Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art
C In 1927, the Chicago Art Institute presented the first major museum exhibition of OOKS art by African Americans. Designed to demonstrate the artists’ abilities and to promote racial equality, the exhibition also revealed the art world’s anxieties about the participa- EXHIBITING tion of African Americans in the exclusive venue of art museums—places where blacks had historically been barred from visiting let alone exhibiting. Since then, America’s major art museums have served as crucial locations for African Americans to protest against their exclusion and attest to their contributions in the visual arts. BLACKNESS In Exhibiting Blackness, art historian Bridget R. Cooks analyzes the curatorial strate- AFRICAN AMERICANS AND THE AMERICAN ART MUSEUM gies, challenges, and critical receptions of the most significant museum exhibitions of African American art. Tracing two dominant methodologies used to exhibit art by African Americans—an ethnographic approach that focuses more on artists than their art, and a EXHIBITING recovery narrative aimed at correcting past omissions—Cooks exposes the issues involved in exhibiting cultural difference that continue to challenge art history, historiography, and American museum exhibition practices. By further examining the unequal and often con- tested relationship between African American artists, curators, and visitors, she provides insight into the complex role of art museums and their accountability to the cultures they represent. “An important and original contribution to the study of the history
Jaimeo Brown SPOTLIGHT Quiltmaking Gee’s Bend. William Arnett. Underground Railroad. Spirituals. Words Andy Thomas Portrait Janette Beckman Photographs courtesy of Souls Grown Deep Foundation soulsgrowndeep.org In the spring of 2013 drummer Jaimeo so many other functions,” says Brown. about art – but in the mid-19th century, Brown took a journey from his home in “Going back to the roots down at Gee’s quilting became creative. A variety of New York to a small corner of the deep Bend and seeing how these spiritual techniques and styles were developed: south. There in Gee’s Bend, where the songs were interwoven into their daily the medallion quilt consists of a central Alabama River curls through Wilcox activities and the craft of quilting that motif with multiple borders; the log County, a rural collective of women have really inspired me.” In Mario Tahi cabin is made of arrangements of a been creating brilliantly improvisational Lathan’s documentary that follows repeated single block pattern. Quilting quilts for, perhaps, 200 years. They follow Jaimeo Brown to Gee’s Bend, we meet also became a communal activity: women in a tradition of African-American some of those women whose craft has came together in what became known quilting that reaches back to slavery. only recently gained recognition. as quilting bees. Artistically and socially The quilts of Gee’s Bend transcend The term quilt comes from the Latin important, it spread quickly. As early as folk art. Following an exhibition at the for a stuffed sack, an incongruous name the 1850s, in Amish society remarkable Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, New when you consider the beautiful art to quilts were created using modernist style York magazine art critic Mark Stevens emerge from Gee’s Bend.
The Life and Art of Mary Lee Bendolph joanne cubbs Published in Mary Lee Bendolph, Gee’s Bend Quilts, and Beyond Atlanta: Tinwood Books, 2006 [text-only version] There is only one road leading into Gee’s Bend, a small, historically black community in the lush green backcountry of southwest Alabama. Surrounded on three sides by a sharp, capricious curve in the Alabama River, it is a place that has always remained tucked away from much of the outside world. No one really knows the precise popula- tion of the Bend, but some say it is seven hundred or so. Appearing amidst a landscape of overgrown fields and patches of scrub forest, the town itself is a scattering of one- story houses connected by red dirt trails and joined by a tiny post office, two conve- nience stores, and four churches. Like many old agricultural communities where farming has become practically ob- solete, Gee’s Bend seems to belong to another time. In fact, there is a highly palpable sense of the past that hangs in the air like the thick humid atmosphere of an Alabama summer day. Everywhere are markers of eras gone by: rusted cars, decaying barns, and the metal corpses of defunct farm machinery. On a late afternoon, an elderly man sits quietly on the front porch of his weathered home and gazes past the muddy clay road into a cornfield that has long ago turned into an empty vista. It is an everyday scene from the Bend that also serves as its elegy, a melancholy ode to the inevitable passing of an age and a place.
Curating and Photographing Art and Resistance in the American South Hannah Collins
Curating and photographing art and resistance in the American South Hannah Collins June 2020 Issue 3 Title Curating and photographing art and resistance in the American South Author(s) Hannah Collins Article DOI https://doi.org/10.31452/bcj3.wlak.collins Url https://burlingtoncontemporary.org.uk/journal/journal/curating-and- photographing-art-and-resistance-in-the-american-south ISSN 2631-5661 Cite as Hannah Collins: 'Curating and photographing art and resistance in the American South ', Burlington Contemporary Issue 3 (June 2020), https://doi.org/10.31452/bcj3.wlak.collins About the author(s) is an artist who makes photographs, films, texts and books. Her works are embedded in historical and social frameworks with a wide range of subjects and geographical locations, and her involvement in a body of work often continues over many years. Examples of her work can be found in many public and private collections including Tate; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Sprengel Museum, Hannover. Cover image: Curating and photographing art and resistance in the American South by Hannah Collins • June 2020 We Will Walk – Art and Resistance in the American South opened in February at Turner Contemporary, Margate. The exhibition brings together art by African American creators made in Alabama and neighbouring states since 1950, a period shaped by the Civil Rights movement. The work takes many forms, from ephemeral environments made from salvaged materials to sculptural assemblages, paintings, musical instruments and quilts, and is contextualised through photographs documenting the Civil Rights movement between 1954 and 1968. The exhibition’s title reflects the fact that during this time walking came to the fore as an act of courage and protest, in such vast communal acts as the widely documented marches from Selma to Montgomery in 1965.
High Museum of Art Receives 54 Artworks from Souls Grown Deep Foundation
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE HIGH MUSEUM OF ART RECEIVES 54 ARTWORKS FROM SOULS GROWN DEEP FOUNDATION Acquisition strengthens one of the most significant collections of American self-taught art in the world Museum expands largest public collection of works by Thornton Dial and holdings by African American artists from the Southern U.S. ATLANTA, April 25, 2017 – Rand Suffolk, Nancy and Holcombe T. Green, Jr., director of the High Museum of Art, announced today that the Museum has received 54 works from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, one of the most significant acquisitions by the High’s folk and self- taught art department since its establishment in 1994. The combined gift and purchase features paintings, sculptures and works on paper by 33 contemporary African-American artists from the Southern United States, including 13 works by Thornton Dial (1928–2016) that span four decades of the artist’s astounding career. The acquisition also features 11 quilts created by the women of Gee’s Bend, Ala., tripling the Museum’s examples of this unparalleled tradition in American art. Work by Lonnie Holley and Ronald Lockett, artists whose work the High has been collecting since the 1990s, is joined by sculpture from their Alabama contemporaries Joe Minter and Richard Dial. In addition to Minter and Richard Dial, artists entering the High’s collection for the first time include Eldren Bailey, one of four Georgia artists represented in the acquisition, Charles Williams, Vernon Burwell and Georgia Speller. A significant group of paintings and sculpture by Joe Light, as well as individual works by artists such as Archie Byron, Mary T.
Souls Grown Deep Foundation Continues Gifts/Purchases Program for Major National Museums with the High Museum of Art
Souls Grown Deep Foundation Continues Gifts/Purchases Program for Major National Museums with the High Museum of Art High Acquires 54 Works by 33 Artists including Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley and Ronald Lockett, Strengthening One of the Most Significant Collections of Contemporary African-American Artists from the Southern U.S. Atlanta, GA, April 25, 2017—Souls Grown Deep Foundation today announced the next in its series of strategic acquisitions as part of a gift/purchase program designed to strengthen the representation of African American artists from the Southern United States in the collections of leading museums across the country. The High Museum of Art has acquired 54 works from the Foundation, one of the most significant acquisitions by the High’s folk and self-taught art department since its establishment in 1994. Following major acquisitions by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2014 and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco earlier this year, these acquisitions draw from the Foundation’s extensive collection of works across media in this genre to promote increased scholarship and understanding of an important and often-overlooked perspective in the narrative of American art history. “This landmark acquisition is a capstone of years of collaboration with the High Museum of Art, the anchoring institution in the Foundation’s hometown of Atlanta. We are very pleased to add dozens of significant works to the High’s collection of contemporary art and look forward to years of future collaboration through insightful programming, displays and publications,” said Maxwell L. Anderson, president of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation.
High Museum of Art Receives 54 Artworks from Souls Grown Deep Foundation
HIGH MUSEUM OF ART RECEIVES 54 ARTWORKS FROM SOULS GROWN DEEP FOUNDATION Acquisition strengthens one of the most significant collections of American self-taught art in the world Museum expands largest public collection of works by Thornton Dial and holdings by African American artists from the Southern U.S. ATLANTA, April 24, 2017 – Rand Suffolk, Nancy and Holcombe T. Green, Jr., director of the High Museum of Art, announced today that the Museum has received 54 works from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, one of the most significant acquisitions by the High’s folk and self- taught art department since its establishment in 1994. The combined gift and purchase features paintings, sculptures and works on paper by 33 contemporary African-American artists from the Southern United States, including 13 works by Thornton Dial (1928–2016) that span four decades of the artist’s astounding career. The acquisition also features 11 quilts created by the women of Gee’s Bend, Ala., tripling the Museum’s examples of this unparalleled tradition in American art. Work by Lonnie Holley and Ronald Lockett, artists whose work the High has been collecting since the 1990s, is joined by sculpture from their Alabama contemporaries Joe Minter and Richard Dial. In addition to Minter and Richard Dial, artists entering the High’s collection for the first time include Eldren Bailey, one of four Georgia artists represented in the acquisition, Charles Williams, Vernon Burwell and Georgia Speller. A significant group of paintings and sculpture by Joe Light, as well as individual works by artists such as Archie Byron, Mary T.
Quilts from the American South Are on Display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
Arts & Culture Quilts from the American South are on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art Works by prominent Gee's Bend quilters and part of a collection newly acquired from the influential Souls Grown Deep Foundation, promoting contemporary African American artists from the South. Artist Mary Lee Bendolph talks about her work in front of her quilt "Blocks, Strips, Strings, and Half Squares" during a press conference announcing the opening of "Souls Grown Deep: Artists of the African American South" exhibit at the Perelman Building of the Philadelphia Museum of Art on June 5. By Bethany Ao | June 18, 2019 Growing up, Essie Bendolph Pettway was used to seeing the vibrant quilts her mother, Mary Lee Bendolph, sewed with the other quilters of Gee’s Bend, Ala., hanging over the cracks in their house to keep the cold winds out in the winter. “They had to do what they could to keep us warm,” said Pettway, who learned how to quilt as a child from Bendolph. “That’s how we kept warm, by quilts.” Bendolph’s quilts now hang in art museums around the country, including in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The museum recently acquired 15 quilts by artists from Gee’s Bend and neighboring towns from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, an Atlanta-based organization focused on preserving the work of contemporary African American artists in the South. All 15 are now on display as part of a larger exhibit — “Souls Grown Deep: Artists of the African American South” — that also showcases nine other works acquired from the foundation, including sculptures by Thornton Dial, and assemblages by Lonnie Holley and Bessie Harvey.
A Whole Villageful of Paul Klees? Eine Untersuchung Des Gee’S-Bend-Quilt-Phänomens
DIPLOMARBEIT A Whole Villageful of Paul Klees? Eine Untersuchung des Gee’s-Bend-Quilt-Phänomens Diplomarbeit zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades „Mag.a art.“ (Magistra artium) in den Studienrichtungen Unterrichtsfach Textiles Gestalten und Unterrichtsfach Englisch eingereicht an der Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien am Institut für Kunstwissenschaften, Kunstpädagogik und Kunstvermittlung bei Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Eva Kernbauer vorgelegt von Mag. Katharina Laher Wien, im März 2021 Eidesstattliche Erklärung Ich erkläre hiermit, dass ich die Diplomarbeit selbstständig verfasst, keine anderen als die angegebenen Quellen und Hilfsmittel benutzt und mich auch sonst keiner unerlaubten Hilfen bedient habe, dass diese Diplomarbeit weder im In- noch Ausland (einer Beurteilerin / einem Beurteiler zur Beurteilung) in irgendeiner Form als Prüfungsarbeit vorgelegt wurde, dass dieses Exemplar mit der beurteilten Arbeit übereinstimmt. Datum: 22. März 2021 Unterschrift: Inhaltsverzeichnis 1. Einleitung ............................................................................................................................ 7 2. Quilts als Ausstellungsobjekte im Kunstmuseum ............................................................. 12 Abstract Design in American Quilts (1971) .............................................................. 13 Amish: The Art of the Quilt (1990) ............................................................................ 18 The Quilts of Gee’s Bend (2002) und Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt (2008) ....................................................................................................