, weaving together the legacy.

 

We see the five Orisha busts, three males Elegua, Obatala & Shango and two females, Oshun and Yemaya, made of wire mesh, abaca fiber, hand-made cast cotton pulp suspended in mid air, as memories suggested by small pieces of cotton pulp flow from them down to the floor. Underneath are boats of the same materials.

 

This work suggests survival, even rejuvenation, through memory and spiritual searching. In some installations the sculptures pair with prints depicting The Journey, small boats with figures, protected or sometime carried by an image of a goddess.

 

The artist reinstalled Legacies in 2020 in the Coral Gables Museum in the exhibition  “Alien2020nation” from December 2020 to March 2021

 

The catastrophe of the slave trade, the Middle Passage and the protection of the Orishas for those who survived and brought memories of their culture with them, brings us directly to the ongoing tragedies of our contemporary world.

 

A recently completed diptych, Thorns and Roses a message from the ancestors  speaks of our last two years. Two small house-like structures stand on collagraph prints filled with the eyes, perhaps of those drowned in the Middle Passage, or those of more recent tragedies)  In one house a thorny stem invokes the pain of life, in the other a rose represents the gifts or blessings discovered throughout these past seven months of COVID-isolation. It appeared in the exhibition A isla miento (Isolation), November 2020 shown in San Juan Puerto Rico, an invitation to artists to address the pandemic. Outside each house stands a cut out women, the artist.

 

As she explained:

we can choose in our isolation to be safe inside or to feel freedom, to be sad or to be angry.

 

In the midst of the quarantine, we witnessed the public lynching of Mr. George Floyd, even as more young black bodies were killed by police violence. We continue to see displays of white supremacy, people without the sheets or burning crosses gathering in the streets.

Experiences that seem way too common for the African ancestors who endured violence perpetrated against their black bodies for generations stretching over 400 years. Here, experiences emanating from hate,  supremacy, exploitation, greed and inhumanity are the thorns. While the strength and genius of the people are inherent gifts bestowed by the ancestors to navigate uncertainty and overcome adversity, here is the rose.

 

 

PART II IROKO TREE OF LIFE

At the same time as these works pairing the Middle Passage with the Orishas, Imna created a series based on “Iroko, Tree of Life.” It culminated in a multimedia collaborative exhibition in 2017, and it is still going through new iterations. The 2017 exhibition  included prints of the Ceiba, Tree of Life that depicted its transformation in various cultures.

 

Humberto Figueroa, the curator, describes the installation

 

“The Iroko installation draws us into a dense thicket of vines that
multiply through the effects of their shadows. Among the twisted
branches, we can make out the silhouettes of simple pitched-roof
houses, typical of the working-class and poorer households of
the Caribbean. The houses in this installation represent the axes
for the divine forces from the Yoruba religion. The deities called
Orishas are represented in the Iroko, and these framed spaces
are meant to signify presences that are intangible and invisible
to the naked eye. The installation extends upward with the
incorporation of numerous other houses in which we see open
palms suggesting supplications to the celestial plane or invocations
to ancestors whose remains reside beyond the horizon. The tree
trunk is suggested by a clustering of houses peopled by inquisitive
eyes and other hands containing faces.

 

At the foot of the tree, representations of the Orishas can be seen on the floor. The general harmony achieved between the balance of materials and the techniques of engraving and sculpture in an evocative spatial arrangement instills a sense of serenity that is also conducive to multiple interpretations. The Iroko installation is a comprehensive visual text inspired by spiritual expressions filtered through time, other cultures and contexts.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The artist describes IROKO: TREE OF LIFE:

 

IROKO was inspired by the sacred Tree of Life, known as Iroko to the Yoruba people of West Africa and those of the African Diaspora, Yaxché to the Maya, Kapok in Southeast Asia, Silk- Cotton Tree to Indigenous North Americans, and La Ceiba in the Caribbean, Central and South America. The tree is of great symbolic, spiritual, mythological, medicinal, magical, commercial, ecological and aesthetic import. Through the exploration of materials old and new, traditional and innovative technologies this multi-media installation focuses on the mysteries of nature using the Iroko/ Yaxché/ Kapok/ La Ceiba / Silk-Cotton Tree as an anchor to express the power of nature, its continuity and resiliency which hold the promise for a sustainable future if nurtured and honored.

 

Arroyo worked in  collaboration with graphic and digital media artist, Tao Chen, and video producer, Jaime Gomez. on a video  accompanying the huge print

 

In the video, filmed by Julio Charris,  Jaime Gomez interviews the Katanzama Indigenous people of Columbia. It also includes a dance choreographed by Alycia and  performed by Sinque Tavares. The music includes traditional Yoruba Orisha songs sung by Amma McKen, Iya Ola and Swahili Henry and a new dance performed Bright-Holland.

 

Bringing together many voices in the video, as well as the large print, profoundly speaks to our interconnections.  As the artist eloquently explains:

 

IROKO addresses the challenge of climate change by exploring the interrelationship between our external ecological situation, our awareness of the sacred in creation, and our internal relationship with the symbolic world of the soul.   IROKO’s intention is to promote art that expresses that complex, diverse and dynamic intersection, while seeking to connect the intellectual, spiritual and practical components of community building and sustainability.*

 

 

 

A part of the “Iroko Tree of Life” joined an exhibition at the ChShaMa exhibition space called AfreeCan in April and May 2021 in New York City.

 

Prayer for a Warrior Island

Currently, September 2021, at the Museum of the Americas in Puerto Rico Arroyo contributed Plegaria para una isla guerrera Prayer for a Warrior Island organized by Las Jornadas del Grabado Puertorriqueño. It was carried in a protest in Puerto Rico.

 

 

This print pays tribute to the ancestors of the valiant Taino Indigenous people and the African warriors whose legacy continues to empower  their dependents to defend the island from the  colonial pirates, imperialists conquistadors, opportunities, embassies, rogues and liars.

 

We can all immerse ourselves in Imna Arroyo’s extraordinary art works that fuse spirituality, art and nature, with specific resferences based on her own varied experiences.  Her carefully thought out prints and multimedia installations can provide us with new hope and perspectives in our present state of climate catastrophe.

 

 

 

Part 3 The Future!

 

Imna Arroyo: Travesías / Crossings is the title of Imna Arroyo’s current project. It will be a major retrospective, focusing on her interpretation through her art of displacement and migratory flows. Co-curated by Humberto Figueroa from Puerto Rico and Benjamin Ortiz of Connecticut with Yolanda Wood, a cultural critic based in Cuba and visiting professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Project , it will be seen at  3 venues: Museo de las Americas,  La Casa del Libro in San Juan, in Puerto Rico  and Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute in Harlem, New York.

 

———————————–

 

All quotes from Imna Arroyo based on our email correspondence, August, September 2021.

 

*IROKO TREE OF LIFE, Ancestral imprint, the Yoruba Cultural Association from Cuba, 2017. It features essays by ecologist, Carmen R. Cid, art historian, Maline Werness-Rude, and writers Isis Mattei, Maria Vazquez, Esperanza Cáseres Santa Cruz, Jaime Gómez, Migdalia Salas and Humberto Figueroa. The exhibition opened in 2017 at the Connecticut the Clear Gallery, Charter Oak Cultural Center in Hartford and MS 17 Art Gallery in New London.

Defusing Radical Alice Neel

 

 

 

Observe these two portraits

On the right is the feature image of the Metropolitan Museum of Art current exhibition of the work of Alice Neel “People Come First”

It is identified as a portrait of “Elenka”1936,  about which there is no information except that she “presumably numbered among the several bohemians with whom Neel associated in Greenwich Village”  Neel lived in Greenwich Village from 1931-38 . It was donated to the museum by the sons of the artist.

 

On the left is “Marxist Girl (Irene Peslikis) 1972 –  radical feminist and crucial supporter of second generation feminism. Her pose and clothes suggest her radical position, austere colors, monochrome black, unadorned, with a confident leg slung over one arm of the chair, and a single arm raised that shows her unshaven armpit. In addition,  Peslikis is  famous as a founder of Redstocking Artists in 1971, she co founded the Feminist Art Journal, which also in its first issue supported Neel . The Met catalog finds it curious that the work was titled “Marxist Girl” when, as they claim she was  “known at the time not as a Marxist but as a feminist.” But they also mention that she was an early member of New York’s Radical Women, a group that is avowedly Marxist and more specifically and defiantly Trotskyite.  The Met catalog says RW is “feminist”. Clearly the Met wants to rush away from any Marxism in the 1970s, just as they want to avoid Communism and Socialism in the 1930s

 

Elenka on the other hand, wears a ruffled, white blouse, her hand dangles languidly in front of her shoulder without intention. She wears careful makeup. Her face is expressionless and mask like.

The differences are telling: in clothing, in pose, even in the yellow background, which in Elenka is pale and in Marxist Girl is intensely saturated. One woman appears to be static, the other dynamic, so although we know little about Elenka, we can tell she was not an activist from the portrait.

 

So why did the Met decide to put this portrait on the cover of its catalog? Perhaps because they owned it as a gift from the artists sons, but more important, because it is a mild image compared to Irene Peslikis, it deflates and defuses the radicalism of Alice Neel.

 

And admirable as this large exhibition is with its many categories, large, intelligent catalog, and memorable array of paintings and documents, that seems to be the overall purpose of the exhibition, to soften Neel’s extremely radical painting, perspectives and position.

 

Let us look at this quote near the beginning of one essay. It describes Neel as having “a stalwart sense of purpose in her dedication to an ethic of radical humanism”.

 

Radical humanism? Humanism is the word that these authors have latched onto, (mis)quoting Neel frequently from late interviews.

For example this is an example cited from a comment of 1950 to demonstrate her “humanism” “I have tried to assert the dignity and eternal importance of the human being.”

That of course is not the same thing as humanism!

Then they turn around her radical commitment ” Encounters with socialist and Communist activists in the United States in the late 1920s and 1930s further shaped Neel’s humanism. She joined the Communist Party in 1935 and was intermittently affiliated with the group for the rest of her life.”

To call Communism a shaping of humanism, is indeed an effort to dilute the artists deep commitment to socialism, to presenting what had been unpresented in art, the poor, the worker, the leftist leaders, and so much more.

Let us contrast this effort to smooth over Neel’s politics  to the ground breaking book on Alice Neel by Pamela Allara, Pictures of People, Alice Neel’s American Portrait Gallery 1998. Allara says Neel “rebelled through both an unconventional life-style and a biting wit, actions and words that indicated an absence of self censorship, a determination to disrupt polite society.”

Allara then brilliantly maps the many types of disruptions that Neel pursued.

To give one example, In The Family 1927, Neel gives us the antithesis of a happy family portrait. The father slumps over in the basement as he carries coal, the mother lies almost prone on the floor as she wildly scrubs, the mother and baby ( Alice and her daughter) sit oversized in a chair, while the brother in the attic is the oblivious intellectual. Each floor suggests complete isolation. Allara compares it to the sharp descriptions in Sherwood Anderson’s small town stories, while the catalog speaks to the conflicts of motherhood and creativity which of course is not shown here.

Neel’s biggest disruptions in both her art and her life though are still to come as she lived as a single mother in poverty in the Bronx from 1938 – 1962, and in Spanish Harlem after 1962. She was on the Left from  the start and stayed there.

Her depictions of such subjects as “Well Baby Clinic” (left) “Suicide Ward,” (right) give us sardonic information about the failings of the public health system and social services, a subject of great importance today.

Allara’s book is mostly chronological, which makes sense with Neel as her life and her work were deeply affected by dramatic changes in the social and political climate of the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

 

The Met exhibition had themes ( they don’t appear in the catalog, to which I will return shortly)

Here they are

Introduction

New York City  (street scenes, including demonstrations)

Home ( emphasizes her studio as her home, with intimate erotic images) Family is placed here, pretty much the antithesis of “home”

Counter/Culture ( portraits of as the label puts it “individuals who pushed social, political, and cultural boundaries, from bohemian poets and labor organizers to queer performance artists and feminist trailblazers.” So we have the radical leftist Kenneth Fearing  above and the cross dressing Jackie Curtis and Rita Redd)

 

 

In other words all in one section we have every decade and many different types of people.

The Human Comedy “documenting episodes of suffering and loss, but also strength and endurance, with unsparing candor and acute empathy” The term is based on Balzac’s Human Comedy of the 19thcentury. Here is the Well Baby Clinic mentioned above.

Thanksgiving 1965 was part of Art as History. This section aligned Neel’s work with such luminaries as Robert Henri, Jacob Lawrence, and Chaim Soutine, as well Cassatt, and Van Gogh. Of course this is the most sardonic Thanksgiving image I ever saw.

 

Motherhood includes images of both pregnant women, the famous image of giving birth and mother and child portraits, the term motherhood seems to me a little cozy for Neel’s cutting and incisive portraits

The Nude male and female; these two sections overlap of course and both include pregnant females. Neel’s painting included here of Andy Warhol after he was shot deserves a whole section and essay on its own!!!

 

Good Abstract Qualities   I don’t need to elaborate on why this was here at the end. Sigh, Greenberg rears up.

 

In other words, these themes obscured social realism in many different places, it spread the  pregnant women into three or four places. it grouped different topics together, etc.

 

The catalog does a better job, with excellent essays by several insightful writers (aside from the smoothing, soothing affect mentioned above). Here are the chapter headings

 

Anarchic Humanist, Political Creatures, Siempre en la Calle, Ill Show Everyone: An Artist Mother at Home, Painting Fruit(s),  Alice Neel’s ‘Good Abstract Qualities’ based on a quote from Neel the year before she died,  “I don’t think there is any great painting that doesn’t have good abstract qualities” here elevated to a major theme.

 

So was this major analysis by some of the best art historians now working at our most prestigious museum trying to sooth us, the audience, the museum board, the Neel family, or were these the positions of the curators and authors. It is hard to know.

At any rate, the main image on the front of the museum gives us a powerful portrait of gay men. As Randall Griffey points out, Neel died right before AIDS devastated the gay community . Several of the people she portrayed died. Griffey points out that she would not have hesitated to paint the ravages of AIDS. So this banner celebrates a moment in our country’s history, before the epidemic, as well as Neel’s own independence in representing gay men and woman throughout her career, in spite of the homophobia of the Stalinists and the Leftists surrounding her.

But unquestionably her radicalism continued throughout her life,  (above is The Death of Mother Bloor, 1951 at the height of the McCarthy era, a funeral that she attended) , her feminism was deep seated way before the 1970s, and she continued to radically transform the little regarded format of a portrait until the end of her life.  No better example exists than her own nude self portrait at the end of her life