History given short shrift
LACMA’s downsized show of Afro-Atlantic art blunts the record.
If you’ve been looking for a concise overview of Modern and, especially, contemporary Afro-Brazilian art — mostly paintings, but also sculpture, video and drawing — “Afro-Atlantic Histories” seems to cover the bases. The exhibition, on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for the next seven months, includes just over 100 examples, all but a relatively small handful made since the start of World War II.
And that’s a pity. When it opened five years ago in São Paulo, “Afro-Atlantic Histories” was hailed as a revelation for the ways current art related to the complexities of the African diaspora, principally in Brazil, since the 16th century. Organized by the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, commonly known as MASP, and the nearby Instituto Tomie Ohtake, the sprawling exhibition then featured around 450 works of art.
A radical downsizing was undertaken by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, to bring a small segment of the lauded show to the U.S. In the process, almost all the historical material, rarely seen in any depth in North America, has been excised.
It’s a shadow of its former self. The exhibition’s introductory first room is emblematic. Of eight works, six are contemporary, one Modern and just one historical.
Divided into such themes as “Emancipation,” “Everyday Lives,” “Portraits,” the
show begins with “Maps and Margins,” which astutely locates Africa as integral to the development of Western art history since the Renaissance. At the entry, “A Place to Call Home (Africa-America Reflection),” a provocative wallrelief in highly polished stainless steel by Hank Willis Thomas, offers a contour map of the Western Hemisphere — albeit with South America swapped out for the vaguely similar shape of Africa, slightly reduced in relative size.
With Portuguese colonizers buying enslaved West Africans and transporting them to Brazil, the Atlantic slave trade began half a millennium ago. Brazil, which brought nearly 5 million enslaved people to the hemisphere — more than any other country — was also the last Western nation to abolish the horrific practice (in 1888).
“In this country, the Blacks occupy the main role,” wrote Ina von Binzer, a 19th century German governess living in Brazil. “They are responsible for all the labor and produce all the wealth in this land. The white Brazilian just doesn’t work.”
The centrality of seafaring skill to the proliferation of forced, free Black labor in European colonies to create massive stolen wealth is evoked in several works, starting with Aaron Douglas’ iconic 1936 painting “Into Bondage.” Silhouetted men and one woman in chains, manacles glowing red on their wrists, march to the sea, where ships bob on the horizon. Concentric circles of color radiate outward from beyond the horizon, linking past and future.
Betye Saar’s well-known “I’ll Bend But I Will Not Break” (1998) fuses a cleaning lady’s ironing board with the telltale shape of a famous 18th century British diagram of the packed hold of a slave ship in the Middle Passage between Africa and the Caribbean. In a work from Todd Gray’s lengthy recent series of “Atlantic Lullabies,” collaged, framed and layered photographs of people, architecture and places drift back and forth across a fluid sea of time and space, the extravagance of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s ravishing 18th century Venetian murals linked to the bleak cruelty of Europe’s sea power. (Gray divides his time between Los Angeles and Ghana.) An archetypal 2019 wood carving of a “Slave Ship” by Brazilian artist José Alves de Olinda merges figures of people with totemic Yoruba sculptures, signifying the transport of ethereal spirit in the diaspora, along with bodily human beings.
A lone painting in the room dates from the late 18th century. “European Ship Wrecked on the Coast of Africa, known as African Hospitality” by the once wildly popular, now less well-known British moralist George Morland shows a melodramatic, stormtossed coastal scene, complete with an angry sky, painted in a dusty range of browns, gray-greens and melancholic violet. Frightened European disaster survivors are being cared for by Africans.
The painting was the second installment of an abolitionist pair, the other showing European slavers callously separating a Black family in the aftermath of the auction block — the first-known British antislavery image, which became the source of a widely distributed engraving.
The painting is one of fewer than 20 historical works in the show, which severs an important thread of contrast, complexity and continuity in its themes. Morland was white, the other artists in the room are Black. That’s not surprising, given the legal constraints around work, language and image-making until the Modern era.
But the absence of historical examples of Black subjects by artists as diverse as John Philip Simpson, José Gil de Castro, Augustus Earle, Victor Meirelles, Dirk Valkenburg, Agostino Brunias and many more Europeans and Americans — white, Black, Latino, mixed-race and some unidentified — blunts the record, depriving the presentation of muchneeded scale and nuance.
This is one of those rare occasions where the exhibition catalog is often more rewarding than the exhibition itself. Headed by MASP curator Adriano Pedrosa, the team has apparently kept most of the original printed material intact, while slightly altering the 400-page book for the tour. (LACMA curators Rita Gonzalez and José Luis Blondet oversaw the local installation, while Pedrosa, who is supervising a series of big shows on sexuality, Indigenous life, feminism and other themes for his museum, was recently named curator for the 2024 Venice Biennale.) The book offers a wealth of information, with insightful essays by seven additional scholars.
In its original incarnation, the exhibition’s Portuguese title was “Histórias Afro-Atlânticas.” The direct translation of histórias is stories, not just histories, and in this stripped-down version of the show, we mostly hear only recent stories of the Black diaspora in the Western Hemisphere. That’s not bad, just disappointing, especially as any number of other first-rate contemporary Black artists long concerned with similar approaches are surprisingly excluded. (Start with Martin Puryear, whose first L.A. solo exhibition in 30 years opens Feb. 16 at Matthew Marks Gallery in West Hollywood.) The selection, while including a number of Brazilian artists not often seen here, feels nearly random.
At a time when Black art, its history and its critical position within Western art history are at the forefront of international revelation, the revised exhibition falls far short. LACMA, as if it were a museum of Modern and contemporary art rather than world art history, continues its unfortunate trajectory of over-emphasizing 20th and 21st century work. (Of eight current special exhibitions at the museum, seven fit that bill.) History matters, but these days, those stories are mostly missing on Wilshire Boulevard.