From Hatred to Hope

The Brooks exhibit “Black American Portraits” embraces Black power, love, and joy.

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From news stations to social media, these moments of pain and suffering persevere in an endless and instantaneous scroll, with nothing preventing them from resurfacing at any given moment. Yet these images are hardly representative of the entire Black American experience, and in 2020, in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) sought to intervene and inject into the mainstream consciousness images of Black joy, power, and love.

Full of portraits of Black sitters, spaces, and subjects, the exhibit, “Black American Portraits,” has made its way to the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, having opened in August. As a majority-Black city, Memphis needs this, says Brooks executive director Zoe Kahr. “It’s so important to see every Memphian reflected back in the museum.”

Though this exhibition originated in Los Angeles, the Brooks has included additional pieces to lend the experience a Memphis touch. An Augusta Savage sculpture is on loan from The Dixon Gallery and Gardens, and works by Jarvis Boyland, Derek Fordjour, Catherine Elizabeth Patton, Jared Small, Ernest Withers, and the Hooks Brothers Photography Studio punctuate the gallery walls. “We wanted to highlight talent in Memphis and show it in a national context,” Kahr says.

With 129 pieces of art in total, the sheer number of works, encompassing a variety of media and spanning over 200 years in history, is in itself a feat. “One of the things that struck me about this show and taking it here is just this idea of abundance,” says Patricia Daigle, the Brooks’ curator of modern and contemporary art. “So there’s this idea about being prolific, and the impact of what it means to see this many portraits of Black people in one space.”

The gallery itself is divided into three themed sections: power, love, and joy. “For me, those three terms are broad enough and open-ended enough that I think you could really explore it further with the works in the exhibition,” Daigle says. “I didn’t want to focus on something really specific, but I wanted to ground visitors in the visual experience. … A lot of us think we understand what power looks like or what love feels like, but one thing you’ll see in this exhibition is that these are really complicated concepts and emotions. And they’re presented through a Black lens.”

“We’re not trying to present an image that’s like a rose-colored-glasses view of the past,” adds Efe Igor Coleman, Blackmon Perry assistant curator of African-American art and art of the African Diaspora at the Brooks. “But it’s important to see that [power, love, and joy] existed and still exists, … [that] people are able to find joy and love and power in periods of incredible difficulty or suffering.”

Power

From a circa 1800 portrait of an unknown sailor by an unknown painter to a painting completed this year by Calida Rawles, the works in this exhibition bring the past, present, and future into conversation with each other. Tintypes from nineteenth-century studio photography harken to the abolitionist period, when Frederick Douglass — the most photographed person of his generation — championed photography for its accessibility and its ability to allow the sitter to control their own portrayal, especially in a time when negative stereotypes and caricatures proliferated.

“There’s great power that you can have when having control over how you’re presented,” Coleman says. “Something that’s exciting for me about that is also that you own your own image, which for Black folks, owning yourself, owning your own presentation, like literally being able to hang an image of yourself, is really important.”

With the works culled from numerous moments in history, Daigle adds that the viewer is able to witness the full scope of this meaning of ownership, a fraught term in American history. “Thinking about the Civil Rights Movement, the abolition movement, our present day with the Black Lives Matter movement, and other civil rights movements that are of our time, [the ‘Power’ gallery space, in particular] deals a lot with images of self-possession and knowing, claiming one’s identity.”

The exhibition itself presents very little text; Daigle says this decision encourages the viewer to embrace the visual experience fully and allows the portraits to speak for themselves. “Just having such a rich visual history,” she says, “really conveys the importance of image-making, which I think is at the core of this show. That’s really where this power lies, in that legacy of having these images that artists are still continuing to make or reusing or reimagining contemporary issues using historical images.”

“For the show to come to Memphis and for the Brooks curatorial team to decide that they are going to include local Memphis artists and Memphis-adjacent artists like me, I think points right back to why I do service work in Memphis and why I love Memphis.” — Derek Fordjour

Renee Cox’s The Signing, for instance, re-imagines the signing of the Declaration of Independence, with a completely Black cast. Genevieve Gaignard’s photograph, Trailblazer (A Dream Deferred), features a biracial woman in an antebellum dress, carrying a painting of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. The contemporary photograph hangs beside a set of antique tintypes.

The juxtaposition of the modern and the antique is intentional. The exhibit was hung in the “salon style,” where works are placed in groups of different sizes, next to and above one another, rather than in a linear procession. The salon style originated in Paris in the seventeenth century, and with portrait-making also having Eurocentric ties, the original LACMA curators made sure to include sculptures that reference African art. “It’s an interesting and wonderful celebration,” Coleman says, a celebration that is as diverse as the Black American experience.

Love

The salon style also makes the gallery space feel more domestic, Daigle says, as if the works are arranged in a way one might decorate their own house. As it happens, she says, portraits also “have a root in the domestic space, and that’s something several of the artists are looking at in their work. … There is some degree of feeling like you’re entering this kind of space where people seem familiar or you might feel this kind of connection in a way you might with, like, a family photo album.”

After all, Daigle says, “Images help to really make us feel like we know someone. Things like Instagram make us feel like we actually know people, but this isn’t anything new and I hope that this exhibition shows us that we still live with those legacies today of how we consume images, but this is not a new history.”

In the “Love” gallery space, especially, images of heroes who have since passed — like Chadwick Boseman and Kobe Bryant — remind the viewer of those whom we hold in high regard without really knowing them. Other images in this space offer intimate insight into families, both chosen and biological, granting the viewer access into private moments shared by loved ones.

Memphis-born Jarvis Boyland’s painting, Expectations, is one such piece, a portrait of himself with close friends Cameron Clayborn and D’Angelo Lovell Williams, whose piece Daddy Issues happens to be in the exhibit as well. The three completed a residency in Skowhegan, Maine, together, Boyland explains, and all are either from Memphis or have a relation to the city.

“I was thinking about the complicated tensions that I have been imbued with growing up in Memphis,” Boyland says of the piece, “and the different gazes in that painting, I think, indicate something about community or the difficulty to communicate among a group or between two or more individuals.”

Completed in 2019, Expectations is now a part of the Brooks’ permanent collection. Rich jewel tones luxuriate on the canvas, melting the tension among the three figures into an intimate yet beautiful moment. “‘Black’ just can’t even begin to describe all of the many shades and hues that I see when I look at Black flesh,” Boyland told Tre’vell Anderson of Out magazine in 2019. “So, I try to render the flesh [by] sort of really looking at it, really feeling it, and really making it all a compliment, complimenting the people [pictured].”

Since 2019, Boyland, now based in L.A. where he saw the original LACMA exhibit, says his perception of his work has shifted, but then as now, he aims to reflect his reality, even as it shifts to accommodate his personal growth. “That’s really the nature of my work, that it’s subject to change,” Boyland says. When he arrived in L.A., for instance, he says, “I was refusing to paint people [his typical subject matter]. But ultimately, I’ve returned back to dealing with figurative matters. It’s because I care about people, period, and more so I care about queer Black men.”

Similarly, Memphis photographer Catherine Elizabeth Patton tends to shoot portraits because, as she says, “people are compelling subjects. … People come with human experiences that inform the way they show up in front of the lens.” For her piece within this exhibition, though, she was the subject. Unveil I, she explains, is part of a series of self-portraits, wherein a veil obstructs Patton’s face before eventually being removed “as a representation of the transition from hiding from vulnerability to embracing it.

“This was the first time I had ever been my own sitter,” Patton says, “but I felt that the subject matter was so personal to me that I couldn’t ask anyone else to embody what I felt was my sole responsibility to express at the time.”

Like Boyland, Patton had seen the exhibit at LACMA. “I had only seen these works on computer screens and in books, so at that point I was just taking everything in,” she says, and now that her work is on display in her hometown, “it feels so good. I’m honored to share space with so many outstanding artists I look up to. Deana Lawson and Carrie Mae Weems are both women I admire in this space, so to see their work and take a few steps to find my portrait nearby [is] really gratifying.”

Joy

While curating the exhibit, Daigle and Coleman knew they wanted to put their own Memphis flair on the traveling show, not just to represent and reflect Memphis faces, like those of Patton and Boyland, back to viewers, but to remind Memphians “that there is this really long, rich history right here,” says Daigle. As complex as that history is, Memphis has always nurtured Black power, love, and joy.

“So [the exhibition’s] banking on that legacy and showing off that legacy, especially as we’re part of this monumental national tour,” Coleman adds. “[That joy] is historical because it’s not just seen in contemporary work. We’re seeing older works. So that’s a greater kind of subtle intervention that I think [Daigle] is doing with our additions, is [to show that] Memphis has always been popping. But her biggest intervention that I really enjoyed was this shedding light on the extraordinary ordinary, like graduations, things we take for granted … how much joy there is in the quiet moments.“

A selection of photographs by the Hooks Brothers Photography Studio illustrates just this in the “Joy” gallery space. Established in 1907 by Robert and Henry Brooks, Hooks Brothers captured images of notable leaders like Booker T. Washington and Mahalia Jackson for the better part of the twentieth century, but perhaps more importantly, they captured ordinary life and the events that accompany it, from ballet performances to weddings to family portraits.

“Joy is such an expansive word,” Coleman says, “and I think we usually associate it just with happiness, but it’s complicated and it allows for so much nuance. … Like, yes, having pain and sorrow is this kind of foil to experiencing joy.”

When speaking about his Highstep Double that is featured prominently in the “Joy” space, Memphis-born Derek Fordjour recognizes a similar phenomenon. “I like to create works that walk the line between comfort and discomfort,” he says. “You know, this is a jubilant work at first glance, but there’s also strenuous effort and extreme athleticism. And I think that attraction to the pageantry of life rituals in the Black community, especially, is very compelling, but often it’s informed by a certain level of desperation or resistance.”

For the piece featuring two marching band performers in a back-bending high-step, Fordjour employed an equally arduous process of layering, gluing, and tearing thousands of small newspaper clippings, creating a “rich terrain” upon the canvas for painting. “I’m really interested in the notion of reuse and discarded elements,” the artist says of his materials. “I started working this way when I was an impoverished artist. I had very little supplies and that’s why newspaper was initially attractive, but as I continued to work, I enjoyed how sort of shabby the works are. That they could occupy a space as pristine as a museum felt very honest to me — how I show up personally but also that larger cultural experience of starting from an under-resourced place and trying to add up to more, to sort of compete at life’s game.”

Today, Fordjour, who resides in New York City, serves on the Brooks’ board and operates Contemporary Arts Memphis, a nonprofit that offers local high school students a no-cost summer arts-intensive fellowship and year-round mentorship. “I attribute my success to having grown up in Memphis,” he says. Though he has shown internationally, this will be the first time his work is on display at the Brooks.

“With this show, now is probably the best time in history to have ever shown at the Brooks,” Fordjour adds. “I think it’s a really simple concept that is also very profound when you consider the history of representation for Black people, in any culture, but more specifically in art.”

For Memphis, at large, this exhibition comes to the arts scene at a pivotal moment, as the Dixon will open its “Black Artists in America: From Civil Rights to the Bicentennial” on October 22nd and the Clough-Hanson Gallery at Rhodes College has its “Young, Gifted and Black” on display through December 9th. “It is a really wonderful moment to sort of celebrate Memphis,” Daigle says, adding that the Brooks and Rhodes have cross-programmed events planned for the fall, with 10 artists overlapping in their respective exhibits.

In the meantime, “The excitement level for this opening is probably unparalleled,” Fordjour reflects. “Just watching many of my friends who still live [in Memphis] on social media, people that have never previously gone to the Brooks, or known much about their programming, they’re engaged for the show. So I think it’s a compliment to all the artists and their work, but also the Brooks. The museum should feel like the city, and it should be a resource for the city, and this show feels like a step in the right direction.”

“The first iteration of this show, which I did see at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in L.A., I was not included,” Fordjour adds. “And for the show to come to Memphis and for the Brooks curatorial team to decide that they are going to include local Memphis artists and Memphis-adjacent artists like me, I think points right back to why I do service work in Memphis and why I love Memphis. When everything is working right, we cheer for each other, and it’s not common that, for a show that you weren’t originally included in, a museum makes a decision to include you, but they did. I think that’s special.”

“Black American Portraits” is on display through January 7th. For more information about the exhibition and its related programming, visit brooksmuseum.org.