‘Community history, ecology politics, indigenous environmentalism, extractive capitalism, and cultural evolution – these meditations on my homeland demonstrate how the art and film-making process can be employed to promote youth empowerment, challenge colonial narratives and disrupt systems of knowledge production.’
(Wilfred Ukpong)
Autograph ABP is a gallery dedicated to work by contemporary Black artists. It’s located just off Shoreditch High Street and is well worth a visit. It contains two gallery spaces, one on the ground, one on the first floor, and admission is FREE. The only slight snag is the opening hours which you need to check before you go (for example, it only opens at 12.30 on Saturdays).
But the thing about Autograph ABP is the work they display is always good and frequently outstanding. It has a case for being the best small gallery in London.
Currently the downstairs gallery, gallery 1, is hosting a display dedicated to recent work by Wilfred Ukpong, titled ‘Niger-Delta/Future-Cosmos’.
The basic premise is an environmental one. Ukpong is protesting – as Nigerian artists, poets, playwrights and film-makers have been doing for decades – about the ruination of the Niger Delta by 70 or more years of ruthless and often careless oil extraction.
Nigeria and oil
Notoriously, Nigeria is a kleptocratic state in which various factions of the ruling elite vie with each other to gain control of the nation’s phenomenal oil revenues in order to steal them for themselves. See the relevant chapter of Tom Burgis’s searing 2015 exposé, The Looting Machine. So cynical is Burgis that he doesn’t bother referring to the president of Nigeria by his formal title but as ‘the captain of Nigeria’s looting machine’ (Burgis page 201) and quotes Nigerian analyst, Clement Nwankwo, describing the country’s largest political party, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) as: ‘not a political party. It’s a platform to seize power and then share the resultant booty’ (Burgis p.203).
Oil was discovered in the delate of the river Niger in 1956 and the enormous wealth it generates for a small elite has been ruining the country for nearly 70 years. Oil currently accounts for 80% of Nigerian government revenue (Burgis p.63).
As a political economy took hold that was based on embezzlement and manipulating public office for private gain, government contracts for the upkeep of public goods that support industrialisation – a functioning electricity system among them – were diverted to the cronies of the rulers of the day. The pattern was the same [in Nigeria] as in Angola or Congo: the more the non-oil economy withered, the greater the impulse to embezzle, perpetuating the cycle of looting. (Burgis p.76)
Countries whose economies are largely reliant on oil production are commonly referred to as a petrostates. A country where the ruler entrenches power in himself and his clique, using authoritarian security forces against any form of protest, is called a petro-dictatorship. But so extreme is Nigeria’s corruption that Burgis coins the phrase petro-nightmare to describe Nigeria’s descent into universal corruption and an endless series of military coups.
To give a sense of the scale of the theft, in 2014 reforming banker Lamido Sanusi estimated that corruption at Nigeria’s national oil company, NNPC, was robbing the national treasury of $1 billion per month (Burgis p.205).
But not only has oil production corrupted and undermined Nigerian politics for over half a century, but it has had a catastrophic impact on the region where most of the oil extraction takes place, in the delta of the mighty river Niger, which covers 27,000 square miles and makes up 7.5% of Nigeria’s land mass. Beside the predictable impact of gas flares and burn-off into the atmosphere, the oil industry in the area has a long sorry history of disastrous oil spills, which has been compounded by a terrorist and insurgent attacks on pipelines from a variety of motivations, from siphoning off raw oil to sheer destructiveness.
The cumulative impact has been to make the Niger Delta one of the most polluted places on earth, and local activists, Nigerian writers and artists, and Western environmentalist groups have been publicising the issue for a long, long time.
How on earth can you, as an artist, respond adequately to such an enormous, ongoing, unstoppable social and environmental apocalypse? Ukpong’s response is simple and compelling – Afrofuturism.
(I first encountered Afrofuturism at the Barbican’s 2017 science fiction show, Into The Unknown, where it was represented by the mysterious 2009 film Pumzi, directed by Wanuri Kahiu. Ukpoki’s vision has many things in common with Kahiu’s.)
Niger-Delta/Future-Cosmos
So Ukpong has taken his response to this disaster in his home region into an alternative reality and a strange and visionary future. The show consists of just eight photos and 2 videos but they are all riveting. All the photos are fantastic expressions of Ukpong’s vivid and striking Afrofuturism, very big, super-clear digital photos of Black people painted a deep shade of oil black and wearing strange curled headpieces, photographed in strange poses holding mysterious devices or artefacts.
As the curators put it (and I apologise for the recap of the economic and social issues I’ve outlined above):
Once a major producer of palm oil for British colonisers, the Niger Delta is considered the mainstay of the Nigerian economy for its large oil reserves and its rich biodiversity due to the presence of rivers, mangroves, freshwater forests, and marine estuaries. In recent years, the region has been at the centre of environmental and social justice campaigns, challenging the pollution caused by major spills and flares at the hands of oil and gas industry giants.
The works in the exhibition are all set in the Niger Delta, Ukpong’s homeland. Driven by a profound desire to effect change, the artist worked with more than two hundred young people from marginalised, oil-producing communities to collectively address the historical and environmental issues in the oil-rich region.
The resulting photographs and film powerfully reference local rituals, ceremonial motifs, and symbols interwoven into a complex future cosmology.
All the photos are beautifully composed, beautifully clear, sunlit of strange objects, rituals, dress. I loved the weirdness and otherness of it. I loved the digital clarity of the images. I love science fiction so this pushed all my buttons right down to the great way all the photos are embedded in frames made from shiny black plastic folded into metal rods in such a way as to convey the sense of a rippling flood of black oil cascading around the alien future people captured in the photos.
They are so strong and clear and strangely imagined and beautifully designed and stunningly photographed. In their strong incomprehensibility they make perfect sense of mankind’s absurd destruction of the natural world. When reality is absurd, why not respond absurdly?
First film: FUTURE-WORLD-EXV
As well as the eight photos there are two films in this exhibition. The first, in the main room alongside the wonderful photos, is titled ‘FUTURE-WORLD-EXV’ and is 16 minutes long.
It is set in the year 2060 and follows a (Black) oil worker who is haunted by dreams of environmental disaster before coming to a grisly end on a wide smooth beach where his corpse is discovered by women members of a people who live in a watery environment and worship a water goddess. It is weird and it is absolutely wonderful.
In the particular scene I watched one particular woman covered in freckled white paint laments over his corpse, rubs and strokes it before climbing onto his body and then, lo, the body has also become white and speckled and the corpse animates, he gets up, they hold hands and walk into the waves. Sounds a bit clichéd but I found it genuinely strange and intense and riveting.
Installation view of ‘FUTURE-WORLD-EXV’ by Wilfred Ukpong, showing the final scene as the speckled man and woman walk into the waves, wearing the distinctive headgear of Ukpong’s futureworld. Photo by the author
Second film: Earth Sounds
The second film is set apart from the suite of 8 photos and the first film, which are linked by the vibrant colours and strange headgear of his science fiction futureworld. This one is titled ‘Earth Sounds’ and dates from 2021. It is 30 minutes long and less plotted and structured than ‘FUTURE-WORLD-EXV’.
It is the film of a performance in which Ukpong, again almost naked, flanked by two masked women carrying heraldic black flags, journeys on a wooden boat (a traditional canoe?) across a narrow waterway cluttered with mangroves or swamp plants, bushes and trees hemming them in. In this boat Ukpong is a shaman, performing obscure rituals, often involving a peculiar artefact, a yard-long circular wooden chest, painted red with yellow insignia of some sort, bound with heavy black metal clasps and with carved faces at each end.
Maybe the shaking of branches and the strange sounds he makes are invocations, designed to protect the Niger Delta from its dreadful despoliation. Whatever’s going on it is weird and wonderful up to the moment when the shaman kisses the wooden face on the chest and then, ritualistically, throws it into the polluted swamp water, and then dives in after it.
This isn’t high-budget Hollywood production values, there’s an obvious amateurishness to the camerawork and the sound quality, but this makes it all the more vivid and immediate, in all its mysterious, hypnotic power. Strange, compelling.
Summary
All this, all these ideas, designs, visions, images, sounds and movements, all of it happens in just one medium-sized gallery, but I came out reeling from the brilliant conception and luminous enactment of Ukpong’s brilliant vision.
The Royal Academy has discovered that Britain used to have an empire, and that this empire and many other aspects of British culture and economy were deeply indebted to the Atlantic slave trade and wants to tell everyone about it! Those of us who have known, read and written about the British Empire and the Atlantic slave trade for a quite a long time are not quite as excited about these great discoveries as the curators of this exhibition are.
But then we don’t work for an organisation like the Royal Academy which, like a growing number of British institutions (banks, insurance companies, the Church of England, the National Trust) are coming under pressure to uncover, publish and apologise for all their institutional connections with slavery and imperialism.
Installation view showing ‘The First Supper (Galaxy Black)’ by Tavares Strachan (2023), commissioned specially for this exhibition
So that’s what this exhibition is about. It is a huge, dazzling and quite exhausting exhibition about the links between Slavery and the Royal Academy, ‘informed by our ongoing research of the RA and its colonial past.’ Featuring over a hundred works by around 50 artists connected to the RA, it is designed:
‘to explore themes of migration, exchange, artistic traditions, identity and belonging.’
A theme of our times
These, as anyone who reads my blog knows, are the same kinds of themes which dominate most contemporary art exhibition. Notable recent examples which focus on empire, slavery or the Black experience include:
Of all of these shows Entangled Pasts most resembles the 2016 Tate show which took a very straightforward view of the British Empire and colonial guilt, and mixed up classical works from the 18th and 19th centuries with bang up-to-date pieces by contemporary Black artists. Same here. Maybe the most striking thing about this huge show is the way that it deliberately mixes up past and present, into a sometimes confusing, a-chronological, thematic display.
So paintings by old masters like Royal Academy founding president Joshua Reynolds, John Singleton Copley and J.M.W. Turner are presented alongside works by what the curators call ‘leading contemporary British artists of the African, Caribbean and South Asian diasporas’, including by Ellen Gallagher, Yinka Shonibare and Hew Locke, Sonia Boyce, Frank Bowling and Mohini Chandra.
The exhibition starts from the fact that the Royal Academy was founded in 1768, at more or less the peak of the transatlantic slave trade. Some of its early members actually owned slaves, but most of them certainly painted portraits of rich people who derived their wealth from sugar or tobacco plantations which were worked by slave labour, generally painting their portraits in England or, occasionally, painting life on slave plantations in the colonies.
Britain banned the slave trade in 1807, although the legal condition of slavehood wasn’t abolished until much later, in 1833. So for the fifty years or so between the founding of the Academy (1768) and the final abolition of slavery in the British colonies (1833) people at all levels of British society continued to benefit from slave labour – at the low end of the social scale, workers in factories using raw cotton from American plantations, at the high end, rich plantation owners, merchants and companies which benefited from the profits of the slave triangle.
So the early part of the exhibition brings together lots of work by Royal Academicians which:
portray rich slave owners and their plantations
portray families in Britain who benefited directly or indirectly from slave labour
more generally portray Black people in the 18th and 19th centuries, many of whom have a backstory involving slavery and liberation
These early works provide an impressive and interesting range of paintings to look at, enjoy, and read picture captions about. In addition there are display cases containing relevant relics, such as early editions of memoirs by freed slaves such as Olaudah Equiano or Frederick Douglass, and correspondence about them with various members of the Academy.
As it happens, I’ve written for this blog a detailed summary of Douglass’s most famous work:
But right from the first room, mixed up with all these classical works are a variety of much more modern pieces by predominantly Black artists, including bang up-to-date pieces and some works commissioned specially for the exhibition.
I was expecting to mostly like the classical pieces but was impressed by a lot of the contemporary work. Some was super-memorable, like Hew Locke’s installation of a fleet of model boats, created with loving attention to detail, and suspended from the ceiling to create an ‘armada’. As a keen model-maker, I really loved these.
Installation view of ‘Armada’ by Hew Locke (2017 to 2019) Photo by the author
The videos
What nothing I’d read had prepared me for was the impact of the two enormous videos. An entire room has been hung with thick red velvet curtains to create a heavy Victorian flavour and onto a big wall-sized screen is projected a nicely-shot and powerful 26 minute film by Isaac Julien about the African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass who, during his active years in the 1840s and 50s, was ‘the most photographed person in the USA’ and a tireless campaigner against slavery. Here’s a clip:
In my opinion moving pictures quite eclipse static ones in interest and imaginative power which is why I am prejudiced against films and movies – their appeal is too immediate and visceral and flashy. Watching a movie and then returning to a book or painting is like staring at the sun and then looking back at trees or flowers, you are too dazzled to register their much weaker but more profound content. In this exhibition the two videos were beautifully made, with powerful polemical messages but, in my opinion, tended to drain the impact of the paintings.
This was even more true of the second video piece, an enormous installation towards the end of the exhibition. This is ‘Vertigo Sea’ by John Akomfrah, which involves the projection of immaculate, high definition videos onto three enormous screens. The piece dates from 2015 and lasts a whopping 48 minutes.
The 3 or 4 minutes I watched contained awesome footage of whales cavorting in the southern seas (according to the wall label, the film incorporates footage from the legendary BBC Natural History unit) before introducing old black and white footage of whales being harpooned by whaling ships, dragged aboard and their carcases eviscerated. This was unpleasant enough but was intercut with shots of Black people in chains washed up on a beach, presumably intended to depict victims of the vast evil of the slave trade, so I could sort of see a connection, how an instrumental view of others – whether people or animals – leads us to brutality. But then, suddenly, there was black and white footage of an atom bomb going off in the Pacific, and this cut to footage of Japanese survivors of Hiroshima, looking very sick indeed.
So it felt like the whole 48-minute video was turning into a review of humanity’s worst actions and activities (after all, countries like Norway and Japan still pursue commercial whaling). It felt like a long powerful Feel Bad movie and, as someone who reads the daily news headlines, I really don’t need any more bad news to tip me over the edge.
Responses
This brings me to my responses to the exhibition. Well, I can see that the basic premise – a review of the involvement of the Royal Academy and leading individual academicians to the issues of slavery and empire and then, by extension, attitudes to race and ethnicity, from its founding to the present day – is valid and interesting. And many of the works from the classic period (18th and 19th centuries) had interesting wall labels which highlighted direct links between the grand, beautifully dressed sitters for various portraits and their involvement in the slave trade, members or the aristocracy and royal family, portraits of plantation life, and much more.
But when art curators write about history you start to get into difficulties. Art curators are not historians. They are paid to keep up with developments in art studies, they are not trained to undertake historical research or to assess new evidence and ideas in historical studies.
It is this, I think, which accounts for the way that this and all the exhibitions about slavery and imperialism I’ve been to feel – no matter how thorough their selection of works of art and how scrupulous the art historical research has been – from a purely historical perspective, shallow and superficial.
If we take ‘history’ to be the record of all human activity, then you can’t just take an enormously long period, from the start of the European slave trade around 1500 until the cessation of slave trading to places like Brazil in the 1900s – and make it all about just one issue.
1. A simplistic view of imperialism
It may be true to say that a good deal of the history of the European nations from the 1500s to the 1960s was affected by or heavily involved in, imperial and colonial activities, but the more you simplify that huge and multifarious history down to the two ‘issues’ of slavery and imperialism, the more you realise you are missing out on all the multiple complexities which make it ‘history’.
To take an obvious aspect, for most of that period, the European nations were at one another’s throats with an enormous number of wars, on mainland Europe and at sites around the world. If we focus on the period from the founding of the Academy, you have the Seven Years War, then the American War of Independence, and then the gargantuan Napoleonic wars between Britain and France. At the end of the period you have the two great conflicts of the twentieth century.
So both the trade and the broader activity of imperialism must be set against the complex, troubled conflicts between the colonial powers and the permanently shifting web of alliances they created, other people’s battles which the populations of Africa, in particular, found themselves caught up in (resentment against fighting in the white man’s wars is a recurring theme of the three novels by Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o which I recently reviewed).
Presenting ‘imperialism’ as just the One Bad Thing which characterises the history of Western Europe misses out on all the multitudinous complexity of imperialism in practice, and its complex embedding in a host of other historical, economic, social and military realms. The best introduction to this complexity that I know of are John Darwin’s brilliant books:
The first one, in particular, goes into great detail about the many types of imperial enterprise which came under the heading imperialism (commercial, military, territorial, legal and so on) and the more you read, the more vastly complicated and confusing the subject becomes.
It also makes the staggeringly obvious but often forgotten point that, for most of history, most human beings have lived under empires. Empires have been the usual way in which societies have been organised for as long as we have written records. Therefore, the European empire builders were simply expanding a mode of social organisation which can be found in the Chinese Empire, the Assyrian Empire, the Egyptian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Persian Empire, the Aztec Empire, the Inca Empire, the Mongol Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, and many others.
One of the interesting questions, from an intellectual or historical point of view, is how the European empires differed from the many, many empires which preceded them or existed alongside them. And that is the kind of question, triggering detailed and sophisticated analysis, which makes studying the concept of empire, as explained by professional historians, so rewarding – but visiting simple-minded, dumbed-down exhibitions like this so shallow and frustrating.
It’s not that an exhibition like this one which presents ‘imperialism’ as one thing, carried out by one group of people – ‘white people’ or ‘Europeans’ – with one sole aim in mind, which was the exploitation of all non-white peoples, is wrong, exactly – it’s just that it’s so simplistic. It doesn’t begin to capture the multi-layered complexity of everything that happened over such a long period of time.
2. A simplistic view of slavery
Similarly, the exhibition takes a very simple view of slavery, which is that it was something done exclusively to Black Africans by white European nations who were all as bad as each other and had no redeeming features. There are, of course, numerous caveats to this naive idea.
1. Slavery is a universal human institution. It existed in all the empires I listed above. The Romans exported slaves from Britain. the Vikings captured Saxons as slaves. When William of Normandy conquered Britain in 1066 an estimated 10% of the population were slaves. But there’s not much here about the Roman slave trade, the Viking slave trade or Saxon slavery because they’re the wrong kinds of slaves, white slaves.
2. About a million white Europeans were carried off into slavery by Arab raiders:
Many historical studies exist but you won’t find them mentioned in exhibitions like this. Wrong kind of slaves.
3. Slavery existed in Africa before Europeans ever arrived.
4. Slavery existed between Black people who. Before the advent of Europeans with their binary notions of ‘black’ and ‘white’, Africans divided themselves into numerous tribes, all of which were continually fighting and jockeying for power with their neighbours, some of which rose to becomes ’empires’, such as the Empire of Mali (1226 to 1670) or Greater Zimbabwe (1220 to 1450). But the history of Black imperialism and of Black-on-Black slavery are rarely if ever mentioned in exhibitions like this.
5. Long before Europeans arrived, there was a thriving Arab slave trade, the systematic kidnapping of Black Africans by Arab slavers who shipped them across the Sahara or up the East coast to the slave-hungry markets of the Arab heartlands. For a comprehensive description see Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora by Ronald Segal (2001). Segal cites scholars Ralph Austen, Paul Lovejoy and Raymond Mauvey who estimate the total number of black Africans trafficked into the Islamic world between 650 and the twentieth century was between 11 and 14 million i.e. directly comparable to the number trafficked in the transatlantic slave trade we hear so much about. None of this alleviates the guilt and responsibility for the Atlantic slave trade, it just puts it in wider, fuller historical context – but it is rarely if ever mentioned in exhibitions like this because the enslavers weren’t white, and this is an exhibition about white guilt.
6. Once the Europeans arrived, Black Africans conspired to capture and sell their African ‘brothers and sisters’ to the slavers. The full extent of the complicity of Black tribes and leaders in capturing and selling into captivity other Blacks is rarely if ever mentioned in exhibitions, nor how it continued long after the British banned slavery and tried to stamp out slave trading at its source in Africa.
All these omissions are glossed over and suppressed because exhibitions like this, and entire subject of imperialism and slavery in broader cultural discourse, in the media, in education, is less about these messy complexities and more about emphasising white guilt, British guilt.
Taken together, all these omissions build up an impression that only white Europeans are capable of evil and exploitation. The implication throughout, in every wall label, video and caption, is that no Africans or non-white groups ever did anything wrong, that all Black people were always and everywhere only the innocent victims of the appalling trade. It’s an impression encouraged by the complete omission of any reference to the Arab slave trade.
I’m not saying the Atlantic slave trade wasn’t a monstrous evil, a crime against humanity, a scar on European history, a scandal whose damning legacy we may well never escape from. I’m just making the fairly obvious point that like any other historical event which took place over hundreds of years, across two or three continents and involved scores of millions of people, it was a very complicated phenomenon, which breaks down into countless millions of smaller actions and events. The interest, for me at any rate, is precisely in the full historical complexity, not in simplistic naming and shaming.
To someone like me the interest of history is in the complexity of human affairs and the often counter-intuitive nature of people and events. That’s one of the things which I would have thought make art and literature valuable – their capacity to surprise us in the same way that people we know, even the ones we think we know well, sometimes surprise us. Unexpected twists. Strange ironies. Moments of humanity amid the darkness.
But in an exhibition like this there are no surprises. Empire bad. Slavery bad. White people bad. Britain bad. Anyone who disagrees with these uninflected sentiments runs the risk of being ostracised or cancelled because the conflation of empire and slavery, and a uniform, unquestioned condemnation of both, have become the new cultural orthodoxy, and nuance, complexity and contradiction, questioning and curiosity, are not welcome.
7. One last point, the guilt of the British (traders, businessmen, plantation owners, politicians, army, artists) is hammered home in wall label after label, caption after caption, for running this wicked, evil thing the British Empire. But something you rarely if ever see referred to is that, once the wicked British Empire had gotten round to banning the slave trade in 1807, the Royal Navy, the British Army, countless British missionaries and a good deal of British diplomatic activity was deployed to get other countries to follow suit – to ban slavery, to end the Arab slave trade in Africa, and to intercept ships carrying slaves across the Atlantic and set them free.
The naval campaign against slavery is documented in books such as:
But none of the slavery and empire exhibitions I’ve visited ever mention the huge cost in men, resources, time, money and effort which Britain devoted to trying to end the slave trade. Why not? Because these exhibitions aren’t about presenting a complete review of all the historical evidence, in its vast and confusing complexity – they are about making the simple-minded political points relevant to our present cultural concerns and anxieties.
After a while the systematic erasure and suppression of all these other strands and of the broader context starts to look more like propaganda than history.
Installation view of ‘I’ll bend but I will not break’ by Betye Saar (1998) which combines a white sheet as worn by the Ku Klux Klan with an ironing board showing the famous image of slaves packed into a slave ship (for the importance of this iconic image see Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery by Adam Hochschild). Photo by the author
Labels or works?
As I’ve mentioned lots of times, my friend Andrew the designer long ago stopped reading the wall labels at art exhibitions. He just strolls around responding to the art works as contemporary artefacts, reacting to shapes and designs, patterns and poses, colours and textures, as he finds them.
Unfortunately, I had a lot more of a literary education than him and am addicted to texts, so I’m the kind of visitor who reads every single wall label, sometimes several times, in order to orientate myself within the curators’ worldview and claims.
Very often I end up disagreeing with these labels because curators have only one job, which is to write just enough to justify their exhibition and their selection of works but nowhere near enough to deeply analyse and work through the issues which they routinely raise, name-check, and then leave hanging.
Art curators’ grasp of history is generally superficial and is always selective, carefully selected to make the kinds of points that will justify, market and promote exhibitions which are themselves responding to contemporary times and trends.
Art galleries (surprise surprise) have to make money. They need visitors and so have to wait until they think a blockbuster exhibition like this will be commercially viable i.e. until pretty much all the ideas in it have become common currency and widely accepted, in this case, by the kind of people who visit Royal Academy exhibitions. This is why so many of the big exhibitions tend to be on trend but rarely ahead of it.
And what could be more on trend, what is dominating the news and the political agenda these days more than issues of race and ethnicity, what with politicians and businessmen accusing each other of racism, and making outrageous slurs against Black and Asian people? (I am, of course, referring to the scandalous remarks allegedly made by businessman and Conservative Party donor Frank Hester about former Labour MP Diane Abbott, coming hot on the heels of former Conservative Party deputy chairman Lee Anderson’s outrageous comments about London mayor Sadiq Khan)
And these recent controversies involving (Conservative) politicians’ views about Black and Asian people come against the grim backdrop of the 7 October Hamas attack into Israel and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza, which have, apparently, triggered an alarming rise in incidents of both antisemitism and Islamophobia.
Political, social and cultural problems or issues around race, and the role of the British Empire whose legacy, in the form of a deeply multicultural society we now live in, could hardly be more topical.
The way this kind of exhibition is following public opinion, not leading it, is clearly indicated by the press release for the show. This explicitly states that the curators were reacting to events and responding to public opinion, not shaping it.
The exhibition was programmed in 2021 in response to the urgent public debates about the relationship between artistic representation and imperial histories. These debates were prompted by the Black Lives Matter protests and the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol in 2020.
All of this, the responsive nature of the thinking behind this exhibition and the fraught nature of recent headlines about race and racism, all explain why the show feels in many places more like an extension of the news – illustrated by a selection of works from the Royal Academy archives – than an exhibition in its own right – because that’s, in a sense, what it is.
Then again, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the omission of the more complex perspectives I mentioned above (Darwin, Segal) rubbed me up the wrong way and gave me an unduly negative view of the whole thing.
Maybe I should be more like Andrew the gay designer, who strolls around the same exhibitions as me, but never gets cross or confused because he never reads the curators’ wall labels and so never takes issue with them. Instead he simply delights in the wonderful things that he encounters – an armada of model boats hanging from the ceiling (Hew Locke), a sculpture of a woman with a globe for ahead struggling up some broken stairs (Yinka Shonibare), beautifully realistic portraits of Black men, women and children from the 18th century (Reynolds, Copley), not one but two rooms full of life-sized cartoon cut-out figures of Black people in colourful costumes (Lubaina Himid), two enormous immersive film installations (Isaac Julien, John Akomfreh), and the many other visual and artistic delights this huge and dazzling exhibition has to offer.
As the topics of race, imperialism, immigration, identity and gender become ever more dominant in the art world as in the so-called ‘real’ world, so, apparently, does the need to warn people about some of the exhibits found in these exhibitions.
Long ago in the 1960s and 70s the aim of radical art was to shock the staid bourgeoisie. Nowadays, the exact opposite is the case. Anything which might possibly shock or trigger any possibly type of visitor has to be flagged up in advance with multiple warnings.
Tate did it very prominently in their exhibition about the British Baroque because it contained some paintings of Black slaves in chains. This exhibition also comes with a general warning:
This exhibition contains themes of slavery and racism. Some works include historical racial language and violent imagery.
And by the doorways into some of the individual rooms there are warnings that you are about to be confronted with upsetting imagery depicting racism and slavery. We didn’t use to need these kinds of warnings. Now we do. They are straws in the wind indicating the huge social and cultural changes which we are all living through.
Related links
Entangled Pasts continues at the Royal Academy continues until 28 April 2024
Landscape painting is associated with the classical tradition, with nostalgic views of often idealised landscapes (in England, by painters such as Gainsborough and Reynolds in the 18th century, via Constable in the 19th, and onto 20th century artists as varied as Ravilious or David Hockney). Above all it is associated with white, male, historical artists, and Dulwich Picture Gallery is home to numerous works by masters of landscape painting, in Britain and Europe.
And so the thought naturally arises: why not gather together works by non-white artists, by contemporary living artists who, in a host of different ways, can offer new and interesting perspectives on a well-worn subject? Hence this exhibition, ‘a contemporary retelling of landscape by artists from the African Diaspora.’
It sounds like a simple enough proposition but raises a surprising number of questions and issues, problems and perplexities, which I try to address through the course of this review.
Scope
‘Soulscape’ features about 33 works (20 paintings, 2 textiles, 10 photos and 2 videos and a video installation) by 21 contemporary Black artists. The works include large-scale pieces, a site-specific installation, and a big new painting commission from Michaela Yearwood-Dan. They cover a wide variety of media including photography, film, tapestry and collage. And they are all very 21st century. The oldest work is from 2012 but that’s an outlier, most are much more recent. I counted five a piece from 2020, 2022 and 2023. It’s up-to-the-minute stuff.
Some of the artists I’d heard of before, namely the film-maker Isaac Julien, photographers Marcia Michael and Mónica de Miranda because I’ve been to exhibitions of their work at the Black gallery, Autograph ABP (and de Miranda also features in Tate Britain’s current Women in Revolt! exhibition). But most of the rest were, to my shame, completely new to me.
As you might expect the show goes way beyond traditional limited interpretations of ‘landscape’ to bring in a host of weighty themes and ideas. Dulwich Picture Gallery is a relatively small space, made up of four consecutive galleries (with a small broom cupboard of a mausoleum at the break between rooms 2 and 3) and the rooms have each been assigned themes or topics, being: belonging, memory, joy and transformation.
1. Belonging
Room one is arguably the best room in the show. It contains just four big works, but I liked them all. They have been selected to illustrate the theme of belonging. I’m going to quote the curators’ introduction in full:
Belonging is fundamental to the human experience. It is intrinsically linked with our relationship to landscape and our place in the world. We can feel an emotional affinity to a place through shared histories, as well as being rooted somewhere through a collective identity.
Each artist here offers a unique perspective in the way their work draws links between self and nature. They reflect on the intersections of felt experience and the traditional understanding of belonging, often against the backdrop of colonial history, migration, and the complexities of disputed territories.
‘Limestone Wall’ (2020) is a large-scale painting by Hurvin Anderson, depicts the tropical foliage of Jamaica and explores the artist’s relationship to his ancestral homeland. The curators write:
Anderson is the youngest of eight children born to Jamaican parents, the only one born in England. His work reflects an attempt to reconcile his inherited and imagined knowledge of Jamaica with his own limited experience of the landscape. ‘Limestone Wall’ invites us to consider the liminality of belonging through a landscape that was inspired by photographs taken on a visit to Jamaica.
‘The liminality of belonging’. For those not familiar with curatorspeak, liminality means ‘the quality of being in between two places or stages, on the verge of transitioning to something new’. It’s in fact a term taken from anthropology where it indicates ‘the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete’ (Wikipedia).
This is, as you can see, a big and complex idea to attach to a painting of what looks like some kind of terrace (of a café, maybe?) set against a lush green tropical jungle.
The idea that immigrants, emigrants, the children of people who have emigrated from one society to settle in another and who remain, in some sense, between two worlds, and two identities, is a Central Issue of Our Times, and runs like a thread through all the rooms in the exhibition.
The question which this first room raised for me was not the one the curators intended, about belonging or identity etc, but more like: Does the knowledge about the artist’s family background and immigration status (I apologise if this is insensitive phrasing, all I mean is knowledge of whether the artist comes from a family which has emigrated from an African country to somewhere in the West, Europe or America), does and should this knowledge affect our appreciation of the art?
On one level it doesn’t matter at all to me, I don’t care where any artist comes from or what their ethnic background is. I’ve come to an art gallery, I’m looking at 30 or so paintings (and a couple of videos) and deciding which ones I like purely on the basis of how they look and how they make me feel. But it matters a lot to the curators. It’s the curators who’ve made it an issue, because it’s the curators who include this ‘immigration information’ in almost every wall label, as well as in the articles which accompany the show in the Dulwich Gallery magazine.
This is the room which hosts the pieces by Marcia Michael and Mónica de Miranda. Of the Miranda triptych of photos, the curators write:
De Miranda, a Portuguese artist with Angolan ancestry, explores the poetry of belonging throughout her work. This piece, from the series ‘The sun does not rise in the north’, investigates the physical and mental concept of borders and migration. Depicting landscapes that witness hope, de Miranda examines the complexity of migrant histories in Europe in relation to the politics of land. The three figures, standing amid breaking waves, lead us to consider the limitations of belonging.
Sun rise (detail) by Mónica de Miranda (2023) Courtesy of the artist and Sabrina Amrani Gallery, Madrid
She’s also represented by ‘When words escape, flowers speak’, massive digital photos of twin Angolan sisters standing in the seemingly natural but carefully constructed landscape of the botanical gardens of Floresta da Ilha (Island Forest) in Angola’s capital city, Luanda. The curators describe this city, Luanda, as bearing ‘a history of colonial presence’. Well, yes, Luanda ‘bears’ quite a bit more than that, since Angola gained independence in November 1975 and was immediately plunged into a devastating civil war which lasted, with interludes, until 2002, leaving up to 800,000 dead and the country’s economy and infrastructure in ruins. See my reviews of:
As so often, as in Tate Modern’s excellent exhibition of African photography, the (white liberal) curators bang on at great length about the evils of the colonial period, and simply ignore the 60 years of civil wars, military coups, famines and kleptocratic dictatorships which have ravaged Africa since the end of the colonial era.
On the big wall facing the entrance is Marcia Michael‘s 2022 work, ‘Ancestral Home 45’, from the series ‘The Object of My Gaze’. It’s a photograph of a jungle scene which has been mirrored vertically and horizontally to create a dazzling image of a tropical landscape.
Kaleidoscopic and mesmerising, this photographic work is a meditation on the sense of belonging that can be evoked through immersion in nature. It was created from a series of images captured by Michael on a visit to her late mother’s homeland in Jamaica.
2. Memory
Room two is devoted to memory. The curators, again, make a number of sweeping claims:
Landscapes have the power to unlock feelings that only a particular place can activate. Sometimes these memories are nourishing and affirming and at other times they are challenging, making us feel unwelcome or excluded. The artists in this section explore the space in between these extremes.
Do landscapes ‘have the power to unlock feelings that only a particular place can activate’? Maybe. It’s a big claim, a big thought.
This room contains the most works, with 8 or so paintings and fabrics, 6 photos, plus a video and a still from a video.
The video is by Harold Offeh, is titled ‘Body Landscape Memory. Symphonic Variations on an African Air’ (2019) and is 20 minutes long. It consists of very calm, quiet shots of one, two or three Black people sitting on log benches in what looks like a typical (and typically boring) English park. There’s no dialogue or interaction. The calm scenes are accompanied by music from the early twentieth-century Black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. There’s a web page which gives more explanation, stills and a clip from the video.
The curators give an explanation which is presumably the artist’s, namely that:
These figures are liberated from any racialised notions of victimisation, or suffrage, to reimagine the inclusive possibilities of this romanticised environment.
The complete lack of action or dialogue is the point, and I (think I) understand the political or polemical aim, to show Black people in a nice park, with none of the melodrama or negative stereotypes which usually accompany Black people in TV dramas or movies. Bit boring, though.
In a similar vein, of normalising Black figures in non-urban settings, are two big digital photos by Jermaine Francis.
‘A Pleasant Land J, Samuel Johnson, & the Spectre of Unrecognised Black Figures’ by Jermaine Francis (2023) Courtesy of Artist Jermaine Francis
According to the curators Francis:
considers the issues that arise out of interactions with our everyday environments, positioning the Black figure in rural settings to instigate conversations around power, identity and the history of the English Landscape.
‘Conversations around power, identity and the history of the English Landscape.’ These are hefty topics, walloping great ideas, to simply mention and then leave hanging. For me they are like lead weights which have been hung on the photos, which drag down your response, which channel whatever initial response you have to them as works of art, into an urgent-sounding, political-sounding straitjacket.
And the ideas are just too big to engage with. Am I meant, somehow, to review the entire history of the English landscape based on just these two photographs?
I mentioned Isaac Julien. He’s represented by a big colour photograph, a still from a 2015 film installation Julien made titled ‘Onyx Cave (Stones Against Diamonds)’. The film aimed to celebrate the beauty of natural elements. The sequence the still is from was filmed in the rarely accessible ice caves in the Vatnajökull region of Iceland. It shows a Black figure standing in a beautiful ice-white and azure cave. It is accentuated by the presence of the onyx figure, dwarfed by the magnificence of the backdrop.
But this beautiful, awesome image isn’t enough. Again the curators corral it into one of their polemical concerns about Black inclusion/exclusion from the tradition of landscape art.
Historically, these depictions of cold-climates excluded the Black figure, so its presence here challenges notions of belonging and memory.
Obviously this is an idea implicit in the image, if you choose to read it this way. But if Julien really did intend his piece to be first and foremost a celebration of the beauty of nature, I wonder how he feels about this broad aim being straitjacketed into yet another discussion about Black figures in art. It made me wonder what any of these 21 artists thought about being chosen for this exhibition primarily for the colour of their skin rather than the quality of their work.
Interlude: the Mausoleum
It’s a quirk of Dulwich Picture Gallery that half way through, between rooms 2 and 3, off to one side, there’s a smallish circular room which is actually the mausoleum of three of the founders of the gallery. It is shaped to recall a funeral monument, with urns atop the building on the outside, sarcophagi above the doors and sacrificial altars in the corners.
The back wall is flat and it’s onto this wall that Phoebe Boswell has created a ‘site-specific installation’, namely a big door-shaped projection of a video titled ‘I Dream of a Home I Cannot Know’ (2019). This is a kind of visual collage depicting everyday activities of (Black) people in a beach in Zanzibar. It’s happy and innocent and lovely, with a low soundtrack of laughter and conversation and chat as holiday makers and day trippers runs, skip, play, go swimming, handle fishing boats etc. There are four attractive stools carved from a gnarly old tree because they contain gaps and holes, for visitors to sit on and be nicely lulled. It’s more or less the only piece in the show which really does convey a sense of the happiness and relaxing quality of being out of doors. However, the curators rope it back into their concern with migration, disaporas and the artist’s multi-country identity:
The work is a reflection on belonging, community, freedom, and migration. Boswell is informed by her own history, which spans various geographies and landscapes, and her work navigates the spaces between.
3. Joy
Room 3 is devoted to the theme of Joy. It contains nine works.
The joy that that comes from connecting with nature is a deeply personal and emotional experience. Whether experienced in solitude or socially with others, this feeling is often underlined by the nourishment and release that arises from being at one with the natural world.
The artists here invite us to join with them in sharing this moment of euphoria. For some, this is conveyed through evoking the sensory delight that comes from an immersion in the beauty of nature; the smell of fresh flowers, the feel of petals between one’s fingers. For others, depicting scenes of familial joy that place Black figures into classical pastoral scenes is a way of expanding the possibility for Black bodies to experience true ease and freedom.
‘…expanding the possibility for Black bodies to experience true ease and freedom’ rather begs the question: Do Black bodies currently not experience true ease and freedom? Anywhere? What would it take for Black bodies to experience true ease and freedom? The wall labels begged loads of questions which I found worried and distracted me from the art.
Anyway, I’m afraid I found most of the pieces in this room pretty meh. After strolling through the four rooms four or five times, I came to the settled conviction that I only really liked about ten, about a third of the 33 or so works. Some I found so horrible that I could barely look at them. It would be invidious to single out the really bad ones, but here are some I thought were very average.
‘Unforeseen Journey of Self-Discovery’ by Kimathi Mafafo (2020). The medium is interesting – it’s a hand- and machine-embroidered fabric so that when you get up close, you can see the individual threads and appreciate the extraordinary amount of time and patience it must have taken to make. I just didn’t like the final image very much. Maybe you do. Tastes vary.
‘Unforeseen Journey of Self-Discovery’ by Kimathi Mafafo (2020) Image courtesy of the artist / Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery
However the curators load the work with some rather scary issues.
Mafafo explores the joyous embrace of nature as an act of resistance. The woman emerging from a cocooned veil of white muslin peers out with an air of excitement and wonder. The veil, once a sanctuary of peace and introspection, billows around her playfully as she rediscovers her world, uplifted by the natural beauty that defies the weight of patriarchy and racism.
Looking at the image cold, was your first response be that it is an act of resistance to patriarchy and racism? Maybe it was. But these struck me as being huge, troubling issues to load onto what (I think) is intending to be an image of innocence and natural beauty.
Another work which didn’t light my fire was a set of four paintings by Kimathi Donkor from her ‘Idyl’ series (2016 to 2020).
‘On Episode Seven’ by Kimathi Donkor (2020) Courtesy of the Artist and Niru Ratnam, London. Photo by Kimathi Donkor
These depict:
The concept of Black joy is a central theme of Donkor’s Idyll series. The figures in his painting display gestures of ease, relaxation and shared play between friends and family members. The pleasures of public green space and balmy weather are celebrated as precious gifts of nature, available to uplift us all.
‘Black joy’? Is this a lot different from white joy? Chinese joy? Latinx joy? Asian joy? Then comes then the polemical kicker:
For Black communities, this joy is also a form of resistance against being excluded, silenced or classed as victims.
OK, if this picture is something as serious and politically committed as ‘a form of resistance…for Black communities’, am I even allowed to have a view of whether I like it or not? The other three in the series were all in the same style and, well, I just didn’t like them very much.
On the plus side, the room contained two very good works. Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s lush multimedia piece, ‘Cassava Garden’ (2015), layers images from fashion magazines, pictures of Nigerian pop stars, and samplings from family photo albums to represent a hybrid cultural identity.
I always like collage, whether in its 1910s Cubism, 1920s Weimar or 1960s Pop guides, so I straightaway liked this. But I just responded to the size and feel of this work, it’s big and striking. I liked the way the repeated face of the women embedded in the fabric on the right is at right angles to the picture plane. You can’t really see them in this reproduction but in the two big green leaves at the top are embedded (from left to right) the faces of an African woman and man and they are both stunningly vivid and realistic. Maybe they’re photos somehow worked into the piece. If they were painted they’re extraordinary. And the off-centre positioning of the stalk of what is, presumably, the cassava plant. It all combines to make this one of my favourite pieces from the show. According to the curators:
The Nigerian-born American artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby uses an abstracted collage to engage with the idea of memory. The main feature is the cassava plant, whose broad leaves extend across the canvas and are layered with photographic images of the artist’s family life.
The collage is a reflection on Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s childhood trips to her ancestral land which were marked in her memory by the presence of cassava plants. She also references traditional West African material and patterns, signifying the duality of her cultural identity since making a new life in the USA.
Nearby are two more really good pieces, ‘The Climber’ (2022) and ‘Moonlight Searchers’ (2022) by Che Lovelace which depict the flora, fauna, figures, landscapes and rituals of the Caribbean. Again this catered to my slightly Asperger’s taste for squares and geometric shapes. I immediately responded to the way it consists of four rectangles bolted together, each signalling a different perspective or colour palette on the main composition. And then I liked the rather Cézanne-like way the two naked women are turning into geometric shapes or geometric shapes are emerging from their bodies, beginning to schematise or diagrammatise them. And I liked the colours, especially the green fronds of the palm tree leaves on the left.
‘Moonlight Searchers’ by Che Lovelace (2022) private collection. Courtesy of the artist, Corvi-Mora, Various Small Fires and Nicola Vassell Gallery
According to the curators:
Lovelace reflects on the loving embrace of the landscapes found in his homeland, Trinidad. His depictions of the rhythms of life on the Caribbean island are informed by his rootedness there. The result is a complex and nuanced expression of his sense of identity, as well as an exploration of postcolonialism, resistance, freedom and joy. The division of the canvases into quadrants reflects the interactions between different cultures on Trinidad. Both works show bodies at ease with nature, exploring and connecting with their surroundings.
Once again the wall label raised questions in my mind: Is this painting ‘an exploration of postcolonialism, resistance, freedom and joy’? Or are those just fashionable words thrown at these paintings, combined and recombined in an impressive number of ways but, at bottom, representing just a handful of ideas, none of which actually is actually ‘explored’. Are these terms like confetti thrown at a wedding, bouncing off the central figures and then lying around on the floor till swept up and thrown away?
4. Transformation
The Gallery often reserves the fourth and final room for Big works, acting as a climax to what came before and this exhibition is no exception, the fourth room containing four big, big paintings. The curators explain the theme of transformation thus:
Nature can be a powerful force that changes the way we see the world and its history, as well as equipping us with tools for healing physical and emotional wounds.
This begs so many questions, it left me dizzy. Is nature ‘a powerful force’? What does that mean, exactly? Surely we are part of ‘nature’, every organic thing, plus the geographical and geological environment, surely these are all part of nature? So what does it mean to say that ‘nature’ can change ‘the way we see the world’? How are these terms, ‘nature’ and ‘world’ different? Is it because the curators are assuming that ‘world’ gestures more towards the world of humans the world of culture and technology we surround ourselves with?
And what does it mean to say that ‘nature’ can change ‘the way we see…history’? How, exactly? Does walking through a park change my view of the French Revolution or the Rwanda genocide? I don’t really see the connection?
And these are all implications of just the first half of that sentence. the second half goes on to make the huge claim that ‘nature’ equips us ‘with tools for healing physical and emotional wounds’. Does it? What tools? How?
So I found myself hugely distracted by this simple couple of sentences, my mind buzzing with an explosion of implications and issues, so it took quite a while to settle down and actually look at the works in the room.
These include the one specially commissioned for the show, by Michaela Yearwood-Dan, ‘Another rest in peace – from a holy land in which we came’. It’s a huge landscape-shaped canvas filled with swirling paints, with ceramic petals and other matter stuck to the surface, and I actively disliked it. It looked like an abortion on a canvas and had absolutely no healing impact on me.
Next to it is an equally huge painting of a tropical rainforest which appears to be hanging over a river, although the paint is handled in such a way that it looks like it is melting into the river, an uncomfortable image of distortion, reminding me of the cover art for a science fiction book where some horrible radioactive disaster has struck the world. the grey blobs on the right, from a certain angle, looked like distorted skulls.
‘There Is Water at the Bottom of the Ocean’ by Ravelle Pillay (2023)
This is ‘There Is Water at the Bottom of the Ocean’ by Ravelle Pillay (2023) and, according to the curators:
In this moody and evocative painting, Pillay explores the legacies of colonialism and transformation of painful colonial histories alongside the conflicting nature of historical memory. The lush shoreline sits against the backdrop of a jungle made up of palm trees that appear weighted and changed by the histories they have witnessed. The water seems to hold spectral energy. The artist allows us to consider the way history can affect a landscape and reveal wounds that call for healing and change.
None of that was obvious to me. I just found it huge, overpowering and depressing. Maybe you think differently.
And, finally, a pair of enormous paintings, dominated by orange and browns, by Christina Kimeze, namely ‘Wader (Lido Beach)’ and ‘Interior I’, both painted in 2022. Here’s a link to the Wader, and to the Interior on Kimeze’s website. Actually, in small reproduction they scrub up quite well, the orange palette coming across very powerfully. Also, on the internet you can see installation shots of exhibitions with lots of her works together, which I imagine give a strong cumulative effect.
But here, the context of two other huge and not very appealing works dragged my reaction down into negativity. In the ‘Interior’ I found the space (is it inside a hut?) offputtingly square and rigid, and the depiction of the woman’s shape or outline disconcertingly clumsy and unappealing.
The figure of the pregnant woman in ‘The Wader’ is a lot more appealing, as is the liberal use of purple marking or strokes but, in the flesh, huge and oppressive in a small room, I found both these works the exact opposite of healing or transformative. I couldn’t wait to get away from their looming presence.
Summary
After carefully reading the 40 or so wall labels which repeatedly invoke troubling social and political issues around racism, ethnicity, migration, identity, Black oppression, Black suffering, Black exclusion and Black exploitation, I felt anything but soothed and healed by nature. I felt very troubled and anxious about some of the hottest hot-button issues in modern society. The labels of almost every work have the harassing, hectoring tone of a Guardian article lecturing you about your white privilege and asking what you are going to do for the Black Lives Matter movement. Quite stressful.
As to the healing, joyous and transformative power of nature which the main room captions repeatedly invoke, one minute in the lovely gardens surrounding Dulwich Picture Gallery, amid the deckchairs and playing children and picnicking families, was more instantly and deeply healing and calming than anything I saw in the challenging hour I spent in this difficult and very uneven exhibition.
Exhibiting artists
Njideka Akunyili Crosby
Hurvin Anderson
Michael Armitage
Phoebe Boswell
Kimathi Donkor
Jermaine Francis
Ebony G. Patterson
Alain Joséphine
Isaac Julien
Christina Kimeze
Che Lovelace
Kimathi Mafafo
Marcia Michael
Mónica de Miranda
Harold Offeh
Nengi Omuku
Sikelela Owen
Ravelle Pillay
Alberta Whittle
EVEWRIGHT
Michaela Yearwood-Dan
Promotional video
Related link
Soulscapes continues at Dulwich Picture Gallery until June 2024
From left to right: 1) ‘Sarah Lockett’s Roses’ (1997) by Ronald Lockett, made from cut tin, nails and enamel on wood. 2) ‘Stars of Everything’ (2004) by Thornton Dial, made from paint cans, plastic cans, spray-paint cans, clothing, wood, steel, carpet, plastic straws, rope, oil, enamel, spray paint and Splash Zone compound on canvas on wood. 3) ‘Oklahoma’ by Ronald Lockett (1995) made from found sheet metal, tin, wire, paint and nails on wood. All in room one of ‘Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers’ at the Royal Academy
1. The Souls Grown Deep Foundation
There are two important points to grasp about this exhibition. The main one is that ‘Souls Grown Deep’ isn’t a fancy name dreamed up by the curators but the name of an organisation in America. The Souls Grown Deep Foundation (SGDF) is based in Atlanta, Georgia. It:
advocates for the inclusion of Black artists from the South in the canon of American art history
fosters economic empowerment, racial and social justice, and educational advancement in the communities that gave rise to these artists
Founded by Atlanta collector William S. Arnett in 2010, Souls Grown Deep derives its name from a 1921 poem by Langston Hughes titled ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’. The poem is one of Hughes’s signature works and is worth printing in its entirety:
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
The Souls Grown Deep Foundation stewards the largest and most eminent collection of works by Black artists from the Southern United States. It originally totalled some 1,300 works by more than 160 artists, two-thirds of them women.
Part of the foundation’s remit is publicise and promote these artists beyond America. To this end it energetically partners with galleries around the world and has placed more than 500 works from the collection in 32 museums globally. So this is an example of the foundation’s global outreach program. They came to an arrangement to display a selection of their works at the prestigious Royal Academy in London.
What exactly do we mean by ‘The Deep South’?
Map of the South featured in ‘Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers’ at the Royal Academy
The artists live and work in this region, 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, all indicated on the map.
2. Outsider art
Obviously all the artists are Black Americans, that’s explained by point 1. But just as important is the idea that these artists, growing up in communities in the Deep South, come from outside the mainstream of American art schools and galleries. Some couldn’t afford art school, some were actively excluded on the basis of their colour, others didn’t know about the possibility or care.
So, with little access to formal art education, most of the works on display here were made by artists who developed their own artistic techniques and styles by learning from neighbours, friends and family. Both the foundation and individual artists make a big point of emphasising that these artists came from within very local traditions and communities. In this respect a bunch of photos at the entrance to the show capture the context and vibe of these works in their original settings.
Clockwise from top left: Ronald Lockett standing by ‘Sarah Lockett’s Rose’; Thornton Dial pointing at the camera; Doris Moseley and Mary Margaret Pettway working on a quilt; Purvis Young standing by a canvas; Lonnie Holley giving a thumbs up; Mary T Smith in the middle of a big yard show.
Some used skills they developed when working in industry, such as Thornton Dial and Joe Minter who were metalworkers. These skills were handed down – Dial trained his sons Thornton Dial Jr and Richard Dial and nurtured the talents of his younger cousin Ronald Lockett.
The women of Gee’s Bend, a remote settlement on the Alabama River, have handed down the skills of sewing and making quilts from generation to generation. Artist Loretta Pettway Bennett, featured here, recalls learning to sew by helping her mother and grandmother make quilts.
Raw materials
Coming from outside the mainstream art tradition, many of the artists here recycle and reuse materials available locally – like clay, driftwood, roots, soil, sawdust and all manner of cast-off items, old phones, bicycles, tools, shears, wire, trash and detritus. This gives almost all the works a rough and ready, hand-made appearance. For example this stunning work by Archie Byron (one of my favourites in the show) is made entirely from sawdust and glue!
Anatomy by Archie Byron
Or take these two sculptures, assembled from bits and pieces of bicycle (on the left) and an old tool box, spanner and wire (on the right).
Three-Way Bicycle by Charlie Lucas (c. 1985) made from bicycle wheels, metal machine parts and electrical wiring and Where is My Hammer? by Joe Minter (1996) made from welded found metal
The exhibition
The exhibition brings together 64 works by 34 artists from the mid-20th century to the present. There’s various media including assemblages, sculpture, paintings and drawings, reliefs, and video.
Artists
The artists include Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Ronald Lockett, Joe Minter, Hawkins Bolden, Bessie Harvey, Charles Williams, Mary T. Smith, Purvis Young, Mose Tolliver, Nellie Mae Rowe, Mary Lee Bendolph, Marlene Bennett Jones, Martha Jane Pettway, Loretta Pettway, and Henry and Georgia Speller.
Room 1. Friendships and family ties
The first room is, arguably, the best and showcases work by artists connected by close familial relations and friendships. Lonnie Holley, who had been working as a gravedigger and cotton picker, began sculpting in 1979, when he carved grave markers for a young niece and nephew following their tragic deaths in a fire. Through a former girlfriend he met Thornton Dial, who had worked in farming and as a steelworker before he became an artist. Both artists worked with discarded and salvaged objects and organic materials, transforming them into impressive sculptures and assemblages rich in personal, social and political symbolism.
The most impressive pieces here are by Dial including the biggest piece in the show, the fabulous ‘Stars of Everything’ (see above). But it was the relatively small piece, ‘Keeping a Record of It (Harmful Music)’ by Lonnie Holley (1986) which the curators chose for the exhibition poster. Like all the assemblages here it is made from cannibalised waste and spare parts, in this case a salvaged phonograph top, a phonograph record and an animal skull.
Keeping a Record of It (Harmful Music) by Lonnie Holley (1986)
I don’t know what it’s saying, but it’s saying it very powerfully indeed, a brilliantly powerful, unnerving image.
Room 2. Personal stories, local sources
Working almost entirely without recognition from the wider art world, these southern Black artists drew inspiration from daily life and current events. The resulting works are intensely local in terms of materials, subject and audience, while also bringing out universal themes.
This room features the work of Sam Doyle, Henry Speller, Eldren M. Bailey, Georgia Speller, Jimmy Lee Sudduth. Lack of access to conventional art materials and tools often led artists to repurpose what
was around them. Sculptors including Bessie Harvey found artworks ready to be ‘drawn out’ from the twisted organic forms of roots and dead wood, a practice that became a distinct regional tradition.
Instinct drove visually impaired artist Hawkins Bolden as he searched the streets for items he could sense felt right for his ‘scarecrow’ sculptures, giving new life to materials that others would class as trash.
Installation view of ‘Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers’ @ the Royal Academy
By and large the sculptures were much more interesting and effective than the paintings. Many of the ‘primitivist’ paintings were just too basic for my taste.
Paintings from room 2.
For example, I couldn’t get on with any of the big, puke-yellow paintings by Purvis Young. Apparently, his scenes are populated by wild horses, warriors, angels, pregnant women, boats and prison bars but I still don’t like them.
Paintings by Purvis Young
By contrast with the paintings, I found almost all the sculptures wonderfully effective. In part this is, I think, because I’ve seen so much of this kind of thing before. Pablo Picasso made cubist sculptures before the First World War; Marcel Duchamps signed a urinal and put it in an art gallery in 1917; Dada artists created absurdist sculptures made mashed-up street junk in the early 1920s. Then lots of artists in the 1960s turned to making sculptures from found objects, and then the Arte Povera movement of the early 1970s, which took industrial waste products and cast-offs and made them into abstract sculptures.
My point is that recycling street junk into imaginative or surreal sculptures is hardly new but, on the contrary, feels like a venerable and well-explored strategy, which is why so many of the pieces here had such a reassuringly familiar feel to them. I really, really liked this piece by Hawkins Bolden but that’s partly because it reminded me so strongly of classic Surrealist sculpture. Could be by Picasso or Max Ernst.
Untitled by Hawkins Bolden (1989) Pot, drainpipe, cans, muffin tin, rubber hoses, nails, wood and wire
Room 3. The yard show
As most of the artists did not have access to formal art spaces, often the only place they could display their work was in their own back yards. The ‘yard show’ is a deeply rooted Southern tradition where artists would arrange their sculptures, paintings, and assemblages on their property.
One of the best known examples has been created over decades by Joe Minter (b. 1943), and is titled ‘African Village in America’, on a half acre site near Birmingham, Alabama. The show includes an impressive video featuring a panoramic scan over this huge area full of ramshackle constructions.
Room 4. The quilt-makers of Gee’s Bend
Gee’s Bend, officially known as Boykin, is a remote settlement on a hair-pin bend of the Alabama River. The Bend’s residents are descendants of the enslaved people who worked on the cotton plantation established there in 1816 by Joseph Gee. After the American Civil War (1861 to 1865), many of the formerly enslaved people remained on the plantation working as sharecroppers, who were obliged to give part of their crop to the landowner, and many inhabitants today still bear the surnames of their ancestors’ enslavers. The community was able to remain intact due to Government loans provided during the Depression which enabled tenants to buy the land they farmed and protected them from forced evictions.
Installation view of Gee’s Bend quilts
This continuity allowed a unique tradition of quilt-making to survive and be passed down through generations of women. Most Gee’s Bend quilts are improvisational or ‘my way’ quilts. Quilt-makers start with basic forms then head off ‘their way’ with unexpected patterns, unusual colours and surprising rhythms. Not originally conceived of as formal artworks, quilts were both decorative and necessary objects, keeping families warm and making use of fabric scraps.
More Gee’s Bend quilts
I appreciate the enormous amount of time and energy which goes into creating patchwork quilts like this. I appreciate the communal nature of the work, and the deep local tradition which has bound successive generations of women quilt-makers together. But, to be blunt, I wasn’t that impressed by the quilts. Maybe it’s just not my medium or genre. I quite liked the couple which were made from corduroy, because the texture of the fabric was so tactile, and my favourite was the one made entirely from denim patches, maybe because it approached closest to being a painting in design.
Spending five minutes in the quilt room made me suspect I just don’t ‘get’ quilts and embroidery and sewn artefacts in the same way that I do paintings, sculpture and photographs. Well, my loss.
Marfa Stance and quilts for sale
‘Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers’ is a relatively small exhibition, but be warned that there’s an additional room, which is sort of part of the show but situated right at the other end of the Royal Academy building. I couldn’t find it and had to be shown the way by one of the Royal Academy receptionists. It’s through the members’ cafe, then up some stairs and in the Academicians’ Room on the first floor.
Here are displayed eight or so modern quilts from some of the Gee’s Bend quilt-makers. The difference between these ones and the works in the main exhibition is that these ones are for sale. They felt ‘better’, more elaborate and finished than the ones in the main show but, as I explained, I’m not a good judge of these kinds of thing. But be warned about the prices. The cheapest one will set you back a cool £25,000, the most expensive one, £30,000.
There’s a web page about them where you can not only read a bit more but buy one, if the fancy takes you and your bank balance can handle it.
Books & Boots 