33 ways to say 'black' and 'box'

(now, let me just hope my sister remembered to fish it out of the recycling yesterday...)

An L.A. museum show of African American photography finds out just how volatile two simple words can be.

By Lynell George, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
December 9, 2007

"BLACKS In and Out of the Box." As rubrics go it seemed straightforward enough. It had a certain directness, but with enough play built in for a bit of interpretive wiggle room -- or so curators Jill Moniz and Lisa Henry thought.

When they settled on the title, which also worked as an organizing theme for their current photography exhibition at the California African American Museum, they weren't thinking poetically. They saw "the box" as a camera, the actual apparatus used to still a moment, provoke a narrative or cue critique. What they didn't quite count on was what artists would read between the title's lines, or how charged the words "blacks" and "box" in close proximity might be. "The artists were having these real expectations," says guest curator Lisa Henry. "They'd say, 'That's a weird title,' or, 'What do you mean?' "

There was a certain power in the words' juxtaposition: It was an incantation of sorts that pulled in an array of work from the show's 33 invited artists, an intergenerational roster that includes instantly recognizable names -- Charles Gaines, Betye Saar, Lorna Simpson -- and others to watch for. As Moniz and Henry began to consider the pieces collectively, they couldn't ignore a not-so-subtle thread that looped through many of the pieces and the emotional conversations that attended it.

What was the box? "Stereotypes." "A school of thought." "A niche." "The museum." "The brain." "Fear." "A frame." "Blackness . . . . "

The concentration of works that deliberated, deconstructed or dabbled in notions of identity gave Moniz pause. "I was shocked if not dismayed," she admits. "I wasn't thinking about blackness at all. Except that the artists were black."

The show, as she and Henry had conceived it, was to highlight California's groundbreaking photography traditions through the prism of African American artists, says Moniz, the museum's visual arts curator. Juxtaposed against rare historic images of African American life in California drawn from the Steve Turner collection, it would be not just a survey of black artists living or trained in California, but a way to root around, exploring the medium and how African Americans "commemorate or critique" it. The topic seemed wide open, but "the exception to the rule were the folks who didn't focus on race," she says. "Race is still at the forefront of people's thinking in terms of their artistic endeavors. I had expected something different on the whole."

Still, there was nothing monolithic about the responses. As the work was laid out end to end, grouped by aesthetics, not by racial charge, ultimately much of it spoke to the complexity of experience -- both in the pieces' ambition and their subject matter.

Carla Williams, 42

How she saw the box: "Art history, a particular kind of practice."

Williams is a San Francisco-based archivist, a portrait photographer who's been immersed in landscapes and the many ways in which race is literally inscribed there -- towns called "White Settlement," "Negro," "Squaw" and "Jap Road."

One of the pieces in the show, a landscape titled "Nigton, Texas" -- is at the core. Short for "Nigger Town," the settlement was founded in the late 1800s by a group of recently freed slaves and christened by a white rancher -- named, incredibly, Jim Crow. Nigton is still entirely African American, and the majority of those who live there don't want the name changed. "It's this, 'Well it's always been this way' thinking" -- played out again and again from town to town.

"It's also complicated by the fact that every reference to 'Negro' gets changed to something like 'Rolling Hills,' which erases the history entirely." It leaves her of two minds.

The elision is a bitter metaphor: "We had a huge multicultural movement in the '90s, then there was a complete reversal -- 'Aren't we past all of that?' So the discussion of identity, race is totally paramount. It's my entire focus."

Through assemblage, collage, video and all manner of hybrids, the works explore a washof themes: The names we call ourselves. The masks we wear. The legacy of ancestors. How we mark territory and how it marks us. Staring point-blank at excruciatingly painful history. Erasure and its antidote: writing yourself into being.

lauren woods, 28

How she saw the box: "The frame."

Relocating from Texas to San Francisco, filmmaker woods found herself searching -- "looking for my own reflection." Art school in the Bay Area was a shock after life in Texas. "I had to seek out a black experience," she says, both in the traditions of filmmaking and the communities themselves.

That quest laid the groundwork for "Outside of the . . . ," woods' 16mm/digital video hybrid, which she shot at a black arts flea market in Berkeley. Her camera wanders through the environment, focusing tightly on fine details -- mouths, noses, cheekbones -- its gaze almost like a caress.

"I felt uncomfortable bringing a camera in public shooting black people, because of the history of ethnographic and safari films," she says. "I had all those things in my head. And there was a certain pressure of not wanting to continue a certain tradition." But purpose cut through her ambivalence.

While woods calls the piece "ethnofictive," she realizes that her work is becoming more abstract and yet -- "Isn't it the million-dollar question? Am I a black artist or an artist who happens to be? I want to say it's moot but . . . ."

Boxed In, Boxed Out

Intentionally or Not, CAAM Show Brings Race Into the Picture

by Julie Riggott

Blacks In and Out of the Box was supposed to show how times have changed.

The California African American Museum exhibit Blacks In and Out of the Box features photos from the 19th and 20th centuries. Pieces on display include images by Todd Gray (above) and Carrie Mae Weems. Photo courtesy of Todd Gray.

The idea of the exhibit was to juxtapose historic photos of African Americans with contemporary art by African American photographers living or trained in California. With the advances in photographic technology, the curators of the show at the California African American Museum expected to see dramatic new ways of looking at the world, a multitude of inspirations.

Instead, they found that artists today are struggling with the same issue that dominates the photos from the late 19th and early 20th centuries: racial identity.

"You could see themes from the historic work repeated over and over again," said Jill Moniz, visual arts curator at the Exposition Park museum, "and see these artists in a visual way grappling with or struggling with those issues of becoming objects, becoming other."

Blacks In and Out of the Box, a wonderfully complex exhibit on view through Dec. 30, opens a conversation about race while exploring photography's creative possibilities. What is interesting about the show, observed Moniz, is "both the ways in which the medium has come forward, matured and evolved, and the way that black identity has or hasn't evolved from that early work, and that struggle it seems is ongoing with artists to - define themselves in a way that speaks to that past but takes them in their own mind forward."

It was a theme that Moniz and Guest Curator Lisa Henry, who selected most of the works, hadn't expected.

"It kind of blew me away," said Moniz, "when you think about the opportunities that these artists have, being educated in progressive schools and really having the opportunity to speak a different kind of language both in terms of the medium and the context of their work. It floored me that almost all of them focus so heavily on this issue."

Todd Gray has two pieces on display in the exhibit. When Gray graduated from California Institute of the Arts in 1979, he watched his peers get exhibitions while he was left out of the art world. In response to what he perceived as a form of institutional racism, he created works and posted them around Los Angeles as a kind of "uninvited public art." One of these, "Support Systems," is a large-scale photographic collage wherein a gigantic boxer pummels a skyscraper. Gray said he was thinking about gladiators and slavery when he created the piece: the boxer represents marginalized people and the building symbolizes those in control. "To tip the scales back into balance, at least in art, with photography I gave the boxer as much power as the building," he said.

Gray, now in his 50s and a professor of photography and digital imaging at California State University Long Beach with an MFA from Cal Arts, said reality is more complex than he realized when he was younger, and that race is now only one of his "filters of reality." In a 2005 self-portrait on display, one eye peers out from a mask created with shaving cream. Despite the whiteness of the foam, he said his intent was not to comment on race, but to re-imagine himself "without an ego," to explore the id and primal instincts with an ironically civilizing material.

But he did admit that issues of race regularly confront people of color. "Maybe with my shaving cream I'm being naïve and it is quite racial," he said, laughing about how his work might be interpreted.

Past and Present

Since the title Blacks In and Out of the Box was meant literally - the box refers to the camera - the exhibit begins in a dark space housing historic photos from the collection of Steve Turner, a local gallerist and co-founder of the William H. Johnson Foundation for the Arts. Among the 19th-century portraits are photos that express a feeling of intense isolation or "otherness." Group photos show either African Americans lost amongst the dominant white culture or Africans in native attire.

Then, as if stepping out of the old-fashioned camera box, the scene shifts to contemporary photographic art where African Americans are both subject and artist. The curators cast a wide net, including recent graduates and professors of arts programs at California universities, Art Center College of Design, California Institute of the Arts and other schools that, Moniz said, "take photography to a new place."

Recognized artists like Betye Saar, Charles Gaines, Dennis Callwood and Carrie Mae Weems are exhibited along with emerging talent. The result is an intriguing and powerful show that may explore race, but certainly is not limited by the topic.

Hank Willis Thomas converts the practically iconic Absolut vodka bottle into a cross-section of a slave ship, Rodney McMillian questions creative ownership with a photograph he supplied the subject for but paid someone else to take, video artist Kendell M. Carter juxtaposes break dancing and ballet, and some beautiful landscapes with surprising titles by Stephanie A. Lindsey and Carla Williams & Deirdre Visser recall a blighted history.

The metaphorical implications of the title, the ideas of limitation and restriction, however, were not lost on the artists. Gray, among others, was disappointed with the choice. When asked to contribute to the catalog, he chose to interview four of the artists about their reaction to the title. If CAAM was going to appropriate the language of advertising, Gray facetiously suggested another title: Photography, Got Blacks?

"Artists were just put out," Moniz said. "They thought that we were putting them into a box, or because they were black they were in a box."

Moniz also shared a joke about the title. She noted that Keba Armond Konte was the only artist to install his own work, arranging mixed media photos on wood on the gallery wall to create "88 Pieces of Me: A Photo Memoir." When Moniz saw the finished installation, there was one piece above the boundary of the exhibit space: a picture of a boy jumping, looking as if he were breaking free from Konte's work.

"He said, 'That's for you,'" Moniz recalled, laughing. "'That's my black out of the box.'"

Blacks In and Out of the Box runs through Dec. 30 at the California African American Museum, 600 State Drive, (213) 744-7432 or caamuseum.org.

page 26, 10/29/2007
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© Los Angeles Downtown News. Reprinting items retrieved from the archives are for personal use only. They may not be reproduced or retransmitted without permission of the Los Angeles Downtown News. If you would like to redistribute anything from the Los Angeles Downtown News Archives, please call our permissions department at (213) 481-1448.

a name I haven't seen in a while

Shaman Series: 2005, Archival pigment print and acrylic paint, 21 x 16 inches


I always really liked Todd Gray's work, but I never really thought he received as much attention as his work merited. Maybe because he's L.A.-based; I'm not sure, really, or maybe it's because only a handful of black artists who emerged in the 80s really ascended to their deserved ranks while the rest didn't; or maybe I just haven't followed his career closely enough.

So I was thrilled to hear that he'd be interviewing me for an upcoming exhibition, "Blacks in and Out of the Box," by guest curator Lisa Henry at the California Afro American Museum in Los Angeles, and even more so to receive his E-mail with a link to his page featuring new work.