The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis continued its tradition of bringing major names in African-American contemporary art to St. Louis by opening an Amy Sherald show on Friday, May 11, and while it’s well worth seeing, it opened alongside a show by a local black artist (Addoley Dzegede) that is even more powerful and a show by a local white artist (Sarah Paulsen) that engages even more intimately and provocatively with issues of race and racism.
Sherald has an assured place in art history after receiving the National Portrait Gallery’s commission to paint the official portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama. However famous and justly so, that portrait is not the best introduction to Sherald’s work, in that she devotes more of the canvas to Mrs. Obama’s dress than to the subject herself, and that dress obscures one of the most powerful and distinctive bodies in American history.
Sherald’s portraits on display at CAM are of unnamed and unknown people, so one encounters them without preconceptions, and they make for memorable encounters. Lisa Melandri, the museum’s executive director who organized Sherald’s show, said the subjects of these paintings are “almost always looking back at you,” and those painted gazes are riveting. Indeed, they are almost always looking into you.
Sherald’s experiments with costume are more effective in these portraits than with the dress that overwhelms Mrs. Obama. Most effective is the American flag shirt, cowboy hat and (especially) belt buckle adorned with a galloping horse in which she dresses the subject of What’s precious inside of him does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence (All American) – a title that shows Sherald also has poetic gifts. She told The American that she painted this subject in plain clothes and then deliberately added the costume elements later, using Google to find reference images of American flag shirts and cowboy belt buckles.
Sherald’s manipulation of quintessentially “All American” imagery in a portrait of a black man finds local parallels in new work by St. Louis-based artist Addoley Dzegede, which neighbors Sherald’s portraits in the museum. One body of Dzegede’s work in her show Ballast consists of cotton cloth printed with Batik and screened dye, creating beautiful patterns that encode often disturbing messages. One piece has a pattern of arch shapes, sometimes looped and sometimes upside down, creating a kind of fence through repetition of St. Louis’ defining architectural symbol. The title – Loving/Killing (Divided City) – does away with the subtlety of the image, as do the images of Ku Klux Klansmen embedded in the background of another local meditation from this series, Veiled Prophet/Profit.
Dzegede’s show includes very different, yet compatible, work in three other genres. She has a cloth piece that looks like colorful little pillows strung on a rope that is a gigantic replica of a string of trade beads. She made a collection of bells (that she described as “testicle-shaped”) in the spirit of bells used to chase off ghosts. And (somewhat less successfully) she produced a video piece that melds city images from Amsterdam with street scenes and a funeral after-party from Accra, Ghana, where she has family.
Dzegede was one of three local artists selected for the 2018 Great Rivers Biennial, and her work appears alongside shows by Sarah Paulsen and Jacob Stanley.
Paulsen’s exhibition, The Invention of Whiteness, is a startling sequence of stop-motion animation films, one of them embedded in the floor, about American history, race, class, and systemic racism and classism. “Although steeped in investigative sources and historical research,” read the exhibition notes, “together the works ultimately operate less as a documentary than as an emotional portrait of a nation in denial of its deepest conflicts and most obvious myths.” This work appears to spring from the post-Ferguson white ally’s determination to do “white folk work,” to repair some of the damage done by white Americans and to drain some toxicity out of whiteness.
Stanley’s show, TIME, is a set of innovative and interactive sculptures with a conceptual basis. Most vividly, Recurrent Entropy is a looped cycle of conveyor belts in perpetual motion, moving porcelain cups and plates along and then eventually dumping them onto the museum floor, where they shatter. Given that these are white objects shattering in the room right next to The Invention of Whiteness, Stanley’s placement in the Biennial also makes this piece raise questions about the fragility of whiteness.
The 2018 Great Rivers Biennial was organized by Wassan Al-Khudhairi, the museum’s chief curator. It was juried by Martin Kersels, multidisciplinary artist and associate professor and director of Graduate Studies in Sculpture at Yale University; Lauren Haynes, scholar in modern and contemporary American Art and curator of contemporary art at the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art; and Christine Y. Kim, associate curator of contemporary art at Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The Biennial shows that St. Louis’ talent in the field of contemporary art is profound, varied and innovative – anything but a flyover art scene. With one important young black artist and challenging work on race and racism by a white artist, it shows CAM’s continuing investment in black artists and engagement with issues of race, despite the Kelley Walker fiasco (which continues to keep some black patrons away from the museum two years later). And by bringing Amy Sherald and her paintings to St. Louis, it shows that CAM remains in the vanguard in recognizing black contemporary artists – indeed, as it was before the Kelley Walker fiasco, thanks in no small part to then-curator Jeffrey Uslip, which made his mishandling of the Walker flap so puzzling and unfortunate.
The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis is located at 3750 Washington Blvd. It is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday, and 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Thursday and Friday. Admission is free. Visit camstl.org.
