‘Empathy’ exhibit invites us to consider other people
How can a painter or photographer convey a person’s essence without the capacity to imagine that person’s experience? If you assume they can’t, an art exhibition about empathy might sound beside the point.
Except when you stop to think how easy it has become to capture, manipulate, distribute and consume images without stopping to think about them at all. Increasingly, a staggering volume of visual information at our disposal threatens to numb us more than move us. In which case a refresher course on empathy is probably a good idea.
“Humanly Possible: The Empathy Exhibition” exhibits works by 12 artists, most from the Midwest, who have been chosen for the feelings they evoke about fellow humans and the natural world. Many come from or live in the communities they depict.
Curator John Schuerman and co-curator Mark Lawson make it clear the exhibit, on view at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, is responding to the divisive, echo-chamber times we live in, when “our ability to understand and sympathize with other human beings seems to be on the wane worldwide.” So they invite us to look more closely at the lives of gender-ambiguous people, the poor, the deaf, victims of oppression, immigrants, and other afflicted or marginalized groups. We experience them through photography, video, three-dimensional objects, prints, paintings and audio recordings.
In some cases, the artists in “Humanly Possible” leave less room for interpretation and more room to simply consider their subjects as human beings. A case in point is the “Androgyny series” by Lois Bielefeld, a Milwaukee-based photographer who sets out to explore shared human qualities while plumbing the essence of the individual. She photographs each subject head-to-toe against a plain white wall. Each looks directly at the camera. None can be easily defined by gender. We have only body language, clothing and facial expressions to go by. Installed with the seven portraits is a locked bathroom stall, and from inside the stall we hear the recorded voices of people describing their gender-fluid lives.
It’s one of several hidden-yet-revealed gestures in the exhibition. Christopher E. Harrison, an African-American painter from Minneapolis, paints acrylic-on-canvas portraits that depict moments on the streets of his community. Two women talking or a man pulling the strings of his hoodie seem commonplace until we realize a portion of each face is deformed. It’s an external expression of internalized wounds.
Elsewhere, two artists use blackand-white woodblock prints that impart a graphic, cartoon-like quality to their subjects that also heightens the message.
Raoul Deal, a Milwaukee artist and educator, has three large woodcuts here, each hung alongside a poem. His “Trenzas” accompanies the poem “Tus Trenzas,” and together they use a girl’s braids to symbolize coming of age in a different world, with all the loss, possibility and peril this implies. The poem, by Dinorah Marquez, is written from a mother’s point of view. In Deal’s woodcut, a sober-faced child watches as her braids float away — shedding her culture perhaps in defiance, perhaps for survival.
Sue Coe, a British-born artist now living in New York, is an artist-activist known for her plainspoken outrage. In the linoleum prints here, she’s taking on animal rights, depicting in each print a sorry episode of abuse or exploitation. They’re like small posters calling for action, yet achingly intimate. A series of prints documents the story of Snowflake and Szenja, polar bears separated from each other after 20 years. In “Rescue,” a woman grasps a wide-eyed calf, and we’re not sure who’s rescuing whom.
“Empathy” as a theme can cut a pretty wide swath, almost too wide to sustain a focus and theme. How does it move beyond being a showcase of causes? Is an effort to more closely observe the marginalized sympathetic, or voyeuristic? “Humanly Possible” avoids these traps because the artists approach their subjects with honest curiosity, and in most cases firsthand knowledge.
Parts of “Humanly Possible” are documentary gestures distilled in a way to evoke feeling; they struck me as worthy but not ultimately remarkable. The best parts of this exhibition show us something we have not ourselves experienced, and startle us into paying attention. Mission accomplished.
“Humanly Possible: The Empathy Exhibition” is on view through March 3 in MIAD's Frederick Layton Gallery, 273 E. Erie St. For information visit miad.edu/ galleries.