Perspective hangs by a thread or two in shows
The truth that black lives matter is compellingly conveyed in several area exhibitions.
Lavar Munroe’s “Zoo at the Edge of the World: A Continuum of the Exotic,” a powerfully disturbing show of mixed-media paintings, manipulates imagery from 19th- and early-20th-century “human zoo” ephemera. Popular attractions of colonial Europe, human zoos exhibited Africans as curiosities of “otherness,” sometimes alongside animals, promoting racial stereotypes that still exist.
From across the room, with just a glance, Munroe’s big paintings read as abstractions, a hot mess of colorful, cut-up canvases. Closer, you can see how Munroe melds superb painting — with acrylic, spray paint, house latex, you name it — with embroidered fabric, pieces of old quilts, ribbons, felt, faux leather, rope, buttons, string, beads, feathers, Band-Aids, stickers, award ribbons, silk flowers and the occasional drop of his own blood.
If you can stand to look closely for long, the grotesque details slap you silly: anatomical bits exaggerated, limbs amputated, sinewy innards exposed. Munroe’s ideas pour out like visual vomit.
A Bahamian who lives much of the time in the U.S., Munroe committed to the Art League Houston show before he learned that some of his “Zoo” series was chosen for the 56th Venice Biennale. League director Michael Peranteau had to postpone the exhibit so Munroe could create more paintings to fill his venue’s large gallery, but now the show looks like even more of a coup. Many Munroe fans have visited from out of town, Peranteau said.
I hope they also ventured to the front gallery, where Fort Worth artist Letitia Huckaby’s “Bayou Baroque” is on view. Her portraits of nuns from New Orleans’ Sisters of the Holy Family Motherhouse are printed on fabric, including bed sheets with floral patterns, lace and vintage sacks, then cut into strips that are handstitched back together.
The bed sheets aren’t just pretty material. They’re about history and sex. Henriette Delille founded the Sisters of the Holy Family order in 1842 to give free women of color an alternative to lives as concubines of wealthy white men, a common practice during the days of the placage system that permitted common-law, mixed-race marriages. That, of course, meant relinquishing sex altogether as brides of Christ.
Delille, a free woman of color, was a product of a placage marriage. Pope Benedict XVI declared her venerable in 2010; her canonization continues. Early on, the convent’s sisters taught slaves and cared for orphans, the elderly and the sick. They still run a college-prep academy and a nursing facility.
The floral patterns of the sheets and Huckaby’s hand-stitching lend the pieces a poetic, homespun quality — a counterpoint to the imagery of formally posed elderly nuns in their starched contemporary habits, exuding pious intelligence.
Inspired by Old Master paintings and Kehinde Wiley’s baroque portraits of urban men, Huckaby’s compositions are about feminism with fortitude. The artist’s own determination reveals itself in every stitch.
Her biggest print shares the “Bayou Baroque” title but seems only marginally related. It depicts a deer in the woods. Maybe it’s about innocence?
Delita Pinchback Martin, a Texas Southern University alum who now lives in Little Rock, Ark., pieces together a more complex perspective on black female identity with her beautiful show “I Come From Women Who Could Fly” at the University Museum. She, too, employs a needle, thread and fabric, layering stitches and quilted elements into vividly textured and patterned portraits built on fine print-making and Conté drawing.
The subjects of Martin’s portraits, all women of color, appear to be from diverse backgrounds. Some look confident and elegant. Some look weary, wearing their misery in exaggerated features. They could be from Africa or New York or Houston or Los Angeles or Haiti. They could be mothers, grandmothers, sisters, daughters, aunts.
Martin said she has never been interested in traditional portrait drawing; she aims instead to capture an “essence.” The portraits are compilations of many women in her life, past and present.
“You might see my mother’s smile or an aunt’s hands or the eyes of the lady who sold candy on the corner. This was my way of showing a connection between the women and myself,” she said in an email. “I wanted the stories to show a connection but tell my own personal story. I referenced family photographs that I collected from my mother, and I also used the stories and narratives that have been passed on to me from the women in my family and community.”
Some of the stories she heard seemed magical — especially one her grandmother often told while piecing together bits of old school-clothes, baby blankets, work shorts and torn jeans to make quilts — a fable about flying Africans “whose black wings spread across the sky taking them to places I could only imagine.”
In the companion show “Coal,” the strong and highly productive Houston collective of Rabéa Ballin, Lovie Olivia and Ann Johnson examines broader cultural identities and discrimination with works that also illustrate virtuosic print-making.
Ballin applies wax-paper transfers and encaustic to reclaimed Polaroids, a stack of old Vibe magazines and crumpled notepaper — cultural relics that reference music, fashion and other aspects of daily life. Olivia’s “digital fresco monotypes” — tabletop installations that look like cut-out puzzle pieces — spell out the words “Matter,” “Conjure” and “drapetomania,” a supposed disease that caused slaves to run away.
Johnson, a master of printing on such unexpected materials as bird feathers, tackles the unfair treatment of blacks by police with a series of small sculptures that involve prints on mirrored sunglass lenses.
Most provocatively, with the installation “Converse: Real Talk,” Johnson asks visitors to sit for a spell without their smartphones. She’s set up two chairs under a “tree” of painted branches. “Can we please just have an honest conversation?” she writes. She’s tired of a society that’s made it so easy to criticize and demean others instantly through Twitter and Facebook.
“If you are bold enough to say it online, you should be bold enough to say it face to face,” she writes.
The artists have certainly done their part to start the conversation.