Broad Strokes, page 15
I’d started the day at the gallery where my husband was a preparator, checking out some Byron Kim paintings he’d recently hung. They were fantastic: a series of monochromatic canvases in earthy tones of brown, peach, buff, and sand—J.Crew sweater colors made painterly and pure. They were lovely, yes, but also oddly compelling, though I couldn’t say why. They were neither hard-edged nor painterly, but somehow they were just right.
“They remind me of Brice Marden,” I said to my husband, high praise.
He nodded or didn’t, dashing back and forth behind me as I looked. He was at work; I wasn’t. “They’re portraits of his friends and family,” he said at some juncture. “Their skin colors.”
Now I loved them. There’s nothing I like more than a good portrait. Abstraction plus portraiture—the seemingly impossible—was pretty close to perfection in my book. I had a little freak-out in front of them.
Kara Walker. Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart. 1994.
Cut paper on wall. 156 x 600 inches. © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.
Artist Glenn Ligon was there (it occurs to me that it may have been his show my husband was hanging while I hung out). He saw or (please God, no) heard me and came over. We admired Kim’s paintings together and then he said something like, If you like these, you should check out this artist named Kara Walker down the street. When I asked for details, he said to just go, that I needed to see for myself.
So I strolled blithely into the Drawing Center, expecting more abstract paintings. I was charmed to see nothing of the kind. And not conceptual art or Neo-expressionist paintings or graffiti art or any of the things you might have expected to see in SoHo in 1994. This was totally unexpected, something almost like a history painting, big and bold and self-assured and . . . pretty. 50 ft/15 m of gracefully cut silhouettes superimposed across the wall’s white surface.
Then I looked closer. My next thought: Holy. Shit.
Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart was, frankly, terrifying.
Walker’s silhouettes are nearly life-size. I felt subsumed in the scene, pulled in, implicated. I wasn’t totally sure what was going on, but whatever it was, it was deeply disturbing.
Reading it, approximately, from left to right: A hoop-skirted white woman leans in to kiss a sword-clad “gentleman” beneath a mossy Southern-looking tree. The man’s sword pokes backward at the bum of a black child holding the neck of a big strangled bird. A black woman who may be part boat floats before them. Behind her is a rocky outcropping where a white man is being fellated by a black child. The white man raises his hands in ecstasy and they point to a black man floating above, his engorged penis like a balloon carrying him upward. Below him to the right, a black girl does a scatological jig, while a black woman with a kerchief on her head and a broom in hand is thrust forward by a white man whose head is buried up her skirt.
How did I know the race of any given figure, since all of them were black cutouts? Stereotypes. The white characters are a Scarlett O’Hara-ish woman and Southern “gentlemen” in fitted breeches and tails. The skinny black characters have pigtails, nappy hair, hanging sacks for clothes. “The silhouette says a lot with very little information, but that’s also what the stereotype does,” Walker said, of discovering her signature style. “So I saw the silhouette and the stereotype as linked.”
Standing there unsettled in the gallery reminded me of an evening at Robert Rosenblum’s house, where he sometimes hosted students. A reconception of van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters hung on one of Rosenblum’s walls. Googly-eyed, biglipped black sharecroppers replacing Dutch peasants. On the high right, almost like a flashing neon sign, it said: Eat Dem Taters. I respected Rosenblum as much as anyone I’ve ever known but could not begin to understand that painting in the context of his dining room. Was it really okay for a white art historian, curator, and critic to own, much less display, such a painting? I didn’t know where to look.
I later discovered that Robert Colescott, the artist of Eat Dem Taters, had been a big influence on Walker, and particularly that painting. At least the continuity of my consternation was consistent.
Like the gruesome humor in Colescott’s work, Walker’s Gone shines, in the words of Linda Nochlin, with “a kind of pseudo-Rococo perkiness throughout.” Yes, I could see it even on my first encounter: racial horror show meets Rococo naughty. Walker’s Gone is a kind of mash-up of Goya’s Disasters of War and Fragonard’s The Swing. She is their twentieth-century love child, equally unflinching in depicting violence and sex.
I was pretty sure it wasn’t okay for me to be enjoying Walker’s work so much. I wasn’t even sure it was okay for me, a white girl in her twenties, to be looking at it at all.
But I couldn’t look away.
I wasn’t the only one who thought I shouldn’t be looking. Artist Betye Saar, and many other artists, thought so, too.
Soon after Walker landed the MacArthur, Saar sent some two hundred letters (oh, those pre-Internet days—now that was dedication! And not cheap, either) addressed especially to black artists and intellectuals: “I am writing you, seeking your help to spread awareness about the negative images produced by the young African American artist, Kara Walker.” Actually, she wasn’t just asking for awareness, but calling for censorship of Walker’s work (which was effective in at least one instance). Saar said it wasn’t personal, though it’s hard to take her at her word: “I have nothing against Kara except that I think she is young and foolish,” she said. Saar did concede that she found Walker’s work “revolting” and questioned her intentions as an artist. “The goal is to be rich and famous. There is no personal integrity,” Saar said. “Kara is selling us down the river.”
Saar’s own, celebrated, work also often utilizes racial stereotypes—Uncle Tom, Aunt Jemima, Little Black Sambo—but with a crystal-clear party line. Her most famous piece, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima from 1972, is a vitrine lined with a backdrop of smiling Aunt Jemima faces, presumably from pancake boxes. Standing before them is a plump and grinning mammy figurine. Propped against her belly is a picture of a mammy holding a white baby. In one hand the figure herself holds a broom and in the other, a shotgun. Aunt Jemima may still be smiling, but she’s not gonna take it anymore. Totally worth saying, and got it.
Walker’s art isn’t like that. It’s far more complicated, implicating, scary, and confusing. And it’s brave as hell. When the attacks on her work began, Walker was pregnant and, soon after, the mother of a newborn daughter. It was undoubtedly a psychic and spiritual one-two punch, but nothing has stopped Walker from continuing to make hella difficult art.
Kara Walker. Rebel Leader (from Testimony). 2004. Cut paper with pencil, pressure-sensitive tape, and metal fasteners on board. 18 x 14.5 inches. © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.
That’s true even when she’s using an image similar to Saar’s—in this case, black female stereotype holding broom and gun (from her 2004 video work Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Fortune). Violence is not implied, but carried out in the lynching of a white slave master (by jittery silhouette puppets). There is a steady willingness to hold a cold eye on the horror. Walker doesn’t just threaten the tough stuff: she makes us undergo it with her.
Kara Walker. Alabama Loyalists Greeting the Federal Gun-Boats from Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated). 2005.
Offset lithography and silkscreen. Sheet: 39 x 53 inches. © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.
One of the slams against Walker early on was that the white establishment just loved her so much. There may be something there, I don’t know, but it’s hard not to sense the lip-purse of sour grapes. Unquestionably, from the MacArthur to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker has traveled in the highest of high circles.
In 2006, she was the first living artist in the history of the Met invited to curate an exhibition using the museum’s permanent collection. Gary Tinterow, curator of nineteenth-century, modern, and contemporary art (that vast position embodied in one person says a lot about the Met’s relationship to “newer” art), gave Walker carte blanche to do what she wanted: show her own work, the work of some other artist, a selection, whatever.
Walker responded with a timely exhibition titled “After the Deluge.” It featured wide-ranging samples of water and terror—from an obscure seventeenth-century Dutch etching, The Bursting of St. Anthony’s Dike, to a crowd favorite from the American Wing, Winslow Homer’s late nineteenth-century painting Gulf Stream, depicting a solitary black man adrift on a stormy, shark-infested sea. The whole show, title included, was a response to the very real recent horror of Hurricane Katrina. Walker highlighted how often water and terror and race have converged in art and history. Especially American art/history.
Of her own works from the Met’s collection, she included her print portfolio, Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated). In these works, Walker takes etchings of Harper’s original visual journalism (Harper’s hired thousands of artists, including Winslow Homer, to create images during the war) and superimposes the images of slaves on the mainstream (read: white) narrative. Those were the people and stories of the war that were overlooked, just as the marginalized populations of New Orleans during and after Katrina were; both led to wholesale tragedy.
But that’s me talking, not Walker. Though her work is powerful, complicated, and brave (and beautiful), she makes no claims for its usefulness.
“I don’t think that my work is actually effectively dealing with history,” she’s said. “I think of my work as subsumed by history or consumed by history.” Or, to quote the epic title from one of her large drawings (that itself quotes, and alters, Martin Luther King), The moral arc of history ideally bends towards justice but just as soon as not curves back around toward barbarism, sadism, and unrestrained chaos.
CHAPTER 15:
SUSAN O’MALLEY
I want to go back to my eighth grade dream of being an artist. Because if I don’t do it now, then when will I??? Why delay the truth in your heart?
—SUSAN O’MALLEY, AGE 24
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
—ANNIE DILLARD, THE WRITING LIFE
IN 2014, ARTIST SUSAN O’MALLEY lost her mother to a degenerative brain disease called multiple systems atrophy. O’Malley and her five close-knit siblings—four sisters and a brother—watched Lupita O’Malley transform over three years from a vibrant teacher of special needs children to needing a great deal herself. Lupita was, toward the end, wheelchair-bound, with difficulty speaking and writing. Faced with her mother’s steep decline and sure knowledge that the disease would kill her, O’Malley did not turn to the Catholic faith of her childhood or to hope in some yet-unknown science.
Susan O’Malley turned to her art. She made art with her mother.
In 2012 O’Malley had a show called My Healing Garden Is Green at the Romer Young Gallery in San Francisco. The phrase was her mother’s, written after her terminal diagnosis. O’Malley asked her mom to write down phrases she often used with her children. Lupita O’Malley’s stabbing, broken handwriting is almost illegible. But her daughter framed blown-up prints of those shaky phrases—graphic black on white against white gallery walls—so that they look almost like gestural abstract paintings, except that when you look closely, they coalesce into readable, declarative statements: I Love You Baby. Trick Your Brain & Smile. If it takes more energy to frown then be happy.
Susan O’Malley. I Love You Baby. 2012.
They are upbeat, heartbreaking, and deeply human.
“I am so grateful for her,” O’Malley wrote about her mother, “not only for agreeing to make art with me, but for her endless inspiration on how to live: with love, grace and a sense of humor.”
The same might be said of O’Malley herself. Actually, the same is said of her.
I’m struck by all the lost mothers in this brief sampling of women artists. The mothers of Artemisia Gentileschi, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Edmonia Lewis, Vanessa Bell, and Louise Bourgeois all died when their daughters were still children or teenagers. O’Malley was in her late thirties. And there’s Paula Modersohn-Becker, just thirty when she died shortly after becoming a mother herself, leaving behind her infant daughter.
It may not be anything common in their experience that made these motherless daughters look to art. Maybe it’s coincidence, or just the sort of lives I’m drawn to, or a simple fact of history that if we select x number of women from before x time, encounters with early death are inevitable.
But at least in O’Malley’s case, her mother’s struggle with a terminal illness did help focus her desire to make art. She was already an artist—lively, productive, public—but she was also a busy curator and gallery manager for the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art. It’s all too easy in such positions (curators, art handlers, editors, publishers) to allow the creative work of others to overshadow your own. Often, it’s a necessary fact of making a living.
But with her mother’s illness, O’Malley dedicated herself with more intensity to her own art and in that arena things went well. Her pieces were widely exhibited, at prestigious California venues such as Montalvo Arts Center and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and as far afield as England, Denmark, and Poland. She also began work on her first book.
At Montalvo in 2013, O’Malley was featured in “Happiness Is” alongside artists Christine Wong Yap and Leah Rosenberg. “It became a really collaborative project,” according to exhibition curator Donna Conwell, not least because of O’Malley: “Her working process was so incredibly open.” O’Malley further collaborated with Rosenberg in 2014 at Yerba Buena’s Bay Area Now 7 (NorCal’s version of, say, the Whitney Biennial), but the cooperative nature of her art embraces viewers as much as fellow artists.
While her mother was dying, O’Malley was creating work for “Happiness Is,” which could have been a gruesome irony. Yet one of the show’s most moving pieces was her A Healing Walk. Montalvo is situated on 175 acres/71 ha, with miles of widely utilized hiking trails. On one steep trail O’Malley installed nine signs of a type that might be found in Muir Woods to the north, explaining the flora, fauna, or history of the place. But O’Malley’s signs express states of presence and of mind, such as: This Beautiful Moment, Your Mind Quiets, You Look Up, You Are Here Awake and Alive.
Nine was the number favored by Dante in structuring his Divine Comedy, which begins with a walk: In the middle of our lives / I found myself in a dark woods / the right road lost. Dante’s guide is the poet Virgil; in A Healing Walk, the artist O’Malley is ours. And just as Virgil takes Dante through Hell, then on a steep path up until they see the stars, O’Malley’s path culminates in a summit overlooking the quiet balm of the natural world.
O’Malley’s walk offered healing for herself, and for others. Her art is generous that way.
Lupita O’Malley died in 2014. By then Susan O’Malley had quit her job and was working full time on her art. Soon after her mother’s death, she was also focusing on an exciting new creative project: she was pregnant with twin girls. O’Malley was becoming, in the way Paula Modersohn-Becker once so beautifully captured, procreative in every sense.
O’Malley’s early life hardly strikes me as fertile ground for a budding artist. She was raised in a nondescript suburb of San Jose, a place not known for art. A high-achiever, she went to Stanford (class of 1999), where her friend and fellow undergrad Christina Amini says, “There were very few studio art majors. Maybe five out of a class of fifteen hundred.” O’Malley was not one of them. She started as a human biology major, with no interest in becoming a doctor, and by her junior year realized she was accruing a lot of credits toward urban studies, so she majored in that and liked it fine. “What was exciting to me was that it was about how we live,” O’Malley wrote a few years after graduation. “How the structures that we’ve built relate to our human interactions. The idea of community, and how what we’ve developed makes communities or hurts communities. How all of these ideas intersect with each other.”
The thing about places like Stanford (in case you don’t know) is there’s a white-hot spotlight held on success. O’Malley saw this as something of a liability: “I realize that it didn’t leave a lot of room for big mistakes or wanting to admit big mistakes. But big mistakes are part of the learning process and how we grow up.” After Stanford, she followed the traditional path of movers and shakers and moved to New York with friends. She was there less than two years before recognizing her mistake. She didn’t want to “make it” in New York—she wanted, quite simply, to make art.
So she moved in with her mom, where she used the garage as a studio and took art classes at nearby Foothill College.
The above might sound (and feel) a lot like failure when you’re twenty-four years old (and a Stanford grad)—living back with your mom, going to community college—but O’Malley sucked it up and named herself artist-in-residence of her Willow Glen neighborhood in San Jose. Her urban studies interests—and wry humor—are apparent in her earliest works.
O’Malley did not to set out to épater the bourgeoisie she was “stuck” among. No, she dropped a kindly note in her neighbors’ mailboxes letting them know she might rearrange the leaves on their lawns or roll up the garden hose in a certain manner. Neighbors sent supportive notes and e-mails. Passersby sometimes asked if she was the new artist-in-residence. One homeowner created his own lawn leaf pattern.
