Surveys are unwieldy, impossible things. Surveys based on identity? Forget it. What have we learned from the eighties, if not that identity is irrelevant except when it's not and no one is qualified to tell the difference. Working with a highly restrictive set of parameters, including identity of maker and geography of collector, curator Marina Pacini has crafted an admirable survey that, in its generous breadth and depth, transcends any essentialist trappings of identity without ever denying it's significance. It's an important show for Memphis, and much more exciting than the word important might imply. Though it stumbles a bit at the start, once it finds its groove it offers a range of experiences that reflect what Pacini terms the "diversity, vitality, and creativity of African American artists."
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| Chakaia Booker's Untitled, 2002 |
From its title, Soul of a City: Memphis Collects African American Art, the show seems to be about the tastes of art collectors in Memphis. Actually it's a survey of African American art as a whole, with work taken only from local collections. It's not really about Memphis or religion in a way that the title suggests, but we're not mad about that because it's pretty good marketing - Memphis loves Memphis almost as much as it loves Jesus, right?
The exhibition itself doesn't have the most elegant structure, with work grouped according to genre, and also sometimes style, unless it's thematic. (There's also a "contemporary" section which, just...ok. We'll get to that.) There's a grab-bag gallery at the beginning which is meant to offer an overview of the entire exhibition, but much of the work in it also seems to gesture broadly at the idea of community. We're given a great, weird Purvis Young painting in the corner and a take-no-prisoners Elizabeth Catlett sculpture commanding the center of the gallery, and we're off to a roaring start. Then we turn a corner to find a wall text that explains the hierarchy of academic painting, from history at the top to landscape at the bottom. This is odd information, but maybe it's just here for some broad (really, really broad) context. Maybe it's here to make the art historians feel comfortable while the rest of us enjoy the hell out of some art that's not in any edition of Gardner's Art Through the Ages. There's no way they're going to organize this show according to a stodgy European concept that white guy academic painters came up with in the 17th century so they could figure out who the best white guy academic painter was. Right?
But they do.
They shoehorn the first half of the show into this hierarchy, and it sucks the life right out of the work. Everything fits in its category just so. No one is allowed to get rowdy. No ideas are allowed to cross-pollinate. It's as if Charles Le Brun himself walked out of the 17th century and into the galleries and said put this here and that, there (but, you know, in French). It's an odd, odd choice for any show that isn't composed of paintings from the European academies, but seems especially misguided for this show in particular, when a significant portion of the work is concerned with the consequences of strict adherence to the antiquated systems of white guys. There is a fantastic and appropriately nonchalant mix in these sections of self-taught and highly trained, vernacular and schooled. But even the glory of the objects from St Paul's Spiritual Holy Temple (and thank Goddess for their inclusion, because they are glorious in every sense of the word) is tamped by the unnecessary weight of an outmoded paradigm, as irrelevant to most of the artists included in the show as it is to the viewers. We don't think this curatorial strategy is an attempt to validate the work by applying a Eurocentric model to it (although a less-than-generous read could claim it as a kind of "African American artists - they're just like you!" statement on behalf of Art History). We do, however, think it's an example of easy curating - reaching for the most convenient model, or the most widely propagated by capital-A Art History, instead of letting the work dictate its own. We should also say that we don't have a great idea of what that model would be (curating is hard, ya'll) but the thematic sections in the second half of the show point toward a more generous, dynamic possibility, albeit an unrealized one.
Once we leave the French Academy of Memphis we find Abstraction, Civil Rights, Music, and the Contemporary - and some air to breathe. There is some fantastic work in these galleries (Chakaia Booker's untitled car tire sculpture stands out, but why is a sculpture which so resolutely occupies three dimensions pressed up against the wall?) and there are some lovely moments plotted out along their walls, beautiful little art-traps that caught and enraptured us. A couple of these - Demetrius Oliver's Till hung next to Ernest Withers' documentation of the trial of Emmet Till's murderers, and a suite of pieces that pull imagery from the sanitation workers' strike - collectively generate an historical and artistic gravity that we don't recall experiencing lately in a Memphis gallery.
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| Ligon's Warm Broad Glow, from a 2011 iteration |
The final section is Contemporary, and though there is a bell hooks quote on the wall, it's not made clear what these works say about the present moment that work in the show's other sections (in which pieces from many eras play nicely together) does not. It feels like a catch-all space, but themes recur in a poetic way. We're given Sonya Clark's comb-quilt, which recalls quilts we saw earlier in the Religion and Abstraction galleries but also takes on a life of its own, part trippy op-art, part cultural statement. Glenn Ligon's Warm Broad Glow is a fittingly tough and ambivalent follow-up to the clarion calls of the nearby Civil Rights gallery. If the exhibition's first gallery obliquely references the idea of community, maybe this unwieldy space is its appropriate pendant. Could contemporary be is a place for oddballs and leftovers, those with singular perspective who operate in ambiguous territory outside of known systems? Whatever missteps we feel the exhibition might have made early on, it's great to leave with questions like these.
Soul of a City: Memphis Collects African American Art is at the Brooks Museum through September 2.
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