'History Lessons' Interpretive Text

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Bethany Collins

Years, 1865 (The Black Republican), 2023
Blind embossed Stonehenge paper in 7 parts
Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York

Collins has reproduced public notices written by formerly enslaved people searching for missing loved ones in the aftermath of the American Civil War. The single line of black framed works appears like a Minimalist sculpture or memorial. By embossing the notices on black paper, Collins disrupts their legibility, thereby putting the viewer in a situation of uncertainty and in a search for meaning. The desperation is heart-wrenching and echoes across time, recalling similar postings in the wake of violence or natural disaster. These particular postings originally appeared in 1865 in the pages of the New Orleans-based newspaper The Black Republican, one of many Black publications across the country engaged in cultural and political organizing in the face of violent white resistance during Reconstruction. In the larger ongoing series Years, Collins has similarly drawn from many of these sources. In addition to missing person postings and political coverage, The Black Republican included songs the editors adapted from the antebellum abolitionist movement, resonating with Collins’s Battle Hymn of the Republic: A Hymnal, also on view in the exhibition. 


Bethany Collins

The Battle Hymn of the Republic: A Hymnal, 2023
Artist book with 100 laser-cut leaves
Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York

Collins has gathered one hundred versions of The Battle Hymn of the Republic in this artist book. Using a laser cutter, she precisely burns out the musical notation on each page, leaving charred edges as the only trace. To many viewers familiar with the Union anthem and the 1861 version with lyrics by poet Julia Ward Howe, the song can still be heard in the mind’s ear, suggesting how historical memory is intimately tied to personal memory. Speaking on the role of erasure in her work, which often includes erasing or masking words from archival texts, Collins says, “I feel a physical mastering of language. By deciding what’s legible, I’m dragging out the meaning already there.”  The numerous meanings that can be drawn out of The Battle Hymn of the Republic are shaped by the critical moments in American history when iterations of the song have been sung by early nineteenth-century abolitionists, suffragettes, labor unions, and Civil Rights activists, among others. In this work, they are all bound together across time.

 

Glenn Ligon

Runaways, 1993
Suite of 10 lithographs, edition of 45 and 10 APs
Marieluise Hessel Collection, Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York
© Glenn Ligon; courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Thomas Dane Gallery

In these 10 prints, Runaways, Ligon has borrowed the visual format of antebellum “runaway slave” posters. Such posters were used by enslavers trying to recapture people who had escaped slavery. In each one, the printing press type at first follows the format of such postings, giving a description of the person’s physical appearance. But reading on, it becomes evident that the descriptions are about the artist himself and are sometimes lightly self-effacing and often surprisingly humorous—recalling Ligon’s long-standing interest in comedian Richard Pryor, a recurring subject in some of his work. For Ligon, as for other artists in the exhibition, sardonic humor is a way of working within the confines of a structure while simultaneously upending it, in this case an American cultural structure that views Black people through a narrative of the fugitive or criminal.

 

Louise Nevelson

Façade, 1966
12 screenprints with accompanying text folders
Collection of University Art Museum, University at Albany, State University of New York on behalf of The University at Albany Foundation, gift of Martin Shafiroff

Nevelson was able to generate new forms and ideas by recombining and repurposing found elements, an approach used by many artists in this exhibition. This was her process for constructing her well-known monumental, monochromatic, wooden wall pieces and outdoor sculptures made from found objects and for the prints in this portfolio. Nevelson photographed her sculptures, cut the pictures up and collaged them, and then made new screenprints from the result. Dedicated to the poet Edith Sitwell, the prints are juxtaposed with twelve poems selected by Nevelson from Sitwell’s collection Façade (1923). Although the poems have no direct relationship to the images, they illuminate the way Nevelson approached relief sculptures and print as texts, experimenting with their visual grammar and syntax. Nevelson’s affinity for the witty and unconventional poet, which began shortly after Sitwell’s death in 1965, was demonstrated not only in this work, but in several sculptural homages and in her adoption of elements of her eccentric fashion as a part of her public persona.

 

Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (Kids of Survival)
I See the Promised Land (after Martin Luther King, Jr.), 1998
Matte acrylic, pencil, book pages on canvas
Collection of The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, gift of Studio K.O.S., 2011.7

The artwork of Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (Kids of Survival) was produced in collaborative workshops that Rollins led with middle school students in the South Bronx. After studying a text, they would make artwork with its pages and incorporate democratically chosen visual motifs to express their responses to it. Several of their projects were based on the writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., a formative influence on Rollins whose teachings informed his practice as an artist and educator. The text in the top left corner of this work begins with King’s last public sermon, given a day before he was assassinated in 1968, and the rest of the work is completed with pages from his other well-known speeches and writings. The towering isosceles triangle, which recurs in many of Rollins and K.O.S.’s homages to MLK, is red in this iteration. A multivalent symbol, it references the mountain that must be climbed, referred to several times in “I See the Promised Land,” as well as another sermon by King, “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life,” in which he says life at its best is a triangle with height, breadth, and depth.

 

Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (Kids of Survival)

The Temptation of Saint Anthony Plate X, 1989
Aquatint on paper
Collection of University Art Museum, University at Albany, State University of New York on behalf of The University at Albany Foundation, gift of Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (Kids of Survival)

The work of Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (Kids of Survival) was a collaboration among Rollins and the Bronx middle school students he taught. After intensive study of works of literature and other texts, they responded visually on the pages of the texts themselves. The Temptation of St. Anthony is a series of prints on pages of Gustave Flaubert’s 1848 philosophical prose poem by the same title which explores inner turmoil in the face of carnal temptation. The majority of this page is blackened through printmaking processes, leaving only a small opening to glimpse a fragment of the text. Many of the forms in this series resemble dead human cells, an image that resonated deeply during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. At this time, Rollins and K.O.S. drew on collaborative actions and looked to the power of art and the way it operates in the space of social activism.

 

Judith Braun

READ MY PUSSY, 1990
Black carbon-toner photocopy on rag paper, clear vinyl report covers, pushpins
Courtesy of the artist

Braun’s READ MY PUSSY was exhibited in the landmark 1994 Bad Girls exhibition at the New Museum, New York, curated by the museum’s founder and director Marcia Tucker (1940–2006), which represented a new wave of humorously irreverent feminist art practices. On a grid composed of 1990s office supplies—photocopy paper and report covers—Braun presents a deadpan anatomical diagram of a cat over which she’s superimposed a labeled female reproductive system. This title references “pussy” as both a synonym for “cat” and a slang term for the vulva. Her comic wordplay riffs on the idiom “read my lips” (in which the speaker insists that the listener pay close attention). Braun voices a defiant reclamation of women’s reproductive rights and bodily autonomy.

 

Judith Braun

Weinpersonally Yours, 1993–94
52 weekly photocopies on cardstock
Collection of University Art Museum, University at Albany, State University of New York on behalf of The University at Albany Foundation, gift of Corinna Ripps Schaming

Judith Braun, a.k.a, Judith Weinperson, created a series of fifty-two announcement cards that she mailed weekly to her friends and colleagues. One side of each colored-stock paper postcard is treated with provocatively captioned images, while the other displays text that includes the adopted name Weinperson—that she, “in a wry gesture of political correctness,” changed from her married name Weinman. In the familiar, immediate space of a postcard, Braun addresses social constructions of identity, power, and sexuality. Postcard and mail artworks have been made and distributed by a number of feminist artists, like Eleanor Antin (b. 1935) and conceptual artists, such as the group FLUXUS (founded 1960), as an alternative to the way ideas and power are circulated in the traditional gallery system. The subversive use of the photocopier, originally intended for corporate purposes, allows Weinperson to create gritty, degraded images, intentionally playing with their legibility.

 

General Idea

AIDS (Marcus Garvey), 1991
Graphite and gouache on paper
Marieluise Hessel Collection, Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York
Courtesy of Maureen Paley, London

AA Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal were the artist collective General Idea from 1969 to 1994. Appropriation and camp were the method and sensibility of their queer activist work that included performances, publications, prints, mail art, and video, among other media. When the Canadian trio moved to New York, they mobilized these tactics into an urgent response to the AIDS crisis with their project IMAGEVIRUS (1987–94). They appropriated Pop artist Robert Indiana’s iconic 1966 red, blue, and green LOVE sculptures, which stack the four bold serif letters in two rows, the O rolling out of alignment. Indiana’s design was disseminated across the country when he repurposed it for a popular 1973 US Postage Stamp, and culturally it echoed calls for “peace and love” during the turbulent 1960s and 1970s. Replaced by “AIDS,” the intimacy of “love” is marred by the fear of disease and death in General Idea’s work.

By infecting the already iconic LOVE logo, the AIDS logo, in Bronson’s words, could “spread like a virus itself,” bringing visibility to a word, a disease, and its devastation, particularly through General Idea’s poster campaigns in New York, Berlin, and San Francisco. Although AIDS can affect anyone, it particularly devastated gay communities, and, in the 1980s and early 1990s, discussion of the disease was largely taboo, because of rampant homophobia. The artists frequently appropriated color palettes from sometimes unlikely sources in their numerous iterations of AIDS, here borrowing from Marcus Garvey’s tri-color Pan-African flag (1920). Diagnosed in 1989, Zontal and Partz died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1994.

 

Demian DinéYazhi’

my ancestors will not let me forget this, 2020
Letterpress print
Forge Project Collection, traditional lands of the Moh-He-Con-Nuck

In their work in text, poetry, neon, and other media, DinéYazhi’ centers on intersections among queer identity, Native Identity, colonialism, and AIDS. The title and text of this work are excerpted from the artist’s book-length poem An Infected Sunset (2018, Pur Dubois Press) about intergenerational ancestral trauma, which contains the lines: “my ancestors will not let me forget this and every / american flag is a warning sign even the one my / grandfather was given as a Code Talker” [sic]. DineYazhi’’s grandfather was part of a World War II operation in which Indigenous people were enlisted to transmit coded messages among allies using Native languages. The artist points to the reality that military service to the United States has not guaranteed justice and sovereignty for Indigenous peoples. Writing in English, the artist, who has said they “want to see more poetry at protests,” uses the colonizer’s language to challenge a continuing legacy of colonization. By weaving the text into the shape and colors of the US flag, the artist is revealing alternate messages read by them and their ancestors.

 

Kameelah Janan Rasheed

otherwise, 2021
Single channel video, 4:53 minutes, no sound
Courtesy of the artist and NOME

Rasheed brings together a trio of historical figures—civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer, musician and poet Gil Scot-Heron, and singer Nina Simone—through archival footage of each of them protesting through speech or song. And yet the video is entirely silent, creating a space in which the viewer might hear their own breath as they engage with the video’s texts, drawn from a range of scholarly sources cited at the end of the video. Rasheed poetically splices and recombines texts making the reader conscious of the activity of reading. She literalizes the process of reading, learning, and thinking through drawing—loops, intersecting grids, directional arrows, all in her graphic and diagrammatic style. Riffing on a quotation from religious scholar, author, and artist Ashon Crawley, each word of the video’s compound title appears sequentially: “other,” to be othered; “wise,” the wisdom bestowed by producers of Black knowledge; and “otherwise”, the gift of being able to think how the world could be different. The work’s message resonates with Jeffrey Gibson’s She Knows Other Worlds seen in this exhibition, and similarly looks to models from the past to shape other possibilities.

 

 

Jeffrey Gibson

SHE KNOWS OTHER WORLDS, 2019
Acrylic on canvas, glass beads and artificial sinew inset into custom wood frame
Forge Project Collection, traditional lands of the Moh-He-Con-Nuck

Gibson’s work brings together multiple queer and Native histories. The bright colors and rhythmic patterns here are inspired by music, particularly House music, the joyous upbeat electronic genre begun by queer Black DJs in the 1970s and 1980s club scene of Chicago, where the artist lived in the mid-1990s. The glass beads around the perimeter recall the color and geometric patterning of Native designs, particularly those of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw. The text is stylized to the point that each letter might not be recognized in isolation, for example, the black and white bands that compose the “E.” However, when read together they become visible, supporting each other like notes in melody. The unspecific “she” in the text “She knows other worlds” gives the statement wide resonance. As Kameelah Janan Rasheed does in her video otherwise, also included in this exhibition, Gibson recombines elements of history to explore the liberatory possibilities of creating a world different than it is now.   

 

Corita Kent

highly prized, 1967
Serigraph
Collection of The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, Tang Purchase, 2013.17.3

This work is artist and educator Corita Kent’s homage to Lorraine Hansberry, an award-winning Black queer playwright, most famous for A Raisin in the Sun (1959). Hansberry was part of intellectual circles that included W.E.B. DuBois (her former professor), Nina Simone, and James Baldwin, and, like Corita, Hansberry was an activist. The work’s title “Highly Prized” appears in an ornate typeface, printed in reverse to make it even less legible. The handwritten text at the bottom of the work is a quotation from Hansberry’s 1964 play The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window—a play that follows the local aftermath of a man placing a protest sign in his window—and was also engraved on the gravestone of the playwright, who died two years before this work was made.  It speaks of care for others as the guiding factor in how to act and finding meaning in life. Typical of her Pop art approach of repurposing popular symbols and texts to generate new, unexpected meanings, Corita has appropriated text from a sign that reads: “FREEWAY ENTRANCE” and layered it beneath the titular phrase, making both phrases harder to read.

 

Joe Mama-Nitzberg

Untitled (L&L and L&L/After Dark), 2019
Archival inkjet print
Courtesy of the artist and Grant Wahlquist Gallery, Maine

Mama-Nitzberg confronts conflicting historical narratives about gay and Jewish identity. He appropriated an image of two Adonis-like men in bathing suits striding through ocean waves from After Dark, a magazine that, although not officially billed as a gay publication, covered topics from culture and entertainment popular among many gay men and often featured photographs of bare-chested men with chiseled physiques during its 1968–83 run—roughly the period that inaugurated gay liberation with the Stonewall uprising (1969) through to the onset of the AIDS crisis (1981). Over the faces of the men, Mama-Nitzberg placed circles with the names of two Jewish pairs: Lerner and Loewe, and Leopold and Loeb. The former, noted in the bright pink half of the picture, were the lyricist and composer of famous musicals such as My Fair Lady (1956). The latter, labeled in the green, negative image of the photo, were gay teenage lovers who in 1924 murdered a younger teen boy. The poetic alliteration of their names becomes a starting point that evokes ideas about otherness, stereotype, desire, and fear.

 

Joe Mama-Nitzberg

Another Side to the Picture, 2021
Archival inkjet print in custom painted frame
Courtesy of the artist and Grant Wahlquist Gallery, Maine

For this kaleidoscopic work, Mama-Nitzberg took as his starting point an archival photo of Judy Garland kneeling to kiss her daughter Liza Minnelli at Carnegie Hall in 1961—two figures with a devoted following of gay fans. The artist mirrored and inverted the starstruck, nearly all-male audience showing them in quadruplicate while masking the faces of the two iconic entertainers with dots—in reference to a technique begun by West Coast conceptual artist John Baldessari in the mid-1980s. The title and text across the image “But there is another side to the picture that you and Proust don’t show” comes from a letter that gay writer Christopher Isherwood wrote to author and public figure Gore Vidal in response to the original ending of his novel The City & the Pillar, a coming-of-age story considered groundbreaking in 1948 for bringing visibility to gay experiences. Marcel Proust (1871–1922) is a French novelist known for themes of memory and nostalgia. Diverting our attention from the performers, Mama-Nitzberg invites us to see another side to the story, that of the fans and their implied desires. The deep purple and resonant reds and oranges convey melancholy, passion, and longing, bearing witness to an emotional history.

 

 

Joe Mama-Nitzberg

Untitled (#experiencethedivine), 2019
Archival inkjet print on canvas and archival inkjet print
Courtesy of the artist and Grant Wahlquist Gallery, Maine

Emotional/Personal/Historical (Self-Portrait Mid 70s), 2021
Archival inkjet print in custom painted frame
Courtesy of the artist and Grant Wahlquist Gallery, Maine

A Case Called Paul, 2019
Archival inkjet print in custom painted frame
Collection of Bill Arning, Chatham, New York

Tears are Not Enough, 2024
Found and made objects and framed archival inkjet print
Courtesy of the artist and Grant Wahlquist Gallery, Maine

 

Corita Kent

moonflowers, 1969
Serigraph
Collection of The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, Tang Purchase, 2013.17.4

manflowers, 1969
Serigraph
Collection of The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, gift of Harry Hambly, serigrapher, Hambly Studios, 2016.14.212

i in daisy, 1969
Serigraph
Collection of The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, gift of Harry Hambly, serigrapher, Hambly Studios, 2016.14.177

The works on this wall by Joe Mama-Nitzberg and Corita Kent, together with the piece by Tim Rollins and K.O.S. on the adjacent wall, constitute a virtual flower garden. In each case, the multiple associations that flowers evoke, such as, love, protest, mourning, hope, as well as the pedagogical metaphor of “planting seeds,” all lend themselves to exploring personal, cultural, and political histories.

Flowers became a symbol of counterculture protests of the 1960s and 1970s by the “flower-power” generation. This sensibility is expressed in Corita’s protest against the Vietnam War. She contrasts the bold type of a military stencil that reads “MANPOWER!” with the poignant question “Where have all the flowers gone?” and appropriates a media photograph of two wounded soldiers, one caring tenderly for the other.

The flower as a marker of gay identity appears in Mama-Nitzberg’s work. His invented movie poster in Tears Are Not Enough includes erudite references to gay film historian Vito Russo, as well as Dolly Wilde, the socialite and niece of famed gay poet and playwright Oscar Wilde. The poster hangs on a domestic wall of yellow flower wallpaper, suggestive of the 1970s, when the artist was a child. Mama-Nitzberg’s Paul! references the red carnation worn in the lapel of the small-town outsider teenager in Willa Cather’s tragic short story “Paul’s Case: A Study in Temperament,” who is bullied for his “dandy” affectations. The petals of the flower in Mama-Nitzberg’s visual retelling of the story translate the character’s “disorders” into a contemporary psychiatric lexicon.

The artists throughout the exhibition have formed their work by taking the material of history and shaping it through the lens of their own experiences. This is seen in Mama-Nitzberg’s two-part piece Untitled (#experiencethedivine), whose text tells his own story of loss. Corita’s text, “Hope is believing that there has to be an ‘I’ in ‘daisy,’’ encapsulates the importance of the personal point of view within intersecting cultural and political events so vital to the exhibition.

 

Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (Kids of Survival)

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1998
24 pages, mixed media on paper
Collection of University Art Museum, University at Albany, State University of New York on behalf of The University at Albany Foundation, gift of Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (Kids of Survival)

This piece, based on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream (c. 1595), was created here at the University Art Museum in 1998 during a three-day workshop Rollins led with students from four regional middle and high schools. Rollins followed the model he had developed for decades, first with Intermediate School 52, a junior high in the South Bronx, of merging artmaking with reading and writing skills. On the first floor of the museum, where visitors could witness their creative activity, students read and acted out scenes of the play (guided by London actor David Acton), and then distilled the play’s narrative to a single visual motif they agreed upon: a flower. They individually painted their flowers on the pages from the book itself, disrupting the text while revealing another side of it. Shakespeare’s play, following the inverted narrative of a dream in which things are not what they appear, offers a lesson in disrupting the status quo, a lesson reflective of Rollins’s own radical pedagogy based in collaboration and activism.

 

Daniela Comani

It Was Me. Diary 1900–1999, 2002–11
Archival print on Photo Rag 308g
Collection of University Art Museum, University at Albany, State University of New York on behalf of The University at Albany Foundation, gift of the artist

Many artists in the exhibition have taken the material of history and shaped it through their own lived experiences. Here Comani inhabits the lives of people from history through this typed diary written in the first person and consisting of 365 entries, each a reference to an actual event that occurred at some point in the twentieth century. At times horrific and at other times humorous, Comani’s selection of events runs the gamut from wars, assassinations, kidnappings, and natural disasters to discoveries, inventions, fashion firsts, and entertainment debuts. She moves fluidly from one event to the next, casting herself in equal measure as a passive witness, a political activist, a perpetrator, and a victim. In seven entries in the month of January alone, Comani assumes the role of Mussolini announcing the foundation of his dictatorship in Rome (1925); of Elvis Presley recording the single “That’s Alright (Mama)” at his own cost (1954); of an anonymous survivor of the earthquakes in Kobe and Osaka, Japan (1995); and of Nathuram Godse, Gandhi’s assassin (1948). Comani has made numerous iterations of this concept as audio installations, artist books, and mural-sized prints, and it has been translated from its original German into seven languages.

 

Corita Kent

power up, 1965
Serigraph on pellon
Collection of The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, gift of Joseph B. Hudson, Jr. Esq., 2015.33.1a-d

Artist and educator Corita Kent developed her own style of Pop activism, borrowing the appropriation techniques of fellow Pop artists by quoting advertising images and text but doing so in service of her tireless advocacy of civil rights, workers' rights, and peace.  The words ‘Power Up’ in this work were repurposed from the Richfield Oil Corporation’s slogan. Originally created for the Immaculate Heart School, part of the order to which Corita belonged while she was a nun, the colorful block letters remain an enduring individual and collective call to reclaim and assert power in pursuit of justice. The handwritten text below, transcribed by the artist, is a sermon by activist priest and author Daniel Berrigan. Berrigan, an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, was a friend of Corita’s and a frequent subject in her work. A call to help the poor, the sermon speaks of the symbolism of bread in Catholic faith—and Corita playfully includes a Wonderbread logo alongside it. The multi-paged print, like the sermon, represents a call to action.

 

Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds

Sweetheart Songs, 2017–18
24 monoprints
Forge Project Collection, traditional lands of the Moh-He-Con-Nuck

Heap of Birds is known for paintings and monotypes centered on text, often referencing historical atrocities or political events, and having the appearance of protest signs, particularly through the spontaneity of handwritten text. Here, the text embodies the romance, revelry, and humor of powwow after-parties, as expressed through song lyrics popular at those parties, generally Round Dance chants with English refrains. The number 49, which recurs in a number of lyrics here, refers to a musical style, a repertoire of tunes, and the social gatherings themselves where the tunes are performed, usually late at night and offering a release from the formality of the preceding powwow. The handwritten text offers the artist a way to make work that is both conceptual and sensory and can address Native themes without creating an image that might be misappropriated and reduced to stereotype.

 

Leon Golub

The Brank from The Atelier Project, 1984
Flat bed offset lithograph on Arches Cover paper
Collection of University Art Museum, University at Albany, State University of New York on behalf of The University at Albany Foundation, purchase of University at Albany, State University of New York

Golub was at the forefront of art and activism throughout his career, and in the 1970s and 1980s he produced damning critiques of violence, torture, and coercion carried out by institutions and governments. He worked in both painting and printmaking. In this print, the text describes a brank, also known as a scold’s bridle, a device used over several centuries to literally silence and punish women, often with fatal consequences. Golub’s gestural rendering embodies the violent use of the device and begins to take on animal-like characteristics, such as pointy ears, which read as an indictment of the torturer’s inhumanity. Golub is quoted as saying, “The nightmare of history has no beginning and no end.” In revisiting the past, Golub draws attention to power dynamics in the present, inviting the viewer to critically reflect on what tools of power are used today to silence women.

 

Colin Chase

of cries and whispers (e pluribus unum #25), 2019
Digital text drawing on rag, archival ink
Collection of University Art Museum, University at Albany, State University of New York on behalf of The University at Albany Foundation, University Art Museum Purchase Award, supported by Munir and Ellen Jabbur, UAlbany Alumni Association Arts and Culture Committee, and University Art Museum Director’s Fund

of cries and whispers (flag), 2018
Digital text drawing on rag, archival ink
Collection of University Art Museum, University at Albany, State University of New York on behalf of The University at Albany Foundation, purchase of University Art Museum supported by Susan Van Horn Shipherd ’64, UAlbany Alumni Association Arts and Culture Committee, and University Art Museum Director’s Fund

Chase provides meditations on Black life in the United States by repurposing and questioning patriotic symbols and mottos in his digitally composed series of cries and whispers. Lyrics from the R&B song “None of Us Are Free” (first recorded by Ray Charles), a call to fight racism, are reproduced in the red stripes and transposed to Morse code in the white stripes. Coding and decoding suggest modes of communication that can evade state surveillance or express messages to fellow members, and they echo an idea expressed in Demian DinéYazhi’’s print, elsewhere in this exhibition, that the American flag can contain hidden messages for different people. Repeated in the blue field is the title of Martin Luther King’s 1967 book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, which King wrote for an exasperated audience disillusioned by plateaued Civil Rights progress and a limit to the support offered by white allies.

In e pluribus unum, Chase repeats the nation’s Latin motto “out of many, one,” stretching and flipping the text in square patterns that begin to resemble a quilt. By repeating the phrase and distorting it to the point of illegibility, Chase seems to emphasize the “many” of the phrase and call into question the unity of the “one.”

 

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