Survey of Black art in New Mexico is rich, insightful

SANTA FE — “Truth, Memory, Joy, Resistance: Black Expressions in New Mexico” features works by 28 Black New Mexican artists. In their artist statements, many allude to the underrepresentation, or flat-out erasure, of Black history in the state.

Although Black people have been part of what is now New Mexico since 1539, their stories do not fit neatly into the prevailing tricultural myth, which imagines the state’s identity as solely a blend of Indigenous, Spanish and Anglo cultures. Exhibitions like these are necessary to counteract such historical erasure and to demonstrate the continued relevance and vitality of Black voices in New Mexican art. Many of the artworks address the complexities of identity, and the double-edged sword of being both invisible and hyper-visible in a state where they comprise less than 3% of the population, according to recent census figures.

The exhibition was co-curated by Aaron Payne of Aaron Payne Fine Art — one of the only Black-owned art galleries in the state — and Jakia Fuller, an up-and-coming curator who recently organized “The Art of Re-Use” at Albuquerque’s Richard Levy Gallery. “Truth, Memory, Joy, Resistance” features work by artists at all levels of their careers, from prominent, internationally exhibited artists, such as Nikesha Breeze and Paula Wilson, to those just starting out, such as Lila Adeyemo, a high school sophomore at New Mexico School for the Arts.

Adeyemo’s semi-abstract, three-dimensional collage, “Strands,” is made with raffia — a material that has been used in Central and West Africa for thousands of years — and scraps of batik-dyed fabric associated with West Africa since Dutch colonial times. The artist has braided the raffia to resemble cornrows and wrapped some of the strands into a bun, referencing hairstyles that are likely as ancient as raffia fiber itself. Not only does the work display a sophisticated understanding of material history, but the use of analogous colors — cool purple and warm orange, united by magenta — reflects an approach to chromaticism that’s equally bold and restrained. For such an intimately-scaled work — approximately one foot square — it punches above its weight, holding its own against much larger works by more established artists.

At first glance, I thought Louie Perea’s black-and-white photograph, “I Forgot the Color I Came From” was a portrait of a DJ, at a DJ booth, scratching a record. The black circle in the foreground is not a vinyl record, however, but a puddle of highly reflective black ink or paint, which ripples at the subject’s touch. A pane of frosted glass obscures the subject’s head and torso from us, rendering their identity fuzzy and indistinct, while a black ink spot drips from a point on the glass in front of their right eye. Perea’s image seems to illustrate the experience of the racialized Black subject, as Frantz Fanon describes it in “Black Skin, White Masks” (1952), whereby the violence imposed by the external racial schema cleaves body from self. The subject who gazes introspectively into the inky reflecting pool or reaches out to touch the glass that separates them from the viewer is distinct from their body, objectified by the white gaze, which becomes a site of historical trauma rather than self-perception.

In “Queer Phenomenology” (2006), Sara Ahmed extends Fanon’s insights beyond race to encompass what she calls the “disorientation” of being queer in heteronormative spaces, and Perea’s work thinks through the embodied experience of queerness as much as Blackness. “My work is shaped by my experience navigating between my Afro-Latinx and nonbinary identity,” Perea writes in their artist statement, noting that notions of identity and belonging, including “Black queerness,” are “often distorted by the ongoing colonial histories of the camera.” I don’t think Perea’s work is pessimistic, though. In this highly constructed, self-aware image, I see an artist-auteur asserting their own agency while critiquing those distorting lenses that would flatten their identity into a caricature. And while the figure extending their hand beyond the frosted partition is not literally a DJ, their DJ-like pose suggests that predetermined cultural codes are things to be sampled and remixed, not blindly accepted.

Karsten Creightney’s lithograph, “12th and Resilience,” combines motifs that appear in many of his works — flowers, grave markers and figures standing at a crossroads. A young Black woman in the foreground of the image holds flowers, while behind her, arrows on an exit ramp point in different directions. On the strip of grass near the ramp are two grave markers in the shape of crosses. Unlike those vernacular roadside memorials placed at fatal crash sites, however, these look like cemetery tombstones — heavy and permanent. By swapping out temporary roadside memorials for tombstones — a seemingly subtle change — Creightney transforms a literal crossroads into an allegorical one. Even if the crosses represent actual deaths, the two people may not have been killed by cars, necessarily. The crossroads may symbolize death and possible rebirth, since, in many cultures, the crossroads marks a liminal space where mundane reality intersects with the supernatural, or where people “cross over” into the spirit world. Is the young woman an orphan? Do the two crosses represent the graves of her parents? Perhaps, although Creightney keeps the narrative open-ended. His goal, as he states, is to “capture the partly lived, partly imagined sense of place experienced in memory.” His title reinforces the allegorical reading, positing “resilience” as a path one may follow. Between tombstones and flowers — death and life — a young woman stands at a crossroads and chooses resilience.

If we think more literally about roadways, we must admit that they have not always been safe spaces for Black people in the United States — not during the era of segregation and sundown towns, and arguably not in the 21st century, either. “Truth, Memory, Joy, Resistance” includes a large-scale documentary story-quilt that the Santa Fe-based artist Alison Morgan made in 2017 while living in Baltimore. The quilt, titled “A Rest in Pieces,” is a memorial to Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old Black man who died in the back of a Baltimore police van that year. It also includes images of Tyrone West, a Black man who died in Baltimore police custody four years earlier. Although the narrative is tragic, Morgan’s syncopated curves of pink, brown, yellow, teal, purple, indigo and orange are joyful. Color-wise, I am reminded of William T. Williams, Joe Overstreet and Sanford Biggers — three artists who were inspired by quilting and jazz to use color in unorthodox ways — unorthodox from the perspective of Western color theory, that is. 

In Morgan’s quilt, the faces of Gray and West are encircled by kaleidoscopic snowflake shapes, which, upon closer inspection, turn out to be paper-doll-style silhouettes of policemen. Should we read the work ironically, where the bright colors and exuberant shapes represent only a false and fleeting joy, while the real truth, barely camouflaged, is one of brutal repression? Or are the joy and beauty just as real as the violence? I think the joy here is real. If Morgan had wished to use bright colors ironically, she might have used only pastel colors, or actual rainbows. Her colors may be vibrant and numerous, but they’re not indiscriminate, nor are they easily digested. She intentionally disrupts harmonic relationships with moments of tension and dissonance, transmuting pain into joy as beautifully as the music at a New Orleans jazz funeral, which begins in mourning and ends in celebration.

Next to Morgan’s quilt, a monitor plays short video pieces by Danielle Reddick and Oriana Lee. I loved Reddick’s “HairShroom,” in which the artist forms a mushroom out of her own hair, displaying the same deadpan wit as John Baldassari’s classic “Teaching a Plant the Alphabet” or William Wegman’s “Drinking Milk.” But Oriana Lee’s “In Spite of” was one of the most affecting works of video art I’ve ever seen. It begins with a home movie-style autobiographical documentary of the artist and her family on a carefree road trip to the Taos Pueblo and healing hot springs. At one point, they pull off the highway to admire the mountains, and Lee’s young child takes control of the camera, creating an extreme “shaky cam” effect that plunges the viewer into a child’s-eye view of the world — frenzied yet jubilant. The video then cuts abruptly to police dashcam footage, showing officers with guns drawn, shouting at the panicked family and ordering them out of their minivan. Having seen the family from the artist’s point of view, and then from her child’s, we hardy recognize them in the third set of images. Reduced to what Fanon called a “racial epidermal schema,” it appears they are being treated as objects, not people. An extreme example of the split between body and self that Perea’s cool conceptual photograph alludes to abstractly, Lee shows the full terror of how such dehumanization operates in the real world. The genius of Lee’s piece is that she first situates us within her own perspective, then that of her child, granting us a rich, multi-perspectival view of her family’s humanity, such that we are genuinely shocked when that perspective changes and we are made to inhabit the cold, objectifying gaze of the Other.

There are many outstanding works in “Truth, Memory, Joy, Resistance,” from Black Men Flower Project founder Robert Washington-Vaughns’ participatory installation to Hana Kostis’ evocative sculptures of finely hammered copper. Most of the art fits at least two of the four themes (truth, memory, joy or resistance), although the curators, wisely, don’t announce which is which. Their light, nonintrusive touch allows the artworks to exist in all their complexity, as opposed to mere illustrations of this or that theme.

A beautiful and sometimes deeply moving exhibition, “Truth, Memory, Joy, Resistance” offers 28 distinctive visions of how Blackness in New Mexico looks and feels today. The artists do not speak in a single, unified voice even when addressing similar themes, which is partly what gives the show its power. As a result, everyone who goes to this show will probably get something different from it, but everyone will get something.

Logan Royce Beitmen is an arts writer for the Albuquerque Journal. He covers visual art, music, fashion, theater and more. Reach him at lbeitmen@abqjournal.com or on Instagram at @loganroycebeitmen.