MFAH’s ‘Soul of a Nation’ evokes current movement on race, injustice
Houston waited three years for “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” only to be delayed four more months by COVID-19. But the show’s opening Saturday at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston is even more significant now. Its potent images of racial injustice could look raw to viewers in George Floyd’s hometown during the wake of his funeral and the national civil unrest his death ignited.
“These artworks are speaking to issues that happened 50 years ago, but they seem to be speaking to this moment,” said MFAH curator Kanitra Fletcher.
“Soul of a Nation” isn’t the first important show of black art, but its popularity has pried open a bigger, more complex picture of a long-ignored story. Many museums have only sought works by many of the show’s artists for the last decade or so, finally acknowledging that the pantheon of white male icons who defined 20th century art — Warhol, Pollock, Rothko and so on — had equals who were marginalized, including women and people of color.
Dana C. Chandler’s life-sized sculpture “Fred Hampton’s Door
#2” stands in one of the show’s first galleries. Pocked with bullet holes, it commemorates the 1969 murder of the Chicago Black Panther leader during a pre-dawn police raid that also killed fellow activist Mark Clark and wounded six people. The piece could just as easily be about the Louisville apartment door police rammed in March when they killed Breonna Taylor, who also was killed in her bed.
Across the gallery, a lynching victim and a Confederate flag are hard to miss in a painting by Archibald Motley. In another room, Betye Saar’s assemblage “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” layers images of a mammy figure who was only abolished from syrup labels a few weeks ago. “It’s a small piece but really powerful,” Fletcher said.
More than pain
Alvia Wardlaw, who directs Texas Southern University’s museum and is a leading scholar of Black art, is philosophical about the timing. “It’s here when it’s supposed to be here,” she said. “The fact it’s coming to Houston now makes it like a healing balm for the city.”
But to see only the legacies of pain conveyed in some of the works would be another injustice. The show holds many kinds of art, much of it compellingly beautiful, by artists who were shut out from the institutions that glorified conversations about the formal concerns of abstraction, composition and materials. Tate curators Zoe Whitley and Mark Godfrey included works about joy, beauty and family that are both timely and timeless. Whitley, a black American who has worked in London 20 years, hopes visitors also will feel uplifted by the persistence and confidence of the show’s artists.
“Soul of a Nation” unfolds through about a dozen sections. Some glimpse the work of collectives in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Others are more loosely thematic.
Just talking about “Soul of a Nation” floods Wardlaw’s mind. She grew up in the heart of Third Ward’s intellectual community, then socialized with some of the “Soul of a Nation” artists during the period the show covers, first as an art history major at Wellesley College, then as a young curator at the MFAH.
“In New York, there was a huge clamor … a great deal of voicing of concerns, just as we have now,” she said. She was there when Benny Andrews organized the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition in 1969 in response to the Met’s controversial “Harlem on My Mind” exhibition, which only included one black artist. Wardlaw gave another New York artist, Roy DeCarava, his first retrospective at the MFAH in 1973. DeCarava founded the Kamoinge Workshop for black photographers, one of the groups featured in “Soul of a Nation.”
Black artists have always dealt with the legacy of slavery and issues of accessibility, “turning them around and creating something people can become involved in,” Wardlaw said.
Emerging Houston artist Nathaniel Donnettsaw ‘Soul of a Nation” last year at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles. “It was like going to Woodstock or Coachella; I liked every artist there,” he said. “It opens up a dialogue about differences in black art that people might not be aware of. There’s a lot of nuance, even in the figurative work.”
He learned black art history as an undergrad at TSU and has been looking for his place in it from the get-go. “You see these different artists and ask where you are in this tradition, and how are you trying to participate,” he said. Still, he was familiar with most of the show’s artists only through books. “Soul of a Nation” also struck personal chords, he said. “The racial stigma is a very real thing we have to deal with. All those different things are pulsating.”
Donnett coined the phrase “dark imaginarence” several years ago to describe his interdisciplinary art. He’s currently collecting old backpacks from local students as primary material for a temporary public artwork commissioned by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. That’s part of a larger project he’s creating with a critical research grant from Yale, where he is a masters degree candidate, about “fugitive blackness,” he said. “I’m thinking about memory and history… the baggage we carry from childhood; this tussle.”
Fitting in with history
“Soul of a Nation” is also important professionally and personally to Fletcher, who grew up in Clear Lake and joined the MFAH in 2017 as she was finishing her Ph.D. at Cornell. She is still the only black curator on staff of 44 that is 70 percent white. Her dissertation on black American modern artists includes two of the show’s artists — Norman Lewis and Sam Gilliam — “so this is especially exciting,” she said.
Fletcher created the Houston component for the MFAH’s “Soul of A Nation” display, putting works by Biggers, Carroll
Simms, Kermit Oliver and Earlie Hudnall Jr. near DeCarava’s photographs and works by Biggers’ teacher, Charles White.
Wardlaw thinks Houston has shown more support for its black artists than other U.S. cities. The MFAH desegregated in 1950 after Biggers won its annual purchase prize. John and Dominique de Menil supported civil rights activism and staged “The Deluxe Show” at a historic Fifth Ward theater in 1971. “I think we have this ability to move forward in ways other places don’t,” Wardlaw said.
“Soul of a Nation” nods to “The Deluxe Show” with a few pieces, including the MFAH’s acrylic painting “Salmon Spray” by curator/artist Peter Bradley. “Artists are so often the first to initiate the change they want to see in the world. Rather than
complaining about the lack of spaces or resources, Bradley was an agent of change. That is really powerful,” said Whitley.
MFAH director Gary Tinterow came of age in the ’70s and was politically active. “I knew of the artists and knew the social issues governing this art but didn’t understand the practical context,” he said. “Today, for me, for white people, the impact of the exhibition is that it’s déjà vu all over again. What a stain on our conscience that we’re still here stuck, 50-something years later, with these same issues unresolved.”
Several of the artists have died since the show’s Tate debut, including Joe Overstreet, Jack Whitten, Barkley Hendricks and Barbara Jones-Hogu. “For those who are still around, time with them is very precious,” Godfrey said. “Curators should do their best to attend to these figures; do solo shows with them, work with them on museum acquisitions and hear their stories.”
That is happening.
“It’s a beginning,” Donnett said. “Online during the pandemic, all these institutions are giving props to Black Lives Matter and showing their collections of Black art, and you realize they don’t have a lot. They can’t even go a whole week without repeating themselves.”
The MFAH’s physical distancing protocols will make the experience of seeing “Soul of a Nation” more solitary than it was in other cities, giving viewers more time to think about “long overdue discussions,” Wardlaw suggested. “That’s one of the most powerful things art can do.”