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The New York Times

Art Review | 'Legacies: Contemporary Artists Reflect on Slavery'

The Influence of Slavery, Through Contemporary Art

By FELICIA R. LEE
Published: June 13, 2006

For the average museumgoer, the wrought-iron balustrade from Federal Hall, where George Washington took the oath of office in 1789, may simply be an ornate piece of Americana. But for the conceptual artist Fred Wilson, it was the starting point for a long riff on battles against oppression around the world.

Gesturing toward the swirls and arrows in the ironwork last week at the New-York Historical Society, Mr. Wilson said the name of the balustrade's creator, Pierre Charles L'Enfant, got him thinking about the link between the French and American Revolutions, American slavery, and the revolt of Haitian slaves against France. He wandered the historical society's halls, seeking concrete expressions of his ideas: busts of Washington and Napoleon, slave tags, slave shackles, a wooden African-American figurine, a portrait of Toussaint L'Ouverture.

"American history is related to all these different subjects, all these different places," Mr. Wilson said. But "in America — at least how I was raised — it all gets whittled down to an American situation."

The result of his hunting expedition, "Liberté/Liberty," an installation of roughly a dozen objects with the railing as the centerpiece, goes on view at the society on Friday in "Legacies: Contemporary Artists Reflect on Slavery."

The sprawling exhibition includes work by 32 living artists, among them Faith Ringgold, Kerry James Marshall, Betye Saar, Lorenzo Pace, Cedric Smith, Glenn Ligon, Carrie Mae Weems, Eli Kince, Kara Walker and Whitfield Lovell.

The show, which runs through Jan. 7, is part of an 18-month program in which the historical society is exploring the theme of slavery in New York and the nation. The "Slavery in New York" exhibition closed on March 26 after six months, and "New York Divided: Slavery and the Civil War," opens on Nov. 17 and continues through April. The goal, museum officials say, is to illustrate slavery's indelible legacy in American life and culture.

Contemporary artwork is a rarity at the 202-year-old historical society. "It's a landmark in terms of artists working with museums," said Lowery Stokes Sims, the president of the Studio Museum in Harlem and a guest curator for "Legacies."

"Generally historians think of art as illustrating history," rather than being part of it, Ms. Sims said. But "the changes in art mark history," she said.

Mr. Wilson — a MacArthur Foundation "genius award" winner who represented the United States at the 2003 Venice Biennale — was one of six artists commissioned by the society to create something for the show, using objects from the historical society's collection.

It seemed a natural assignment for Mr. Wilson: plumbing museum collections to create his own unorthodox installations has become his artistic calling card.

"Mining the Museum," a much bigger installation created in 1992 at the Maryland Historical Society, was his breakout endeavor in that regard. Among other things, he brought together slave shackles and watercolors of blacks and positioned a whipping post beside a group of Victorian chairs.

Mr. Wilson, 51, said his "meandering" for "Legacies" was a truncated version of how he usually worked, months in advance. And usually he begins without a preconceived theme. "I try to come to a place tabula rasa," he said. "I just try to be a sponge."

He said he was initially unimpressed when Cynthia R. Copeland, a "Legacies" curator, pointed out the balustrade to him a few weeks ago. But slowly he began to see the possibilities.

"I had been interested in how design influences culture, how design is emblematic of culture," Mr. Wilson said. The balustrade, he learned, was part of a redesign of the 1699 City Hall building by L'Enfant, who was French -born and fought with the colonists during the American Revolution. "I was interested in the French-American connection."

"Then I saw the tags," Mr. Wilson said, meaning the metal slave tags, often used to identify enslaved Africans by their crafts. It struck him that it might be interesting to attach them to the balustrade. "Then I said, 'Bring me some slave shackles,' " he said, extending the contrast of liberty and freedom, the brutal and bloody contradiction at the heart of the American quest for freedom.

He added the busts of Washington and Napoleon ("leaders, empire, the complicated nature of that"); the shackles of a Georgia slave; badges worn by slaves in Charleston, S.C.; a watercolor of L'Ouverture; and the wooden figurine of a black man, from a 19th-century tobacco shop.

In a way, Mr. Wilson said, the figures are in conversation with one another.

Installing "Liberté/Liberty" last week, he ended up abandoning the idea of putting the slave tags on the balustrade. Instead he attached them to the back of the busts. "Having them on the back strengthens the image of the underbelly of liberty," he said.

He put the wooden figurine in front of the railing ("down below, looking up") and the bust of Washington at the highest point.

Ms. Copeland said that as far as she knew, the tobacco-shop figurine is the only free-standing black figure in the Society's collection.

"The busts are clean and well-made; he's worn," Mr. Wilson said of the figurine. "A cigar-store Indian — or African — is not as important as the president. I don't have to say that. It's embedded in the object."

Of museums in general Mr. Wilson said: "It's not what you have in your collection, but your point of view about what you have. It's what you chose to display and where you place it."

He pointed to the shackles and grimaced.

"You can easily in a museum lose the seriousness of the things you're dealing with," he said. "Museums are good about making you forget the context. Every once in a while you have to step back and say, 'My God, what am I dealing with?' I want people to be blindsided by it and caught off-guard."

By having so many artists examine slavery, Mr. Wilson said, the show will invite visitors to make the same sort of connections that he tries to make with his museum installations. He sees his own installations as critiques of the inherent "whiteness" of so many museum collections.

"I really hope the historical society will use this exhibition as a jumping-off point, " Mr. Wilson said. "As much as African-American artists like to talk about slavery, we don't want to leave it there."

The interracial husband-and-wife team Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry, for example, created a contraption to turn themselves over and over to create a living "topsy-turvy" doll. It is really two dolls, one black and one white, made so that one doll's face and body is hidden under the skirt of the other until you flip it over. Their installation features a video of themselves as the living doll.

The art historian Leslie King-Hammond and the architect José J. Mapily created a rendering of SenecaVillage, Manhattan's first significant community of African-American property owners (a site within what is now Central Park).

As Mr. Wilson installed his then still-untitled project last Thursday, Ms. Copeland arrived with a finishing touch. It was a bright red "liberty cap" for the tobacco-shop figurine. Since Roman times, in many cultures and countries around the world, such caps have been worn by formerly enslaved people to signal their new freedom.

"No one will know what this is," Mr. Wilson said of the cap. And that, he said, may well encourage visitors to think about what it means.

The New York Times

Art Review | 'Legacies: Contemporary Artists Reflect on Slavery'

At Historical Society, Emancipation Remains a Work in Progress

By HOLLAND COTTER
Published:June 20, 2006

                                                                                                                                                                         The New-York Historical Society
"Replenishing," a photograph by Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons of herself and her mother.

Slavery, it could be argued, didn't really end in the United States until civil rights legislation was passed in the 1960's. That was a full century after the Emancipation Proclamation. Or the "Emancipation Approximation," as the artist Kara Walker calls it in a series of hallucinatory silkscreen prints that turn the Old South into a compassless moral state, in which slave and master alike are adrift.

An installation by Fred Wilson in
"Legacies: Contemporary Artists
Reflect on Slavery" at the
New-York Historical Society.

Ms. Walker's witty, poetic, wicked images are among the high points of "Legacies: Contemporary Artists Reflect on Slavery," the second of three exhibitions organized by the New-York Historical Society on American slavery. The first, last year's "Slavery in New York," was archival in nature, made up of relics from the past. "Legacies" is very much of the present, with some of the art made for the occasion.

I came to it with doubts. Topical art, like occasional poetry, is hard to pull off. It can be fleet and fervent, sharpened by its thematic parameters. It can just as easily feel rigged, overpitched, speechifying. "Legacies" solves the potential problems by creating a large, textured exhibition experience, a kind of aesthetic support system. If a given piece is too thin or too arcane, it's O.K. It's part of the argument. It keeps you looking, thinking and rethinking. This is the historical society's first-ever contemporary art show. I have no doubt there will be others.

The show is lucky in its curator, Lowery Stokes Sims, president of the Studio Museum in Harlem. She has a sharp, seasoned eye and knows that "contemporary" spans generations.

Working with Cynthia R. Copeland and Kathleen Hulser of the historical society, she has brought together older artists (Willie Birch, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar) with others in their 20's and 30's (Fatima Allotey, Cedric Smith, Jeff Sonhouse). Most, however, like Ms. Walker, made their names in the 1980's and 90's, when identity politics coalesced as a volatile cultural movement. As a subject, slavery naturally invites polemics , and this show is not shy of them. Ms. Ringgold's "Slave Rape Story Quilt" (1985) includes explicit images and texts about sexual violence. Carrie Mae Weems incorporates a Civil War-era photograph of a male slave's scarred back into a multimedia piece. Whitfield Lovell, in a characteristically lucid drawing, enshrines the image of a lynched body in a florid Victorian frame. Recent video interviews taped by the American Anti-Slavery Group document the persistence of chattel bondage in Africa and elsewhere.

But most of the 32 artists approach their theme obliquely. Kerry James Marshall highlights the faces of individual onlookers in a 1930 photograph of a lynching, leaving the act itself obscured. The hanging figures in ink drawings by Eli Kince are half-abstract silhouettes; they could be pods on a tree. A crystalline painting by Malcolm Bailey titled "Hold, Separate but Equal" (1969), the show's earliest piece, turns 19th-century diagrams of slave ships into a scathing separate-but-equal emblem.

Ms. Sims is clearly intent on demonstrating that political art can be as much about transformation as about information. Lorenzo Pace evokes his family's history, from slavery to the present, in an invitingly bright -colored, wall-filling collage of images and objects. A fountain designed by Algernon Miller and dedicated to Frederick Douglass looks, in a scale model, like a sky of shining stars. Leslie King-Hammond and José J. Mapily turn the memory of an African-American settlement leveled to make way for Central Park into a magical theater-altar called "Celestial Praise House for SenecaVillage."

Some of the work is very close to theater. In a video filmed at the historical society, Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry slowly turn through space in interracial union. On paper the idea sounds labored; on film it looks great. Ellen Driscoll's installation, based on Harriet Jacobs's 1861 "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl," looks fussy and cluttered until you enter the camera obscura environment at its center. Close the door behind you, and you're in the ghostly, locked-in world that Jacobs experienced for seven years as a fugitive slave hiding in an attic.

It's almost impossible to imagine the feelings such confinement would provoke. Fury has to be one, and it sizzles just below the surface in much of the art here: in Renee Cox's mesmerizing self-portrait as a machete -wielding rebel slave; in an installation by Fred Wilson, "Liberty/ Liberté," festooned 19th-century busts of George Washington and Napoleon with iron shackles and manacles; and in Ms. Walker's bad-dream visions, calculated to let no one pass without a reaction, and to let no reaction be easy or "right," or less than intense.

American slavery — what it did, what it is still doing — remains an incendiary topic, as racial discrimination becomes subtler, harder to pin down, played out along lines of class and economics. The topic has also gained importance with the developing diaspora-consciousness of the last few decades, embodied here in a photograph by Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons of herself and her mother, Cubans of African descent.

Although the two women stand apart, each holds one end of a single long, knotted strand of colored beads. It isn't a heavy, binding chain; it's a connecting thread, linking generations through a mutual history. That history was cruel; the emotions it raises are complicated and changing. But its reality, revisited and rethought, can be a source of power rather than depletion. Ms. Campos-Pons has titled her family portrait "Replenishing."

"Legacies: Contemporary Artists Reflect on Slavery" remains at the New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West, at 77th Street, (212) 873-3400, through January.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

 LEGACIES: CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS REFLECT ON SLAVERY

New York Historical Society
June 16, 2006 - January 7, 2007

 A generation of critically acclaimed contemporary artists has thought deeply about how America's history of racially-based slavery has shaped our society. Legacies brings together the works of Faith Ringgold, Carrie Mae Weems, Fred Wilson, Whitefield Lovell, Mel Edwards, Lorenzo Pace, Betye Saar, Marc Latamie, Willie Birch, and a host of others in a remarkable ensemble of innovative are and historical reflection. The exhibition embodies provocative interpretations that capture the tension between the reprehensible past and emotions of the present.

 The New-York Historical Society is located in a landmark building at 170 Central Park West between 76th and 77th Street. It is open to the general public Tuesday through Sunday and on selected holiday Mondays. It is also open on Mondays during special exhibitions for school and adult groups. N-YHS facilities, galleries and auditorium are wheelchair accessible; a wheelchair accessible entrance is located at 2 West 77th Street. The N-YHS provides guided tours of the galleries several times a day and special tours for small and large groups may be arranged.

The museum admission ($10 for adults, $5 for seniors, students and educators, and free for members and children under 12) provides access to all galleries and exhibitions and to all family