From a distance the blue, yellow, pink, green and red flowers in Thornton Dial's "Stars of Everything" (2004) with their simple shapes and 6 or 7 rectangular petals look like something a child may have drawn. Yet, a close-up inspection reveals something else: the flowers are not painted, but they are made with exploded cans and they represent a starry night sky while a spray paint can and a piece of old carpet form a dynamic human figure at the centre of this artwork, an assemblage of recycled and recombined materials.
Dial's artwork is just one of the many intriguing pieces part of the "Souls Grown Deep Like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South" exhibition that opened yesterday at London's Royal Academy (The Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Galleries; through 18th June 2023).
The exhibition explores African American artistic traditions and methods of visual storytelling focusing on the South's painful history and looking at enslavement, the segregationist policies of the Jim Crow era, institutionalised racism, exploitation and inequality in the American South, the horror of white supremacy and the Civil Rights Movement.
As a whole, there are 64 works (the oldest piece is from the 1930s and the latest is from 2021) by 34 artists (23 of whom have passed away) from the mid-20th century to the present, some of them on display for the first time in Europe and most of them from the collection of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, Atlanta, Georgia.
The organization, founded by Atlanta collector William S. Arnett in 2010 and named after a 1921 poem by Langston Hughes ("The Negro Speaks of Rivers"), advocates the inclusion of Black artists from the South in the canon of American art history, and fosters economic empowerment, racial and social justice, and educational advancement in the communities that gave rise to these artists.
The artists featured in the exhibition live and work in the American South, from communities in South Carolina to the Mississippi Delta, in isolated rural areas like Gee's Bend, Alabama, and in urban centres like Atlanta, Memphis and Miami.Born between 1887 and 1965, many of the artists in the exhibition grew up during the Jim Crow era. Their work confronts a series of issues from slavery and the inequalities Black people in America continue to experience while celebrating the African traditions artists inherited or studied.
The majority of them acquired their art-making skills by learning from family members, mentors and friends or through experimentation. While many of them were low on resources, all of them proved to be high on resourcefulness as their challenging economic situations pushed them to find new creative solutions.
Not having access to conventional art materials, many of the artists included in this exhibition learnt to be creative with what they had and employed salvaged materials and found objects to make artworks that show their resilience, tenacity and hope.
The artworks on display include assemblages, sculptures, paintings, reliefs, drawings and textiles as well, but the key to the exhibition is the strong relation between the materials used by the artists and their stories. In the exhibition there are pieces made with rusted tools and empty tins, driftwood, roots, soil, bones and stones, scrap metal and electrical appliances. These objects, transformed by the artists, form a very personal glossary used to write the story of America's painful past, but they are also employed to show how creativity can prevail over racism and financial adversities, over oppression and social marginalisation.
Thornton Dial's "Tree of Life", for example, incorporates fragments of found wood, roots, rubber tires and air freshener to create a monument to his great-aunt, artist Sarah Dial Lockett. The work also reflects his 30 years' experience as a steelworker in Bessemer, Alabama, where his sons, Thornton Jr and Richard (both artists in the exhibition too) also worked.
The Southern landscape has also got a role in the exhibition as several artists use organic materials like mud and salvaged wood taken from the land around them. Dial commemorates in some of his works artist Bessie Harvey (featured in the exhibition with her 1987 work "Untitled") through the natural materials employed by both of them, including tree roots and branches. But the tribute is also a way to comment about how, in exhibitions, only one artist can usually be chosen for a category, something that set Dial and Harvey against each other.
Ralph Griffin crafted instead a bald eagle from a root and salvaged driftwood; Jimmy Lee Sudduth employed mud, blackberry juice and grass stains to forge a relationship with the earth, while Lonnie Holley created a very peculiar record player with a salvaged phonograph top, a chipped vinyl record and an animal skull with a hollow-eyed stare.
Not having access to formal art spaces, these artists ended up displaying their work in their yards, something that led to the "Yard Show", a deeply rooted Southern tradition that started during the Jim Crow era of segregation as a way for Black artists, who were systematically shut out of the art establishment, to display their work on their own terms.
One of the best surviving examples of a yard show is Joe Minter's African Village in America, a sculpture garden on the outskirts of Birmingham Alabama. The works in his yard as well as his independent sculptures address 400 years of American history and the violence, injustices and racism that Black people have been subjected to through the centuries.
Another point to note about these artists is that their skills were handed down: Dial, for example, trained his sons Thornton Dial Jr and Richard Dial and nurtured the talents of his younger cousin Ronald Lockett.
For the quilt-making community of Gee's Bend, learning to sew and make quilts was a creative tradition passed down through generations in their remote Alabama community. "I came to realise that my mother, her mother, my aunts, and all the others from Gee's Bend had sewn the foundations, and all I had to do now was thread my own needle and piece a quilt together," wrote Loretta Pettway.
The all-black community of Gee's Bend, is a key chapter in the history of American art: located at the arc of a bend of the Alabama River within Wilcox County, in the United States, the town of Boykin was originally known as Gee's Bend, after a landowner and slaveholder, Joseph Gee, who in 1816 settled in the area and built a cotton plantation.
After the Civil War, descendants of the slaves from the plantation worked as sharecroppers and, in the 1940s, the land of the former plantation in Boykin was sold in plots by the United States government to local families still living in the Bend.
So, Black and Native residents of the area gained ownership over the same land their families had once forcibly worked within.
With The Great Migration over six million African Americans, forced by economic circumstances, moved from the rural South to the cities of the North, Midwest, and West, but most Gee's Bend's residents remained in Alabama. Many of the current residents are therefore descendants of the enslaved people who worked on the plantation.
Originally Gee Bend's multi-layered quilts incorporating salvaged materials such as worn out clothes and fabric offcuts, were produced for functional purposes and family use, the complexity of their designs reflecting the complex lives of the women who made them.
As the decades passed, the aim and purpose of the quilts changed: in the 1960s, encouraged by Martin Luther King, Jr's visit, community members became active in the Civil Rights Movement, ferrying to the county seat at Camden to register to vote. Authorities reacted by eliminating ferry service, a move that ended up isolating the community and cutting it off from basic services. This isolation fostered a unique environment for their artistic practice.
Local women came therefore together and founded cooperatives with a precise aim in mind - reinventing the traditions and expanding quilting, an art that has often inspired contemporary fashion collections. The exhibition features a selection of works by the Gee's Bend quiltmakers from the 1930s to 2021, including Marlene Bennett Jones who created a geometrical quilt from denim pockets and scraps of red corduroy recycled from a quilt made by her mother.
The oldest work in the show is a quilt from the '30s entitled "Housetop – sixteen-block Half Log Cabin variation" by Rachel Carey George, a continuous tumble of geometric lines that become more intricate towards the lower right. But the display also includes another quilt with a similar name, "Housetop – nine-block Half Log Cabin variation" by Martha Jane Pettway from 1945. In this case the lines form a well-defined optical pattern in a pleasant combination of colours including cream, pistachio green and pale blue with just a hint of lipstick red.
Quite often quilts inspired other works: in his 1997 work "Sarah Lockett's Roses", Ronald Lockett used tin and wood to replicate the formal qualities of quiltmaking, using five colours on interlocked tiles to recreate a quilt-like block of patterns, and pay homage to his neighbour and great-grandmother and her art.
In 2021 London's Royal Academy launched a Decolonial Research Project to investigate the links between the institution and its colonial past, documenting associations between 18th- and 19th-century Royal Academicians and colonial activities and interests, including the ownership of enslaved people or of plantations where enslaved people worked. The Royal Academy ended up uncovering many colonial connections to Academicians. "Souls Grown Deep Like the Rivers" could be interpreted therefore as a further step taken by the gallery towards the decolonisation of this art institution.
"Souls Grown Deep Like the Rivers" is accompanied by a rich programme of events, with musicians, talks and also a quilt-making mini-course entitled "Gee's Bend and beyond"(13th and 14th May 2023) where participants will be able to learn how to create quilts based on the expressive and improvisational quilting techniques used by the artists of Gee's Bend and a weekend (17th and 18th June 2023) dedicated to the history of fabrics that will offer the participants the chance to explore the distinction between contemporary textile art and crafts and the role of textiles.
Image credits for this post
Thornton Dial, Stars of Everything, 2004. Mixed media, 248.9 x 257.8 x 52.1 cm. Souls Grown Deep Foundation, Atlanta. © 2022 Estate of Thornton Dial / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London 2022. Photo: Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio
Ralph Griffin, Eagle, 1988. Found wood, nails, paint, 88.9 x 110.5 x 55.9 cm. Souls Grown Deep Foundation, Atlanta. © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022 Photo: Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio
Lonnie Holley, Keeping a Record of It (Harmful Music), 1986. Salvaged phonograph top, phonograph record, animal skull, 34.9 x 40 cm. Souls Grown Deep Foundation, Atlanta. © 2023 Lonnie Holley / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London. Photo: Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio
Ronald Lockett, Sarah Lockett's Roses, 1997. Tin, nails, and enamel on wood, 129.5 x 123.2 x 3.8 cm. Souls Grown Deep Foundation, Atlanta. © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. Photo: Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio
Marlene Bennett Jones, Triangles, 2021. Denim, corduroy, and cotton, 205.7 x 157.5 cm. Souls Grown Deep Foundation, Atlanta. © 2023 Marlene Bennett Jones / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London. Photo: Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio
Martha Jane Pettway, "Housetop"— nine-block "Half- Log Cabin" variation, c. 1945. Corduroy, 182.9 x 182.9 cm. Souls Grown Deep Foundation, Atlanta. © Estate of Martha Jane Pettway / ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. Photo: Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio
Joe Minter, And He Hung His Head and Died, 1999. Welded found metal, 243.8 x 194.3 x 87.6 cm. Souls Grown Deep Foundation, Atlanta. © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. Photo: Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio
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