Return to Provocative Visions: Race and Identity
Since 1994 Chakaia Booker has made abstract sculptures from discarded rubber tires salvaged from city streets, auto body shops, and dump sites. Cutting, shredding, bending, and transforming them into wild organic shapes, she creates objects that evoke the human body and spirit, without being literal representations. Her work addresses social and cultural issues in a metaphoric way, using suggestive titles to hint at deeper meanings. Raw Attraction, for example, comments on gender, sexuality, and the complications that can arise in male-female relationships. Perched on a pedestal like a bird of prey, this sculpture suggests that both pleasure and peril may await the suitor.
This assemblage of women's shoes forms the shape of a man's head—intense and powerful with a strong jaw, heavy-lidded eyes, wide nose, and short hair knots. Piled heel-side up and without embellishment beyond what is on the shoes themselves, Cole imbues these inanimate objects with a human presence. The head's resemblance to nineteenth- and twentieth-century heads and masks from Cameroon is deliberate: "I want them to be links between worldsf. You live in the U. S. but here is a piece of art that looks like it is from another culture and another time, even though the materials in the work are strictly American."
Since the mid-1980s Cole has incorporated steam irons and the scorch-mark patterns they make on a surface into a number of prints, sculptures, and installation pieces. His work imbues simple everyday objects with powerful associations that allude to tribal masks, ritual scarification, slave ships, and domestic housework. In this triptych the artist's digitally altered portrait appears twice (at left and right, where it is upside-down), formed by joining two left sides of his face. The Proctor Silex iron depicted in each panel (from above and below), forces us to consider the disturbing issues that lie beneath the surface of his seemingly familiar imagery.
Ligon's paintings and prints frequently juxtapose pictures and captions, but in many cases, they consist of words alone, excerpted from famous writings by James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Zora Neale Hurston, among others. His stenciling, which is deliberately smudged and frequently illegible, illustrates each author's message, even as he obfuscates their actual words. In the two black-on-white prints in this portfolio, he repeats a different line from Hurston's essay "How it Feels to Be Colored Me" (1928): "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background" and "I do not always feel colored." In the black-on-black prints, he repeats the same passage, with different line breaks, from Ellison's prologue for Invisible Man (1952): "I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me."
The stylized figures and descriptive texts on the ten prints in the Runaways portfolio resemble the classified ads and broadsides that were placed by nineteenth-century slave owners. Like the originals, they contain information that could assist in identifying a runaway slave, including physical characteristics, personality traits, and clothing. Here, however, Ligon himself is the subject of the ads and the descriptions are provided by his friends. As with much of his work, he creates a paradox between the impersonal advertisements for lost "property" and the autobiographical information given.
The text on this print reads: Ran away, Glenn, a black man—early 30s, very short cropped hair, small oval wire-rimmed glasses. Wearing large black linen shirt with white buttons, dark navy shorts, black socks and shoes. Black-and-white bead bracelet and silver watch on left wrist. No other jewelry. He has a sweet voice, is quiet. Appears somewhat timid.
Beginning in the mid-1990s Lovell constructed a number of tableaux—individual wall hangings, like this one, as well as entire room installations—that combined portrait drawings on wooden boards with assorted found objects that were hung or assembled nearby. Basing the portraits on late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century studio photographs collected at flea markets and found in photographic archives, he conveys the dignity of ordinary people dressed in their Sunday best. By adding objects that symbolize their personal belongings, occupations, or living conditions, the artist invents a story about their daily lives and retrieves them from anonymity. Like the objects, Lovell's titles add another layer of meaning, but remain ambiguous. Here the title is appropriated from an old Southern blues song that repeats the refrain "Wise like that, wise like that I mean / And everyday has brought me somethin' I ain't never seen."
According to the artist, she makes prints as "post-studies" of her sculptures, reevaluating the imagery "in graphic terms." In this work, she reprises the subject of her 1985 painted wooden bust, Snake Charmer (Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.) about which she said: "In my imagination it was a snake charmer, a man who had these powers.... Whether he was a shaman or a gypsy, he could go between people and stir things up." His ability to cause trouble is significantly heightened in the print version, where the man's stony body, blank eyes, and razor-sharp teeth are decidedly more malicious and inhuman.
A recurring theme in Saar's work is the role of women in society. In this piece the specter of a naked woman trussed up by her feet and morphing into a broom is mysterious and disturbing. Yet her flirtatious gesture and the sculpture's title add elements of playfulness. While the manner in which the work is installed recalls the lynchings in the South (described in the 1938 song "Strange Fruit": "Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees"), its form plays on the structure of traditional African fly whisks made with long horsehair. Saar also notes that women, such as the one depicted here, are "the psychic strength within the family" who sweep up the messes in life and clear out the bad spirits.
Simpson began, about 1997, to produce films and video installations that incorporated the imagery and themes she had developed in her previous photographic work. Her interest in cinema and cinematic history, as well as in vintage photography, is combined in Backdrops Circa 1940s, in which she juxtaposes a Hollywood film still of singer-actress Lena Horne (right) with an old studio portrait of an unidentified young woman posed behind a paper moon. One figure represents the epitome of glamour and stardom achieved, while the other, the (possibly unrealized) dreams and aspirations of ordinary folk. Like much of Simpson's work, this work raises questions about identity—how we perceive ourselves and how others see us—especially as it pertains to African-American women.
Silhouettes—those traditionally small and genteel forms of nineteenth-century portraiture—are (sometimes literally) turned on their heads in Kara Walker's work. Since the 1990s she has been making large-scale silhouettes out of cut-black paper as well as prints that are either framed or applied directly to white walls at times around entire rooms. Boldly graphic in their black-on-white design and beautifully crafted with intricate cutouts, these elegant works nevertheless address difficult and heinous subjects in American history related to racial stereotyping, slavery, and the subjugation of women. The artist described this particular figure as "your essentialist-token slave maiden in midair."