Antoine Obin. Philome Obin et son Fils, Antoine, 1977; oil on board. Courtesy of the New Orleans Museum of Art and the LSU Museum of Art.

The selections from the Smith collection are vital examples of the self-conscious representation of Haitian spiritual subject matter through a vernacular, representational, and intentionally simplistic style led by Philomé Obin in the city of Cap-Haitien (eighty-five miles north of the more commercial Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince). Obin worked to represent the daily life, secular experiences, and religious traditions of Haiti that scrape against the commercial initiatives and explosion of the Haitian art markets during the middle of the 20th century. The stark organization of composition within Obin’s style becomes more embellished in the hands of the second generation of artists at the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince, who experiment with the flattened figures, great exaggerations of scale, and a shared desire to represent the more isolated northern city. Works play with Western traditions of perspective; Volvick Almonor’s Le Bal (1976) constructs a scene that dramatizes encounters between dancing couples and destabilizes the physical and spatio-temporal boundaries between inside/outside, public/private, culture/nature that often structure non-Western cultures with strong connections of ancient forms of worship and ritual practice, specifically Haitian Voudou. These traits are further expanded in Préfète Duffaut’s extraordinary work Imaginary Landscape (1979), a painted box of lush, melting vegetation and picturesque views of sea and Haitian countryside, in perfect harmony with humankind, spread in infinite continuity across the surface: an imagined utopia far from the real conditions of Haiti.

Prefete Duffaut. Imaginary Landscape, 1979; oil on cedar wood. Courtesy of the New Orleans Museum of Art and the LSU Museum of Art.

And yet, as I meandered through the galleries, the weighted presence of Haiti’s history seemed to howl at me over the distracting, tropical colors of the gallery walls, and contradicted the pervasive paternalistic language used by the LSU Museum to describe these works (and subsequently, the artists who created them). Works that reference the sea are described not by their engagement with the trauma that the Middle Passage journey inscribed in the national consciousness of the Haitian people, but the “whimsical and intrinsic spiritual culture of Vodun in Haiti”; colors and forms are interpreted as innately vibrant and scripted, unearthing “existing patterns that exist within the magical … landscape of Haiti”; while “vibrant colors … serve as a way to seduce the viewer” and “embrace the playfulness and joyous spirituality of the Haitian experience.”[3] The viewer is asked to revel in the joyous “rhythms” of Haitian imagery and the life-affirming, playful, magical attributes of Haiti—and thus reproduce the essentialist, racist rhetoric and projections that often accompany diasporic Black artists and art. Such a view demands that this art be forever suspended in the intensity of the present, viewed as permanent life-affirming celebratory acts that transcend the depraved conditions that structure Haitian life, and even mirror first-world projections and fantasies about Haitian people and their culture.[4] With these contradictions in mind, I asked questions about the museum’s perspective on this collection of art.

Volvick Almonor. Le Bal, 1976; oil on panel. Courtesy of the New Orleans Museum of Art and the LSU Museum of Art.

As the only republic founded on a successful slave revolt, Haiti’s history has struggled to achieve its rightful place of significance within histories of colonial imperialism, revolution, and the nation–state despite its tremendous symbolic importance to the ongoing history of Black emancipation and social justice across the world. While the surface of the exhibition seeks to make connections between the hybridity of ethnicities and communal cultural practices of New Orleans, and the spectacular public performances of these practices as they are enacted in the city’s Mardi Gras festivities, the historical specificity of Haiti is abstracted, even disavowed in this exhibition.

As an arts institution located in a city that is continually confronting its fraught history with slavery, segregation under Jim Crow, the civil rights movements of the 1960s, and the mass incarceration of African Americans within its prison system today, I had hoped to see LSU’s museum honor its role as an academic institution by unpacking the true relationship between New Orleans and Haiti: the traumatic catastrophe of colonialism across the African diaspora. While the introduction of Haitian cultural production to Louisiana audiences is undoubtedly important, it seems that LSU’s museum missed an important opportunity to create a wider conversation about race, identity, and the history of Black achievement. The absence of this conversation is too large to ignore.

The Carnival, the City, and the Sea is on view at the Louisiana State University Museum of Art in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, through March 20, 2016.

[1] Thank you to Dr. Sarah Clunis for sharking her great knowledge of this collection of work, her tireless advocacy for its presentation to the Baton Rouge public, and her answers to all of my questions and reservations.

[2] E. John Bullard, Director Emeritus of the New Orleans Museum of Modern Art in Louisiana, had this to say about the history of the Perry E. H. Smith collection of Haitian Art: “In 1979 NOMA presented a major exhibition of Haitian art organized by the Brooklyn Museum. One of the principal lenders was Perry E. H. Smith, who attended the opening in New Orleans. A relief aid coordinator for an international welfare agency, Perry was stationed in Haiti in the late 1960s and early ’70s. While there, he began to collect dynamic and colorful Haitian paintings and sculpture, a native school of basically self-taught artists that emerged in the 1940s. Since his work kept Perry moving around the world, he had no place to display or store his collection, so he offered to place it on long-term loan to NOMA. Over the years he has generously given the entire collection to the Museum, nearly one hundred paintings and sculptures.” Accessed at: https://noma100.wordpress.com/2010/10/13/great-collectorsgreat-donors-the-making-of-the-new-orleans-museum-of-art-1910-2010/

[3] See the promotional description published by the LSU Museum of Art for the exhibition The Carnival, the City, and the Sea, which can be accessed here: http://www.lsumoa.org/content/carnival-city-and-sea

[4] Ibid.

Andrea Carlson. Ink Babel, 2014; ink and oil on paper; 115 x 183 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Bockley Gallery.

When viewers enter An Evening Redness in the West, curated by Candice Hopkins for the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, they are surrounded by the constant clicking of a Geiger counter. As if measuring radioactivity within the space itself, the Geiger counter’s din can be heard throughout the exhibition, which unfolds over two rooms.

The exhibition includes eleven Native American and First Nations artists all offering visions of life in a postapocalyptic future. The title of the exhibition cites Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), a fiction account of raucous scalp hunters set in the borderlands of the Southwest, itself a novel of apocalyptic proportion. The Geiger emanates from Cart (2015), Death Convention Singer’s mixed-media sculpture of a cart loaded with detritus such as empty water bottles. A grim-reaper-like figure composed of VHS tape looms overhead, a citation no doubt of the “death cart” motif common to New Mexico. Even more poignant than Cart is Death Convention Singer’s inclusion of a vessel holding the murky brown water of the Animas River, titled Water from the Polluted Animas River as It Flowed Through the San Juan River (2015). The river now flows with nearly 3 million gallons of toxins, a result of the Environmental Protection Agency’s perforation of a defunct gold mine in Colorado.

Andrea Carlson’s Ink Babel (2014) engulfs an entire wall with sixty rectangular compositions (ink and oil on paper) all pieced together to form an opus: an abject landscape of repeating monsters, wretched faces, extraction machines, and hogs. Each image can be apprehended on its own, thick in detail, or all together, forming a kaleidoscopic panorama. One figure in Ink Babel can been seen looking at his obsidian mirror only to apprehend three ships in the distance: the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, showing a harbinger of colonialism within a dreamspace that seems not solely of the past, but also of a strange future. Duane Linklater’s Tautology (2011–13), a glowing neon thunderbird, cites Ojibwa artist Norval Morriseau’s painting Androgyny (1983), an epic, polychromatic canvas in which a similarly styled thunderbird reigns over a garden of indeterminate figures. The repetition of the thunderbird motif in Linklater’s work only proves the tautology. Altogether, the exhibition features a vast array of works in the vein of Indigenous Futurisms, a movement that recalls Afrofuturism’s preoccupation with an uncanny and forward-oriented temporality. In An Evening Redness in the West, life exists after the apocalypse. It may be, in fact, that the apocalypse has already passed.

An Evening Redness in the West is on view through December 31, 2015, at the Museum of Contemporary Native Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Alicia Inez Guzmán is a PhD Candidate in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. She currently holds a post as a pre-doctoral fellow in American Modernism at the Georgia O’Keeffe Research Center in Santa Fe.

, today we bring you an essay on conservation, colonialism, and the “black market archive” of Pakistani film. Author Timothy P.A. Cooper explains, “The case filed by Iqbal Geoffrey, DesiTorrents, and the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum are haunted by traces of Pakistan’s visual cultural archive—nomadic ghosts of empire that evade the exoteric movements of decolonization in favor of fluid, informal modes of transportation.” This article was originally published in the March/April 2015 issue.

“That England is populated will always come as a surprise; humans can live on an island only by forgetting what an island represents.”

“Nobody has tried it, but in Pakistan I have. Somebody has to do it. We can’t accept the status quo.” Iqbal Geoffrey, writing here in 2005, refers to his intention to subject a selection of employees of London’s Hayward Gallery to polygraph tests to reveal data evidence of what he suspected to be inherent racism. The Pakistani artist, and prominent lawyer, was in the process of filing a claim of racial discrimination against the Hayward Gallery under the recently introduced Human Rights Act. It was his claim that his works left over from a 1989 show were destroyed or mislaid through the active collusion of curators, staff, and cleaners. For the 160 works lost, and the 140 damaged, the artist was offered £65,000, but he instead launched a £65 million claim. Geoffrey, whose biography is shrouded in self-mythology (the Queen, in a rare show of lexical dexterity, reportedly called him the “Arts Counsel of Great Britain”) and audacious acts of career sabotage (including submitting his PhD thesis to the Harvard Law School in the form of a stack of bound black pages), was once one of the leading lights of the early 1960s London art scene. In protest over what he saw as the “cultural apartheid” of the British milieu, Geoffrey became a partially reclusive figure, and his calligraphic abstractions have given way to an extensive series of mail-art projects and litigious interventions.

The short narrative of Iqbal Geoffrey reflects many of the core issues concerning the modern repatriation of cultural objects sent abroad, their dispossession, and these processes’ resulting archival and museological dissonance—with which it will be possible, for instance, to fashion at least one contextual framework for Tate Britain’s exhibition, Artist and Empire, opening in autumn 2015. In time-honored fashion, this major introspective will catalogue the various responses to empire that can be read by reimagining the trade routes and trajectories of collecting habits from point B (the colony) to point A (the metropole). Geoffrey’s lavish call for reparations is symptomatic of serious unease and imbalance within and with regard to prevalent Western museum politics and curatorial models. These will no doubt be eloquently explored by Okwui Enwezor when he curates the 2015 Venice Biennale, but, leaving the circumambulation of this well-trodden path to the experts, we can turn our attention to informal networks of cultural flow, correlative but not imitative of the exporting of images of empire in the 19th century, and the afterlives of those museums left over, like empty munitions factories in the former colonies.

Read the full article here.

 at Tyler Rollins Fine Art in New York City

Yee I-Lann’s solo exhibition Picturing Power at Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York, is an emphatic act of subversion. Her black-and-white photomontages, made from two centuries of archival images of the Dutch and British colonization of Malaysia, present a reengagement with reality through a new language of alterity. For Yee, the exposure and visibility of the past create a vocabulary that focuses on emancipation and justice.

In Picturing Power: Wherein one surreptitiously performs reconnaissance to collect views and freeze points of view to be reflective of one’s own kind (2013), shrouded black figures posed as 19th-century photographers are juxtaposed with a comic scene of colonizers standing below large, overturned tables. Set against a stark white background, these incongruous figures symbolize colonial suppression. In Yee’s work, recurring images of tables represent transactions, power, and control. The inversion of these objects becomes a strong metaphor for the reversion of power from centuries of repression. More importantly, the dark, haunting, ghost-like figures appear to be voyeurs looking into the past and upending memories of hard times and the subjugation of the colonized. Here the artist’s language demands a heightened level of representation that is both humorous and a clearly articulated negative critique.

In Picturing Power: Wherein one nods with political sympathy and says I understand you better than you understand yourself, I’m just here to help you help yourself (2013), hundreds of native Malaysians line up in quiet acquiescence behind one of their oppressors, portraying life in the colonies at the time. Yee’s ironic titles, dripping with sarcasm, compel the viewer to visualize an era of dogmatic coersion. Picturing Power: Wherein one cultivates cultural codes, the noble endeavors of mankind and thereby puts them in their place (2013) presents the native woman whose long tresses transform her into the stereotypical mythological enchantress. Seated against a backdrop of spice plantations, which were the most lucrative colonial trade, the figure—with her lengthy, unruly hair—is symbolic of the classic temptress who had to be controlled.

While the eight images from Picturing Power use historical mimesis to expose colonial inequities as a constructive expunging exercise, Tabled (2013), from a previous exhibition titled Suspended Histories, has a conciliatory tone. Images of current life in Malaysia, representing entrepreneurship, freedom, and mobility, are printed on dinner plates referencing blue China from the Dutch and British colonial periods. Neon-colored outlines of embracing figures in The Sun will rise in the East and deliver us from this long night (2012) seem to suggest reconciliation as the best path toward retribution. At the end, the viewer is left with the indelible mark of history on Malaysia and the strength of its people to move on.

Yee I-Lann: Picturing Power runs through April 13 at Tyler Rollins Fine Art in New York.

Bansie Vasvani is an art historian and critic. She lives in New York City.