At PEM, exploring the ‘Black Atlantic’
SALEM — Kenneth Montague has spent more than a quarter century collecting photographs of the African diaspora. He’s the founder of the Wedge Collection, in Toronto, where he lives, and Wedge Curatorial Projects, which seeks to support emerging Black artists. “As We Rise: Photography From the Black Atlantic” includes more than 100 photographs Montague’s collected. Most are from recent decades, though the earliest, James Van Der Zee’s “Couple in Raccoon Coats,” dates to 1932. It’s a show offering surprise, illumination, excitement, and vexation. Three of those four are intentional. The exhibition runs at the Peabody Essex Museum through Dec. 31.
The show’s been curated by Elliott Ramsey, of the Polygon Gallery, in British Columbia, and PEM’s Stephanie H. Tung. A number of other curators and writers have contributed to the extensive wall text.
The last two words in the subtitle, “Black Atlantic,” might need some explaining. Americans, in our American way, tend to think only in terms of . . . America. That’s as true of national shame as national pride. One legacy of slavery and colonialism is an African cultural littoral that circles the Atlantic, taking in Canada and the Caribbean and Britain and Brazil, as well as Africa and, yes, the United States. “As We Rise” includes photographs from each. Among the show’s chief virtues is how neatly it ignores geographic blinkers. “As We Reveal” could work as an alternate title.
The process of revelation extends beyond that fundamental concept of cultural extent and the larger unity within diversity found therein. A particularly marvelous example of unity within diversity is how Seydou Keïta’s image of two Malian women on a motor scooter, from the ‘50s, chimes with Henry Clay Anderson’s of a couple on a motorcycle taken in Mississippi, a few years later. (The
Anderson in turn chimes with a photograph that’s not in the show, from Robert Frank’s “The Americans” of a couple on a motorcycle in Indianapolis, but that’s getting off topic.)
There’s work by well-known photographers: both forebears (Van Der Zee, Keïta, Gordon Parks, Malick Sidibé) and current practitioners (Carrie Mae Weems, Dawoud Bey, Hank Willis Thomas, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Mickalene Thomas, Ming Smith). But what’s most interesting about the show is its presenting so many new and/or littleknown photographers. Most contributors have just one image here. That adds to the sense of sweep and discovery “As We Rise” has to offer. Expect to encounter many unfamiliar names.
As with many photographs in the show, Zun Lee’s “Jebron Felder and his son Jae’shaun at home. Harlem, New York, September 2011” conveys a sense of something like collaboration between photographer and subject: more than just sympathy, if less overt than statement of solidarity. The image being in black and white gives a feeling of distance that balances the closeness of the father and son to the picture plane. Also, the light over Felder’s head lends a sense of visual surprise — and distinctly religioso aspect.
The title of Xaviera Simmons’s “Denver” suggests a photograph more about place than the person seen in that place. But that title underscores a defining dislocation. Instead of a city, we see rocks, stream, trees, and mountain. A woman is fly fishing — and she’s fly fishing while wearing a long dress. Maybe she has waders on underneath? It’s quite a funny image, in both senses of funny. But the funniness hinges on a larger dislocation: the way “whiteness,” or at least privilege, is so often associated with the idea of pristine nature.
Dislocation of a different sort is crucial to Horace Ové's “Michael X and Entourage in Paddington Station.” The date is crucial, too, 1967. That the Trinidadian liberation leader should be in that place at that time lends a greater significance to what is already a striking image. The fact that he’s shown in a location devoted to movement adds a still-resonant metaphorical charge to the image.
The year before that, James Barnor took “Drum Cover Girl Erlin Ibreck, Kilburn, London.” The date both matters a lot and not at all. It matters a lot because of the very Swinging Sixties frock Ibreck wears — and also because at that time it was so rare for a Black person’s face to be seen on the cover of a magazine, let alone a fashion magazine. It matters not at all because her look of iciness and subdued sass is timeless.
Three themes predominate in “As We Rise”: community, identity, and power. One of the first photographs in the show is Dawit L. Petros’s “Hadenbes,” which shows a family in a backyard (presumably theirs) on a sunny day, with a leafy tree in the background. It can be seen as a signature image. Family is community at its most basic; identity at its most shared; and, in the sum of community and family, power at its most elemental.
Formal concerns largely, though not entirely, defer to thematic. Often “As We Rise” can feel programmatic. Wall texts are not infrequently directive. A very striking Kennedi Carter self-portrait shows the photographer getting a haircut from her father. “This image underlines the vital beauty and importance of tender gestures of care” reads the label. Well, OK. Another label, introducing the section on identity, states that “The urgent need to create in the confines of what is accessible is reflected here, as we are privy to the interior spaces of self-actualization.” This certainly sounds impressive, but what exactly does it mean?
What’s most interesting about the show is its presenting so many new and/or little-known photographers.
The show’s title comes from a favorite phrase of Montague’s father, “lifting as we rise.” Lifting and rising are good things, as are engagement and celebration and justice, racial and social both. That goodness doesn’t obviate a need for, or at least the usefulness of, some measure of critical distance. It’s telling that more than a half-dozen times wall text refers to Montague as “Kenneth.” Perhaps being on a first-name basis with the subject of a museum exhibition qualifies as a tender gesture of care. But it also feels slack and undemanding in a way that does a disservice to an exhibition that can have so much to offer.
Not least among those offerings are three short videos — featuring a Lynn community leader, a Cambridge fashion designer, and a Salem dance instructor — which are well worth making time for. They’re lively and immediate and involving: the Black Atlantic brought happily close to home.