SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco present Revelations: Art from the African American South, an original exhibition celebrating the historic acquisition of 62 works of art by 22 contemporary African American artists. Works include paintings, sculptures, drawings, and quilts by acclaimed artists such as Thornton Dial (1928-2016), Ralph Griffin (1925-1992), Bessie Harvey (1929-1994), Lonnie Holley (b. 1950), Joe Light (1934-2005), Ronald Lockett (1965-1998), Joe Minter (b. 1943), Jessie T. Pettway (b. 1929), Mary T. Smith (1904-1995), Mose Tolliver (1919-2006), Annie Mae Young (1928-2012), and Purvis Young (1943-2010). These pieces join the Fine Arts Museums’ renowned collection of American art, adding an essential chapter.
“The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco house one of the world’s greatest 350-year survey collections of American art,” says Max Hollein, Director and CEO of the Fine Arts Museums. “Accordingly, we feel a special responsibility to take the lead in expanding the representation of artists who reflect the historical diversity and complexity of American culture. This exhibition celebrates our groundbreaking acquisition and allows us to introduce this work and these artists to what may be a completely new audience.”
These objects are powerful testaments to the continuity and survival of African American culture. Born in the era of Jim Crow segregation—and with slavery in their inherited memory—the majority of these artists were self-taught. The works in this collection embody the promise and progress of freedom in the civil rights era, and address some of the most profound and persistent issues in American society, such as race, class, gender, identity, and spirituality. Historically marginalized, patronized, or promoted with reductive terms such as folk, naive, or outsider, these artists have only recently garnered new exhibition opportunities, museum representation, and foundation and collector support, as well as critical and popular acclaim.
Displayed in galleries usually reserved for the permanent collection of American art, Revelations: Art from the African American South showcases the entire acquisition alongside relevant works drawn from the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, including prints by Kara Walker and sculptures by British artist Cornelia Parker and Ghanaian artist El Anatsui.
“While all these objects embody universal human values, they are also powerful testaments to African American cultural resilience and survival,” notes Timothy Anglin Burgard, curator-in-charge of American Art at the Fine Arts Museums. “Originally created as expressions of personal identity and communal solidarity in the South, they will now serve as catalysts to transform global art history.”
Revelations: Art from the African American South is curated by Timothy Anglin Burgard and is on view at the de Young from June 3, 2017, through April 1, 2018.
The exhibition opens with three very different paintings of African Americans from the Fine Arts Museums’ permanent collection that document slavery, sharecropping, and civil rights: Robert, Calvin, Martha and William Scott and Mila (ca. 1843-45), by an unidentified artist; Robert Gwathmey’s Cotton Picker (1950); and Jack Levine’s Birmingham ’63 (1963). Also on display in the first gallery is a group of press photographs documenting pivotal events in the civil rights movement. The photographs include the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama; the 1964 murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner; and the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Across the gallery is Purvis Young’s Talking to the System (ca. 1975); the oil painting depicts three young people—two with halos—confronting white and black elders. Paying tribute to the essential role played by young African Americans, many of whom were martyred, Young confronts systematic and institutionalized racism. The painting also simultaneously confronts the perpetual tension between generations—a dynamic that transcends race.
From there, the exhibition delves into one of earliest forms of African American art-making in the South with a look at the stunning quilts from the isolated hamlet of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. Highlights of the second gallery, “‘Ideas All Around’: The Quilts of Gee’s Bend,” include works by Plummer T. Pettway and Annie Mae Young. As with many of the artists featured in this exhibition, these quilters used recycled and found materials to create stunning works of art, many of which were originally intended for domestic use. Young’s “Bars” Work-Clothes Quilt (ca. 1970), made from strips of cloth from visibly worn-out work pants, is a striking example. Audiences may be familiar with some of the quilts in this gallery, which were previously on view as part of the 2006 de Young exhibition The Quilts of Gee’s Bend.
The next gallery, entitled “Roots and Branches,” delves into works of assemblage and root sculptures with key works by Griffin, Harvey, and Holley. Many of these sculptures feature actual tree roots and branches, materials employed by many African American artists in the South. Holley, whose career began by a tragic accident, creates visual stories out of recycled materials. His best-known assemblage, Him and Her Hold the Root (1994), is prominently placed in the center of the gallery. It is comprised of a smaller “female” rocking chair that rests its arm upon a larger “male” chair, as if mirroring the supportive and stabilizing relationship of an absent female/male couple. Together, the chairs support a large tree root evocative of family tree “roots” and genealogy. Griffin’s Noah’s Ark (ca. 1980) is displayed nearby. Griffin’s conception of the Genesis story appears to unify the blue waters of the flood, the white of the sky, the blood-red of the flesh destroyed in the deluge, and the black mountain where the ark came to rest, in one abstracted, boat-shaped form.
The exhibition continues with works by Minter, Light, and Smith in “Yard Show: The World at My Door.” The “yard show,” an outdoor gallery of natural and manmade objects, is one of the oldest artistic traditions in the American South. Drawing inspiration from the world they know, these artists address themes ranging from the Old Testament to pop culture to Civil Rights. Dominating this gallery are Minter’s Camel at the Water Hole (1995) and The Hanging Tree (1996). Both are made of welded found steel and relate to his African Village in America, a dense sculptural installation in Birmingham, Alabama, which critiques on the exploitative history of slavery and Jim Crow racism. Nearby, Light’s Dawn (1988), an oil painting revealing the inverted and reversed phrase God of Israel, illustrates the story of the Israelites from Exodus. Light’s portrait Elvis (1992), Smith’s Untitled (1987), and Tolliver’s Rainy Sunshine, Cats and Dog, Drum Beater (1987) also hang in this gallery.
Dial’s Lost Cows (2000-1), assembled from painted cow skeletons, confronts viewers as they move into the next gallery, “Thornton Dial and Ronald Lockett: The World at Large.” Addressing the cycles of life and death that are central to agrarian life, the abstracted skeleton behind the four white cows struggles to guide his wayward herd. Here Dial critiques the white supremacists (represented by pelvic bones, which resemble Ku Klux Klan masks) who created the Jim Crow system, but were “lost” without their African American employees. Lockett, Dial’s younger cousin, is represented in this gallery with England’s Rose (1997). This sheet-metal assemblage was inspired by the death of Princess Diana, one of the first public figures to physically embrace those living with HIV/AIDS. The vertical bars recall the fence of Kensington Palace, and the gradual descent of rose bouquets suggests a shift from vivid life and light to death and darkness. Diana’s life and death resonated with Lockett, who passed away from HIV/AIDS-related pneumonia one year after the work was completed.
The final gallery, “From the Margins to the Mainstream,” examines a pan-African sensibility in mainstream contemporary art. The gallery includes Kara Walker’s recently acquired Resurrection Story with Patrons (2017); Robert Colescott’s A Taste of Gumbo (1990), depicting a white woman sampling African American food and culture; Anatsui’s Hovor II (2004), which uses recycled aluminum bottle caps to comment on postcolonial economic and cultural exchange; and Cornelia Parker’s Anti-Mass (2005), created from the timbers of an African American Southern Baptist church burned by arsonists.
