Reflections on ‘Word and Image’ at the Saint Louis Art Museum
By Chris King
Of the St. Louis American
Rachelle Puryear’s show “Word and Image,” a suite of etchings that respond to short poems by black poets, is hanging in that small upstairs exhibit space at the Saint Louis Art Museum, the one that is to the left and up the stairs. This tiny space, known as Gallery 321, borders on larger rooms that house the museum’s most off-putting contemporary art, so it’s not that well traveled. It’s possible to be quite alone in that little exhibit space.
When I visited Puryear’s show last week, I came upon one woman alone in the space, gazing intently at one of the pieces. It was a pretty day and she was a pretty woman, so I watched her looking at the show before I looked at the show myself.
She was looking at John Pepper Clark’s poem “Olukun” and Puryear’s etching that responds to it. The woman managed to notice me noticing her, despite her close scrutiny of the work, and she decided to share her observations.
“I like the way the poem is in the picture,” she said.
One part of the poem reads:
I love to pass my fingers
(As tide thro’ weeds of the sea …
“You can see that,” she said, and indeed you could see a weedy tide in Puryear’s etching.
“And the way the poem says ‘crumble in heaps,’” she continued. “Look how it’s all mishmashed together.” In fact, there was a crumbly aspect to the shore in her etching, colored in magenta and deep purple.
The woman enjoying the show was African-American and working-class, I could tell. She said she had accompanied someone else to the museum and was making the most of it.
“I never thought I’d understand it or like it,” she said.
I was deeply happy for Rachel Puryear and the curators at the Saint Louis Art Museum. I know how hard the museum promotes itself to this newspaper. I am aware that our publisher, an African-American civic leader, sits on the museum’s board. To have everyday black folks like this woman soaking up the museum – which is free to visit, except for the temporary, main exhibit – meant success for them. It’s a culmination of a lot of hard work that goes into diversifying an institution that has in the past fallen into a category Bill Clinton described (in a different context) as “the frozen chosen.”
While I was thinking about diversity and the frozen chosen, my new friend had moved deeper into the Puryear show. Now she was copying down lines from a Langston Hughes poem, “Dream Variations,” which had inspired the artist.
Puryear’s etching in response to the poem was an almost literal rendering of one of its primary images, a moment of rest
at cool evening
Beneath a tall tree
While night comes on gently,
Dark like me …
Puryear’s etching, in shades of dark blue, suggests a tree trunk and a dark sky blotted out by branches. One drop of moon slips through the branches.
Puryear also worked with poems that tackle horrifying subjects. Sonia Sanchez’s “Small Comment” is an acid note on the “bestial nature” of man and his “struggle for superiority.” (The artist etched a cubicle grid in response.) “Coventry” by Mari Evans (who was in town a minute ago, hosted by Eugene B. Redmond) is a scary poem about solitude. Puryear etched a spider web-like image that evokes the “gossamer thin” wall that walls in the poet’s “aloneness.”
The beast that humanity often behaves like and the extreme loneliness of the artist could not hurt me, on this unseasonably warm fall afternoon, with so much going right. I exchanged phone numbers with a new student of art – an everyday black woman who now felt like she belonged, somehow, inside this big, chilly, formal institution of art.
Before we parted ways, she showed me a piece of paper she had folded in on itself several times to make it sturdy enough to draw upon while standing up with no hard surface.
“I just came from Rembrandt,” she said. “I drew this.”
It was the Virgin Mary and an angel. I enjoyed the faintly African features she had instinctively given them – dark like her.
Night came on gently.
Curated by Eric Lutz, Rachelle Puryear: Word and Image will be on view in Gallery 321 through February 25. Admission to the Saint Louis Art Museum is free every day; featured exhibition admission is free on Fridays. For more information, call (314) 721-0072 or visit www.slam.org