“The illusion is that most of my work is simply about past events, a point in history and nothing else.” Kara Walker
Slavery’s complex history in New Jersey is entirely relevant to Kara Walker’s solo exhibition at the Montclair Art Museum. And Montclair, specifically, “was not innocent to the slave trade,” as one local journalist put it. New Jersey was originally designated New Netherland when it was settled by the Swedish and Dutch, before the English conquered the colony in 1664 and renamed it. In 1702, England’s Queen Anne urged Lord Edward Cornbury, the first royal governor of the crown colony, to keep settlers with "a constant and sufficient supply of merchantable Negroes at moderate prices" to meet the labor needs of large plantations and small farms, urban workshops and, especially, ports and docks.
New Jersey was the last post-Independence state in the North to address slavery with the 1804 "An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery.” But the act actually contributed to the growth of the interstate slave trade. New Jersey slave owners often sold their human property “down south” either to profit off it or to somehow covertly keep their property at arms-length. By 1830, two-thirds of the remaining slaves in northern states were held by New Jersey masters. Riots plagued the Mid-Atlantic States through the 1840s, largely because of white anxieties about abolition and increased economic competition with a growing number of freed blacks and European immigrants (primarily German, British, and Irish who were uprooted by the Industrial Revolution.) Even the 1846 “Act to Abolish Slavery” failed to do so, since it was designed to turn any remaining slaves into “apprentices for life.” It was not until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, which New Jersey reluctantly ratified in January of 1866, that the remaining slaves in the state were freed.
James Howe, the first freed slave in Montclair, had been purchased in 1813 for $50 by Major Nathaniel Crane, a prominent merchant with ties to the cotton industry and a descendant of Montclair’s founding family. In his 1831 will, Major Crane left Howe, “a colored man, late a slave, whom I manumitted,” his freedom, along with a stain shingled house, $400 and six acres of land. James Howe’s inheritance became known as the “Freed Slave House,” but it was significantly damaged in an early-morning fire in July 2013. Stacey Patton, a historian and journalist, wrote that the Howe House “was an uncomfortable remnant of history for a town that has regarded itself as the epitome of a progressive suburban racial utopia. Not only did slavery exist in Montclair, so too did unwritten rules of discrimination against black and Italian residents.”
Kara Walker’s Virginia's Lynch Mob (1998), a recent acquisition now on view at the Montclair Art Museum, is geographically located in the American South. It could represent racial violence anywhere in the United States and at almost any time. To call this work the centerpiece of Walker’s solo exhibition at the museum would be an understatement. It is an epic, 40-foot long wall-based work, presented on a curved gallery wall, using the artist’s iconic silhouette form to depict a lynching about to happen. Twenty-three other works made between 1997 and the present accompany Virginia’s Lynch Mob and showcase the breadth and depth of Walker’s artistic activities.
The driving force of Walker’s artistic vision is what the exhibition’s lead curator, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, PhD, calls “the visualization of the ‘discourse of the unspeakable’ . . . that is the accounts of physical, mental, and sexual abuse that were left out of familiar histories of slavery and American race relations.” Shaw explains that as a student, California-born, Atlanta-educated Walker was reluctant to explore both racism and history in her art precisely because her instructors expected her to do so. Such are the inherent expectations and biases in art education. Later, when she attended The Rhode Island School of Design, where she received her MFA, Walker began to work with racial and sexual themes. By the mid-90s, Walker embraced silhouette portraiture (creating an image of a person, object or scene represented as a solid shape of a color, typically—and rather ironically black—with its edges matching the outline of the subject). Shaw further explained that Walker’s use of silhouettes was simultaneously a way out of conventional art expectations and a way into her interests, narratives and characters.
Silhouettes let Walker manipulate, modify and, ultimately, control her characters, or as Walker put it,
. . . Being an artist in control of characters that represent the social manipulations that blacks have undergone in this country at least, puts me in the position of being the controller or the puppet master of imaginary black people.
Her silhouettes are hardly those described in the 1913 article “Arts and Decoration” as “colorless ghosts—relics of bygone men and women, shadows caught and held while the realities themselves have flitted across life’s stage and vanished.” Nor are they like the rather effete silhouettes of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was silhouette crazed. Think of Walker’s silhouettes as the artist described them: “Goethe in blackface.”
Walker’s Virginia's Lynch Mob understandably dominates the exhibition, in scale and content. Nonetheless, Dr. Shaw, in curatorial partnership with Gail Stavitsky, the museum’s chief curator, have selected a range of works that reveal the complexity of Walker’s process. Nothing should be overlooked. Two watercolors and a pastel are “sketches” for silhouettes. They are important demonstrations of how Walker develops ideas and prepares for larger works. (An Art21.org video, “Kara Walker in ‘Stories’,” is a must-be-watched insight to Walker’s processes.) A popup book, linocuts, offset lithographs, screen prints and photogravures are among several alternative media and techniques that show how Walker has managed and mastered diversity and virtuosity in her work, while staying faithful to her core, signature technique.
Small can be huge with Kara Walker. A painted laser-cut stainless steel sculpture sits atop a pedestal on the side of the large gallery. Titled The Katastwóf Karavan (2017), this singular object is an editioned maquette for a larger installation of a working calliope that Walker conceived for Prospect 4, the 2017/2018 triennial in New Orleans. It addresses and memorializes the catastrophe (“katastwóf” in Haitian Creole) of slavery in Louisiana. Why a calliope? The instrument uses whistles, a variation of those used at cotton gins and mills to signal work shifts and alarms. Look closely. Walker replaced the traditional ornamentation found on such “steam organs” with silhouetted vignettes that use her material history of slavery.
In an inspired curatorial move, Shaw and Stavitsky borrowed two volumes of Harper’s Pictorial History of the Great Rebellion, 1866-68, from the New York Historical Society Museum & Library. These are considerably more than historical relics. The pages are opened to cartoons of source material that Walker appropriated, if not emancipated, to use in her lithograph and screen prints on which she applied silhouettes. You see the cartoons decontextualized and reconsidered with uneasy, near comic relief. In another important curatorial decision, Shaw and Stavitsky also present a silent, black and white film titled Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions, 2004. This was Walker’s first foray into film and video, and she intentionally filmed it in the most “rudimentary fashion possible.” It is a film with a direct, simple plot—a “revenge fantasy” about the reversal of historical roles. Blacks are the masters; whites are the slaves. Like early silent films, Walker uses periodic inter-titles to provide the story line. They begin:
“The whites, longing for fulfillment, have sold their bodies to us.”
“-However, keeping them proved too much work even for us.”
“-We refused to revert to the old order. We embraced our new positions.”
Virginia's Lynch Mob and Other Works is an unconventional retrospective in its focus. It does not sprawl, as many overview exhibitions do. It is direct, revealing the full range of Walker’s approach to media and capturing her ideas. As Walker put it, “What I’m interested in as far as art goes is how contemporary values and individual neurosis project themselves into the blank spaces between the fact of (for instance) slavery’s influence on the American system, and the power of its influence over the American imagination.” Walker's work addresses a host of polarities, history and the present, entitlement and dispossession, the powerful and the powerless, and those with the “right” to look and those who are expected not to make eye contact. She forces, as art historian David Wall brilliantly summarized, “an unsettling confrontation with images of violence and depravity and the repeated transgression of sexual, social, and racial codes.”
Kara Walker: Virginia's Lynch Mob and Other Works, Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey through January 6, 2019.