* All photos courtesy of the Frye Art Museum
At present, the exhibitions The Unicorn Incorporated (Curtis R. Barnes) and Your Feast Has Ended (Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes, Nicholas Galanin, and Nep Sidhu) have been on display at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, WA for nearly three months. The Unicorn Incorporated is the first solo exhibition and retrospective of the work of Curtis R. Barnes. As described by the Frye, “For over five decades, Barnes has worked as an artist, illustrator, muralist, and community advocate. In his sculpture, painting, and drawing, he employs imagery derived from his vast experience, mystical erudition, and heritage.”[1] Your Feast Has Ended is a joint exhibition featuring the work of the artists Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes, Nicholas Galanin and Nep Sidhu, who explore themes of death, ancestor veneration, environmental exploitation, legacies of colonialism, and fetishization through multimedia works including but not limited to sculpture, video installation, pelts, and adornment.
These exhibitions have been the subject of much discussion and bewilderment, the force behind figurative kicks in the ass and literal calls to action in Seattle’s artistic community this summer. The works contained within these exhibitions bring to bear a number of “–isms,” “–archies,” and other troubling aspects of our society that the politically correct would prefer to remain in the background: non-mainstream spirituality, racism, patriarchy, homicide, body fetishism, and social control to name a few. Further, the makers of these works are representative of nationalities and ethnicities that typically are not visible in the art world.
Two years of intense conversation and collaboration between Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Director of the Frye Art Museum, and Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes resulted in The Unicorn Incorporated and Your Feast Has Ended, as well as a bevy of multidisciplinary, accessible, community oriented programs constructed specifically to support and expand their reach. It must be acknowledged that these installations couldn’t have happened anywhere but the Frye. Its historical policy of “always free” looms large in an artistic and cultural landscape where museums and other cultural institutions are increasing admission prices to compensate for shrinking funding sources, rising operational costs and the general effects of global economic malaise. Undeniable too is Birnie Danzker’s leadership. Her beliefs that curation never really achieves denouement, and that exhibitions are not singular events where artists simply turn over their work and agency to the museum, has allowed a significant degree of multidisciplinary thinking and practice to be incorporated into traditional modes of art curation and art education.[2]
Why do these exhibitions matter?
Discourse, of the generative kind, is salient and necessary. Given their bellicose, in your face nature, these exhibitions have certainly revived seemingly forgotten conversations around issues such as gentrification and police violence. Yet the factor that has implicitly, and for some, subversively, caused the most discomfort is that we are witnessing versions of manhood, represented by men descending from African, Native American, and Indian lineages whose presence has historically been, and continues to be, contested. That these are four men who do not fit the stereotypical tropes created and systematically distributed worldwide about African, Native American, and Indian men means that their art can’t be made to fit such a narrowly defined narrative either[3]. In order to think about their art, we must accept that the existing, dominant paradigms based in large part on European aesthetic standards (or minimally a European filter on the aesthetics of African, Asian and Native American cultures) fail miserably. We have no control over creating or manipulating the value of these works. We must consider that the themes and ideas proffered by these exhibitions may not be for us, even if they are about us. These ideas may very well signal the resurgence of a way of being that, though hidden for reasons of protection and self-preservation, has always existed and has always been about creation, connectivity, being self-determined, and sustaining a community of beings who are free and self-sufficient.
The Unicorn Incorporated: Curtis R. Barnes
The Unicorn Incorporated is the first solo exhibition of Curtis R. Barnes, a life long artist and Seattle resident. Barnes’ formal and informal education included cherished time with his grandmother in his home in the Central District, Seattle’s historically African-American neighborhood, where he states, “she taught me how to read, count, and write in cursive, and she introduced me to Aesop’s fables, a variety of folk tales, mythology, and other make-believe worlds.”[4] During his elementary school years, at the recommendation of one of his teachers, his mother enrolled him in art classes at the Frye, which were like “a new world of magic.”[5] Subsequent art education included art courses at the University of Washington, eventual degrees in painting and sculpture from Cornish School of Allied Arts as well as a degree in wood technology.
Curtis R. Barnes’ portfolio traverses significant spans of time, mediums and experiences. The works selected for The Unicorn Incorporated are but a snap shot. His work for the Afro-American Journal gives a clear view of the violence and oppression visited upon African-American people in Seattle, and is representative of Barnes’ ongoing work to raise consciousness for those willing to be present and receive the message. Barnes’ editorial cartoons for the Afro-American Journal problematize the carefree, liberal, progressive view associated with the city of Seattle: the work titled “White Seattle Is Doomed” (1971) depicts the entrance to the city as barred by crisscross wood panels. His conté drawings explore and celebrate the female form, while his Mask series, in pen and ink, confronts the viewer with the reality that everyone has something to hide. His intrigue of the unseen is further explored with the African Unicorn in his “Television in the Sky” series bringing to bear the importance of mythology at the familial, community, and societal levels. These works are a profound commentary on connectivity to other planes and realms, where the ancestors and other spiritual entities reside, and states very plainly that although fragmented at times, the connectivity has always been and will always be there; we must know it and respect it.
Barnes’ wood sculptures constitute only three pieces in the exhibition but are among the most poignant. In particular there is “Look Them” (1975), a nearly 4 foot tall sculpture with four figures all intertwined, supporting each other. This work immediately calls to mind similar aesthetics found among Bantu peoples of West Central Africa who created sculpture for use in ceremonies to venerate their ancestors. The concept of the blood’s memory[6] explains “the visible manifestations and ongoing praxis of displaced peoples in their respective Diasporas. In this case, it very adeptly explains the historical and ongoing praxis of African culture and tradition found in every place outside of the African continent where people of African descent reside.”[7] Barnes’ commentary that, “Wood is important to me because it is alive and has veins”[8] invites analysis of the artist’s insistence upon the physical manipulation of living things. The impact that such manipulation has may only play out long after the manipulator has ceased to exist in human form, as well as the ability of the artist, or any maker for that matter, to tap into that blood’s memory and sit consciously with his/her ancestors and create in the way his ancestors did without loss of time, space, or relevance.[9] This kind of artistic practice is a continuation of Curtis R. Barnes’ early time spent with his grandmother and the manifestation of his respect for and ability to master other worldly modes of doing and being.
Your Feast Has Ended: Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes, Nicholas Galanin, and Nep Sidhu
The official title of this joint exhibition is O Ye Parasites, Your Feast Has Ended and if you are bothered by the title, then this exhibition is for you. A synchronistic selection of work representing a diverse range of media, the pieces in this exhibition are like long time comrades whose relationships to each other, irrespective of the different narratives they tell, are timeless and unfaltering. Where The Unicorn Incorporated is retrospective and introspective, and according to Curtis R. Barnes, self-explanatory, Your Feast Has Ended is a call to action beckoning both those who have been fed upon and issuing a warning to the “parasites” that their food supply has dried up. This exhibition is a collusion of acts that follows the realization of the need for change, to remove the blinders, to reconnect to the Host.[10]
Consistent throughout this exhibition is a tribute to ancient and contemporary spiritual traditions, or the Host. These artists, through an intentional and sustained connection with the Host, have created objects whose primary form is art but whose function is a spiritual vessel. These vessels have been consecrated in accordance with each artist’s pact and agreement with the Host; similarly perhaps, to what their ancestors did when they walked the earth. In doing this work, these men are no longer solely artists, but also shamans, and their artistic practice is now also ceremony.
Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes
Magic and spell, weaved betwixt and amongst sobering stories of death, dismemberment, resurgence, and salvation are tantamount in Alley-Barnes’ work in this exhibition. The pelts cum trophies are the most intriguing of the artist’s work in Your Feast Has Ended, as they merge the artist’s fascination with our society’s obsession with fetish and signal his ability, like that of a shaman, to repurpose materials for divine use. Though what you see before you is indeed a confluence of vintage materials and garments, each pelt represents a different narrative, infused with incantation, which transforms it into something ‘other.’
Alley-Barnes’ work, “Wait! Wait! Don’t Shoot! (An Incantation for Jazz and Trayvon)”, is simultaneously a death rite for Trayvon Martin, as well as a spell designed to speak directly to the living spirit of Jazz, to whom this piece is also dedicated. The notion of speaking to an individual’s spirit is ancient spiritual practice and is often a solution used when a child or adolescent is engaged in damaging behavior that could cause great harm if not death to the child. Through leveraging the right combination of words in the form of prayer at a predetermined time towards the spirit of the individual, the spirit is convinced to stay and re-orient itself towards healthy behaviors. Doing so, in effect, saves the person.
This work is especially poignant in light of the artist’s own experience with police brutality and the recent string of murders of young Black men committed by police officers. The message here is straight, no chaser: do not think for one moment that we do not still have ceremony to lay our dead to rest and that we won’t use the same to teach, protect and exalt our people who are still here.
Alley-Barnes describes his form of sculpture as refuse alchemy . He sources used materials, that he then recycles and formulates into sculpture. These sculptures are visual representations of the ancient and extinct Matuzdi people, and the vehicle through which Alley-Barnes’ shares with us his personal reflections on dismemberment. His work “Calves of Saint Sah-Rah Loo-Pee Tah” is a commentary on the literal and figurative destruction of the bodies of women of African descent, dating back to Sarah Baartman and also referencing present day occurrences, namely the media’s obsession with actress Lupita Nyong’o’s phenotypic traits, which reduce her to her parts divorced from their sum.
Alley-Barnes returns to the feminine, specifically the divine feminine, in his short film “Sacred” where he asserts the necessary role of women in reestablishing physical and terrestrial balance. Water soothes, and like a woman, can give birth and nurture life. At the beginning of the film we witness scenes that are replete with abundance and beauty: the sound of water drops pierce our ears, a bulging, quivering drop of water sitting on a leaf, and a beautiful woman fully submersed in water. By the end of the film we are acutely aware of water as a scarce commodity in high demand that must be controlled at all costs, even to the point of exhaustion. We are also left to ponder the extent to which divine intervention, calling on women with their inherent connection to the Host, can assist in righting the ills we have carelessly visited on ourselves, and environment.
Nicholas Galanin
Standing at the entrance to the exhibition, your eyes follow the light and suddenly you are under attack from Galanin’s porcelain arrows sitting quietly above. It’s a surprise attack but the choice is yours: turn and leave, or move forward. Your decision-making is interrupted by words broadcasted on a pirated radio station, created by Galanin and his brother Jerrod, in a traditional Tlingit wood storage box built to hold ceremonial items. Tlingit language springs forth from it and our ears ring loudly in our attempts to understand a tongue that was nearly obliterated. The lesson here: language exists because we are a communal people and we must continually engage in dialogue to build community. When language is taken from a people, as was done to Native Americans, communities are forever changed and entire cultures destroyed.
Galanin’s point of departure is the land itself. Whether it is the battles between Native peoples and colonialists, the materials he uses to construct his works (wood, silver, copper, etc.) the blood of Native men and women spilled on this soil or the animals that once roamed Tlingit territory in present day Alaska – land is preeminent and predominates; without it we would have nothing. Galanin intends to shock and awe. The point is to feel something affectively. It may be empathy for the wolf in “Inert” whose hind legs and back are flattened and unable to move, a symbol of the cultural stasis of Native American cultures. Or it may be visceral disgust upon viewing the rape whistle transformed into earrings. Should a rape whistle be an earring? Perhaps not, but Native American women continue to grapple with the legacy of rape. It is a part of the American historical record. Native American art has been reduced to what the market place deems as valuable: trinkets and mementos stripped of historical weight. Don’t we all have a dream catcher?
Galanin broadens the commentary on destruction by issuing a specific indictment of reckless de-ritualized animal sacrifice through the mass killing of its native animal species in “This Country Is A Lie and Well” and “Inert”. Taking it a step further, he decries police violence as an extension of the systematic colonial oppression visited upon Native American people in the Northwestern United States, with “How about those Mariners?” a video installation of a Tlingit warrior carrying a carving knife much like the one John T. Williams (to whom the work is dedicated) was legally carrying when he was murdered by a Seattle Police Officer in 2010. Galanin’s work intentionally broaches uncomfortable historical events that were visited upon Native peoples and speaks loudly against continuing marginalization of Native American peoples and their art forms.
Nep Sidhu
When language and architecture are merged the result is a third space, and Sidhu dedicates his grandest pieces of the exhibition to spatial exploration. Heavily theorized, particularly within the field of postcolonial studies, Edward Soja defines the third space as, “as an-Other way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human life, a distinct mode of critical spatial awareness that is appropriate to the new scope and significance being brought about in the rebalanced trialectics of spatiality–historicality–sociality.”[11] Each of Sidhu’s panels in the Confirmation series is both the portal to the third space and the third space itself. Looking into the center of each work creates a dizzying optical effect such that you feel you can enter it and go beyond to another place.[12] And that is precisely the point. Sidhu combines his experience with the death of his mother written out in Kufic script (which he studied for nine months with an Imam to learn), with the experiences of his fellow Constellationeers[13] Ishmael Butler and Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes (Butler’s lyrics about his mother and Alley-Barnes’ observations on Seattle’s cursed history), mounts them on brass and sheet veneer marble to become the Confirmation series, and has shared them with us in a newly sanctified space: the Frye Art Museum.
With “Re (Confirmation) A” this work creates a portal through which Sidhu and Butler can continue to communicate with their deceased mothers – a hopefully soothing realization that though the body ceases to be the spirit is always there in this third space.[14] “Confirmation B” takes it a step further: the combination of language and architecture is not solely a portal, but a vehicle for the necessary incantation that is the precursor to ancestor veneration. The script in “Confirmation B” contains Sidhu’s mother’s last words to him as she made her transition. The message here is that we need simply to activate language and earth in the appropriate iteration, and conversations with our ancestors will recommence. The third spaces of “Re (Confirmation) A and “Confirmation B” represent the realm of the ancestors and more specifically that realm where our mothers are ever present. The third panel of the Confirmation series, “Curse Words”, is a visual representation of an excerpt of a written work of the same name written by Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes. This fragment tells the story of the blood-drenched contradictions of the beautiful territory now called Seattle, providing a commentary on the transgressions visited upon the land and its original inhabitants. The mind piercing red reminds us how much blood soaks this land, and forces us to reckon with our stake in it.
If the Confirmation series illuminates our path towards the third space, Sidhu’s Paradise Sportif clothing line exemplifies how we must comport ourselves once we get there: protect and exalt. Intending to uplift our present day shamans so that they can work efficaciously, the garments are necessarily beautiful, but what they do and what they mean is more relevant. In Sidhu’s own words,
“When understanding the power of our past messengers and healers, the garments that they wore played significance in their function as much as their understanding of nature, rhythm, dance and medicine. When dealing with negative or destructive spirits during a ceremony, the healing of an illness could inspire revenge in the spirit that caused it. The spirit could not effectively attack a shaman wearing a powerful costume, nor could it recognize the shaman when he or she was out of costume. In both cases, the shaman was protected in the spiritual realm. The garments worn functioned in much the same way as playing the same music during meditation to induce a meditative state. By always wearing the same costume during trance states, the costume itself became an instrument for facilitating access to that state.”[15]
Sidhu has intentionally steered clear of turning Paradise Sportif into a commercial line. To date this collection has only been seen at the Frye, on Sidhu’s web site, and donned by the members of the Black Constellation collective, of which he is a part. It is apparent that Sidhu seeks out people and places that embody and radiate the light that he carefully infuses into every piece.
And now?
On September 14 and September 21, Your Feast Has Ended and The Unicorn Incorporated complete their respective runs at the Frye Museum. While it is significant that these exhibitions started in Seattle, which so desperately needed to be shocked out of its complacency, these exhibitions speak both to and far beyond this city, and thus they must travel. Sidhu’s work must be seen in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Dakar, Marrakech and his hometown of Toronto. Alley-Barnes’ work must visit Chicago, New Orleans, Detroit, Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and Baltimore. Galanin’s should reach as broadly as possible throughout the Americas to countries like Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia and Peru where the indigenous imprint remains indelible. The challenges of planning and executing such global exhibitions aside, there must be a concerted effort to make these exhibitions accessible to those who are open to the large-scale metamorphosis invoked by this body of work. Our responsibility as viewers of this work and culture patrons is to lend our minds and voices towards its actual and conceptual longevity. The artists have done their job. Now it is time to do ours.
Footnotes
- Frye At Museum | The Unicorn Incorporated: Curtis R. Barnes Frye Art Museum http://fryemuseum.org/exhibition/5517/ accessed September 4, 2014.
- Art Talk with Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker of the Frye Art Museum | NEA http://arts.gov/art-works/2014/art-talk-jo-anne-birnie-danzker-frye-art-museum accessed September 1, 2014.
- Quite plainly this is a reference to the preponderance of archetypes – historical and contemporary – about men of color as emasculated, unemployed, white washed, savage, dead, dead beat dads, alcoholics, drug addicts, terrorists, rapists, etc. All of the aforementioned have been ascribed at throughout history either explicitly or implicitly about men of African, Native American and Indian descent.
- The Unicorn Incorporated: Curtis R. Barnes. Ed. Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker. Frye Art Museum: Seattle, 2014. Page 8.
- Ibid, 9.
- Blood Memory, Daily Yonder, July 15, 2010
- The resurgence of the shaMEN lecture Negarra Kudumu. Seattle, August 2, 2014. Page 3.
- The Unicorn Incorporated: Curtis R. Barnes. Ed. Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker. Frye Art Museum: Seattle, 2014. Page 62.
- The resurgence of the shaMEN lecture Negarra Kudumu. Seattle, August 2, 2014. Page 3.
- The use of the host here is synonymous with earth, or Mother earth.
- Edward Soja – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Accessed September 5, 2014.
- The resurgence of the shaMEN lecture Negarra Kudumu. Seattle, August 2, 2014. Page 3.
- All of the artists in Your Feast Has Ended, as well as the musician Ishmael Butler, of Shabazz Palaces, are members of a creative collective called Black Constellation. Individually they refer to themselves as Constellationeers.
- The resurgence of the shaMEN lecture Negarra Kudumu. Seattle, August 2, 2014. Page 3.
- Paradise Sportif | nepsidhu.com http://www.nepsidhu.com/portfolio/paradise-sportif/ Accessed on September 5, 2014.