For several decades, Kwame Anthony Appiah has wondered what it means to be “African” and “African-American.” Born to a Ghanaian father and British mother, educated on two continents and now a Princeton professor, Appiah is perhaps predisposed to musing about such issues. For this multilingual world citizen, and many postmodernists like him, identity is fluid, not fixed. In his words, race and history do not “enforce” identity; instead, identity is chosen — albeit within “broad limits” set by socio-political realities.
Appiah’s ideas are a useful lens through which to view From Then to Now: Masterworks of Contemporary African American Art, a small but powerful — if sometimes uneven — new exhibition at The Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, open through May 9. Organized by senior curator Margo Ann Crutchfield, the show illustrates how several generations of notable African-American artists, working in a broad range of media and styles, have used visual art to explore, negotiate, interrogate and construct identity.
The exhibition brings together work from five local collections: the Akron Art Museum, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland Museum of Art and Progressive Corporation. Many but not all of the works live up to the overused, fusty title “masterwork," but Crutchfield’s smart juxtapositions provoke engaging conversations. Like Appiah, these artists ask what it means to be an American of African descent, and they don’t always agree. What is “African-American” art? Is it in the subject matter? The medium? Does knowing an artist’s racial background influence the way we “read” her work, or what we expect from it? What’s it like to be framed as “black?”
Depictions of powerful black women by Faith Ringgold and Romare Bearden start the conversation. In Ringgold’s 1996 lithograph The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles, nine women freedom-fighters (Sojourner Truth and Rosa Parks, among others) stand in a field of sunflowers holding a quilt they’ve sewn. Lettering along one border announces that it’s “a symbol of our dedication to change the world.” Meanwhile, Vincent van Gogh watches from the periphery, holding the vase of flowers from his famous paintings. Bearden’s 1975 collage, Conjur Woman, gives form to a shape-shifting female spirit-figure, prominent in southern black culture, who mixes love potions and cures illness. In this version, the woman is stooped and haggish, with a menacing composite face: a giant eye with a mirror-like pupil; the weathered chin of an ancient; and a floating, oversized upper lip. A snake coils around one arm. Jungle foliage surrounds her, as do birds and rodents that might either be her familiars, or the ingredients of her next home-brew.
In the 1960s and 70s, when African-American artists were expected to produce art about black political struggle and experience, Alma Thomas and Sam Gilliam embraced abstraction and became renowned members of the “Color Field” school, an offshoot of Abstract Expressionism. In Thomas’s painting Pond-Spring Awakening, grayish blue-green vertical stripes, composed of brick-like shapes - perhaps a nod to pointillism - are highlighted with daubs of yellow, red and orange, capturing the effect of light twinkling on a pond’s gently rippling surface. Gilliam is credited with being the first artist to throw away the stretcher bar and allow color-field paintings to hang or, as with Softly Still, where canvas is draped over a sawhorse, become sculptural elements that crawl through space.
Nearby, Robert Colescott’s cartoonist 1980 painting Tea for Two (the Collector) shows a smug black collector beaming over the David Smiths and Roy Lichtensteins - and a very light-skinned black female - on display in his living room. Are Thomas and Gilliam sell-outs who went “mainstream” (i.e. Euro-American), or did they capture aspects of human experience that transcend race?
The next generation of artists interrogated all species of visual and textual information about African-Americans. They also shook the foundations of the Big Stories that manufacture American and Western identity. Identity formation is, after all, an ongoing dialogue between the self and the social environment. In Untitled From the Africa Series (When Allah…), Carrie Mae Weems pairs two soft-focus, black and white photographs of a grass hut and garden, shot during a visit to Djenné (the oldest known city in sub-Saharan Africa) with text that turns Christianity’s origin story upside-down. In Weems’ version, Adam and Eve are African, God is Allah and Adam is made accountable for his lusting after Eve. To impress her, Adam says he “can change a river into a raging fire” and “live forever,” subversively suggesting that perhaps the notion of God or Allah is merely a projection of the male ego.
When Kerry James Marshall’s painting Bang appeared in Progressive Corporation’s lunchroom in the mid-1990s, it caused a furor. Three tar-baby children celebrate Independence Day in a suburban backyard. A girl waves a U.S. flag above two boys in the act of pledging their allegiance. To what? Why celebrate the day when proto-Americans of European descent, not African descent, gained their freedom? Kara Walker’s cut-paper silhouette of an antebellum black woman, mounted on the gallery’s white wall, gives form to the fetishized images that still lurk in the cultural imagination. A barefoot woman kneels, her hands clasped, as if entreating something more powerful than herself. A master? God? Predator? The woman’s face is covered with a large-lipped African mask that may only exist in the imagination of scene’s invisible actor.
Renée Greene’s arresting 1989 installation Sa Main Charmante, from Oberlin’s Allen Museum, reveals how the exoticized black female became part of the cultural imagination. It looks like a memorial, or a boxy human-like form with outstretched arms. Then we read its found-object pieces, one by one, as if performing the way that “knowledge” is produced. The slats of a wall-mounted, ladder-like structure are hand-stamped with text that describes the ordeal of Sarah Bartmann (real name unknown), the so-called “Hottentot Venus,” a South African woman who was brought to London and Paris in 1810 and displayed as a side-show and medical attraction. On the floor in front of the ladder is a crate with two painted footprints on top. To the left is a glaring spotlight; to the right is a “peep” box that invites a look. If you do, you’ll understand a spotlight’s blinding glare.
From Then to Now is paired with all falls down, an exhibition of sixteen Superflat (a style influenced by manga and anime), super-polished paintings by Washington, DC-based black artist iona rozeal brown that fuse hip-hop culture, animé and ukiyo-e. A complex mythological universe unfolds in the images, complete with trials and temptations that symbolize the challenges faced by young women as they search for authentic identity. It’s so easy for someone to get off their path,” brown says, “ [and] to follow something they believe they should look be like, look like, act like.” Appiah would agree.
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