Distant in time and place but connected through the concept of color studies, nineteenth-century British painter J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) and twentieth-century American poet Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) both placed the application, modification, and interpretation of color at the center of their artistic methodologies. This bridge between Turner’s painting and Stevens’s poetry establishes shared characteristics of ephemerality, turbulence, and immediacy in their works. For both artists, color represents the tool with which they reconcile tensions between the internal and the external—the self and the outside world.
Figure 1. J.M.W. Turner. A Curtained Bed, with the Naked Legs of a Reclining Woman, from Colour Studies (ca. 1834–36). Watercolor on paper. 3 x 4 in. Tate reference D28795; Turner Bequest CCXCI b 5. Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856. Tate Britain, London. Image courtesy of Tate, London (2022).
Primacy of color manifests itself throughout Turner’s and Stevens’s oeuvres, but no more impactfully than in Turner’s two Colour Studies sketchbooks (ca. 1834–1836), which contain mainly abstract bedroom scenes with figures—often dismissed as simply “erotic” images.1 This essay offers a case study juxtaposing these sketchbook images with Stevens’s first volume of poems, Harmonium (1923), and argues that both bodies of work specifically engage with the themes of abstraction and obscurity through color.2 Turner’s two sketchbooks document the beginning of the artist’s evolution toward abstraction, which characterized his later work between the late 1830s and his death in 1851.3 Similarly, the poems in Stevens’s Harmonium represent the building blocks of his transition from a more “aesthetic” style based in representation of the world to an increasingly “cerebral” approach to poetry as his career developed.4Harmonium is essentially Stevens’s equivalent of a sketchbook; the poems act as a site for exploration and experimentation, just as a ‘color study’ constitutes a prolonged physical and mental exploration of color as a material, method, and subject.
Turner’s paintings and Stevens’s poems connote obscurity in several ways. Within the context of this essay, obscurity is interpreted as an extension of abstraction—both a mental and visual uncertainty of subject and form. Stevens’s poem, “Fabliau of Florida” (1919), describes a beach scene where a “Barque of phosphor/ […] Move[s] outward into heaven,/ Into the alabasters/ And night blues.”5 Night assumes various hues throughout the poem, and these opening lines notably present the color words—“alabasters” and “blues”—as the subjects and “night” as a modifier.6 The shift in grammatical format conveys a sense of clarity as well as ambiguity as the audience must reassess the structure of Stevens’s language as well as the scene he constructs to glean meaning.7
In the lines, “Fill your black hull/ With white moonlight,” Stevens returns to a conventional, adjectival application of the color words.8 However, he visually simplifies or abstracts the image from one of form to one primarily of color. He creates juxtapositions between the natural and the manmade, sea and sky, and dark and light, all through the momentary, glowing moonlight on a ship’s hull. Stevens essentially reframes our perception of language and especially words denoting color through a balance of obscuration and illustration. Harold Bloom writes that Stevens “[labors] successfully to make the visible a little harder to see.”9 In abstracting forms and inserting more of the conceptual into his work, Stevens, like Turner, makes the physical forms increasingly obscured or disassociated from their original context, but both artists make readily attainable the emotional, visual, and associative power of their works.
“Fabliau of Florida” depicts a relatively calm landscape, highlighting the natural integration of visual details. For Stevens, both the night and the fusion of elements in nature represent obscurity and are linked with the sublime. By engaging single colors or families of hues—“alabasters,” “night blues,” and “white moonlight”—to represent the entirety of the sea, sky, beach, and light, Stevens abstracts the landscape and simultaneously delineates the horizon for the audience.10 The oversimplification of color is at odds with the sublime nature of the entities the colors depict.
Glen McLeod describes Stevens’s mode of sublimity as “both an abstraction and a feeling.”11 Essentially, the sublime in Stevens’s understanding relies on one’s personal associations of a space and the atmosphere one perceives—an interiority defined by the “movement of the self toward ‘what is real’ beyond words and images.”12This interiority, particularly in combination with the dynamic landscape, conveys a distinctly Romantic attitude toward representation that permeated art of Turner’s era. Consistently throughout his poetry, Stevens applies a modern attitude and use of symbolism to the traditionally Romantic tension between reality and human imagination, as well as his conceptualization of the landscape and formulation of “a oneness between man and the natural world.”13
Meanwhile, Turner’s oil paintings of vortical seascapes and violent landscapes connect his oeuvre with the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century associations of the sublime with supernatural terror and awe. Turner’s ambiguous interiors in the Colour Studies sketchbooks, however, minimize the more frightful aspects of sweeping wind, light, and color in the scenes. Instead, these watercolors emphasize an all-encompassing, yet harmonious and even reverent depiction of natural elements or sublime entities that aligns with Stevens’s description of his poetic environments. Turner shares Stevens’s interest in the expression of the artist’s lived experience and particularly Stevens’s obsession with exploring human imagination through his art. Turner’s work, like Stevens’s, reexamines this interiority within the more modern framework of abstraction and simplification of form. In combining features of the Romantic and modern, their works bridge the near-century separating their creation.
The turbulence that typifies Turner’s oil paintings enhances their visual tumult, but also incorporates the personal that defines his own brand of sublimity by concealing and reimagining the realism of place and time. This duality of human imagination asserted within the ostensibly concrete, realistic framework of the landscape manifests in Turner’s Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (Tate reference N00530, 1842) in which a steamboat battles against the swirling, inescapable embrace of the sea.14 The painting offers a more tempestuous interpretation of the nature versus man, sea versus boat trope than Stevens’s “Fabliau of Florida.” In his Colour Studies watercolors, Turner achieves a similar sense of obscured realism through his extreme simplification of the scene to shapes and planes of color, as well as his attention to slight adjustments in light, shadow, and tone to imply space and volume.
On the sketchbook page depicting A Dark Interior or Curtained Bed, with a Figure or Figures (Tate reference D28841; Turner Bequest CCXCI b 39, ca. 1834-36), Turner interprets his abstract study of light with color.15 The top right corner of the image reveals a dark mass of shadow, which lightens in gradation as it radiates out from the corner. The gradual evolution toward the light demonstrates what Inés Richter-Musso describes as “material forms evaporat[ing] into light and atmosphere” in Turner’s later watercolors verging on the abstract.16 Balancing the dark shadowed area on the right, vibrant cobalt blue in the top left defines the space and atmosphere of the image, manipulated in a zig-zag pattern to resemble the folds of a curtain. The dry-brush effect of the blue conveys a sense of unrest on the surface compared to the fluidity of the shadowy area’s wet-brush application, obscuring two smudged human forms.17 Furthermore, while the white of the paper shows through the blue ‘form,’ the color as well as the marks inform the scene as a study of light and dark defined by an obscuring object—the curtain. Richter-Musso observes that Turner’s use of the white paper to represent light in the scene “is an important step along the path toward abstraction,” which highlights the modernity of his artistic methodology.18
In Turner’s watercolor interiors, light plays the principal role rather than the figures, and maintains a connection to the “chaotic primordial energy” of the landscape even within the gloomy bedroom scenes.19 Likewise, light, color, elements and objects from the natural landscape, celestial bodies, and times of day all become personified protagonists in Stevens’s poems. Stevens’s unconventional characterization of these elements generates a perplexing, yet innovative and compelling aura to his language, an effect that defines the significance of obscurity in both Stevens’s and Turner’s works.
In the second section of his poem, “Six Significant Landscapes” (1916), Stevens writes:
The night is of the colour Of a woman’s arm: Night, the female, Obscure,
Fragrant and supple, Conceals herself. […]20
Stevens personifies night by relating the mysterious and romantic quality of moonlight to “the colour/ Of a woman’s arm.”21 The self-obscuring female that Stevens describes as “Night […]/ Conceals herself,” asks the audience to imagine the act of obscuring by way of nightfall and darkness as a woman might don clothes, obscuring one’s view of her body.22 The lines further implore the audience to mentally reconcile an image of distinct color and form, as well as active obscurity and concealment. One might assume that one suggestion represents the complete opposite of the other, but this poem instead exemplifies Stevens’s utilization of color as a tool in the act of obscuring, as well as his fascination with redefining elements of nature. Color essentially becomes the mediator between pure light from the moon and complete darkness from night itself.
In Turner’s sketchbook watercolor study, A Curtained Bed, with the Naked Legs of a Reclining Woman (Tate reference D28795; Turner Bequest CCXCI b 5, ca. 1834–1836), he uses color to create a distinct barrier between light and dark, and also between form and space (fig. 1).23 Bright, rippling streaks of red cut down the left side of the image at a slight diagonal, alternating rich color with near transparency in a play of light against the white surface of the paper in the top left corner. Inside the curtained area of the folding red divide, a woman’s legs bend inward at the knee, raised off the bed. The rest of the woman’s body disappears in a grayish haze in the bottom half of the image, while a black wash in the upper right thrusts the lower legs forward. The red and black strokes, by their color and richness rather than their form, define the space of the image. Turner once said, “Atmosphere is my style” and “indistinctness is my fault;” in this image, he depicts light and shadow at odds, erasing any trace of color and form where they intersect in the hazy atmosphere.24
Through language, Stevens captures a similar sense of haziness, contending with the human figure and obscurity through the evocation of visual elements—like Turner—as well as linguistic and aural elements, in his 1923 poem entitled “Two Figures in Dense Violet Night:”
[…] Be the voice of the night and Florida in my ear. Use dusky words and dusky images. Darken your speech.
Speak, even, as if I did not hear you speaking, But spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts,
Conceiving words,
As the night conceives the sea-sound in silence, And out of the droning sibilants makes A serenade. […]
Say that the palms are clear in the total blue. Are clear and are obscure; that it is night; That the moon shines.25
The light-dimming function of the red curtain in Turner’s watercolor study, which creates an indistinctness in the confined space of the bed, relates directly to the “dusky words,” “dusky images,” and ‘darkened speech’ the poem’s speaker seeks, as can only be conveyed by the “voice of the night.”26 However, even as the majority of Stevens’s poem focuses on oral, aural, and verbal components in a state of limited visibility, the final tercet reintroduces the audience to the visual, colored world. In the final lines, Stevens finds the balance between color and darkness, or clarity and obscurity, with the image of the palms that “[a]re clear and are obscure” in the moonlight that offsets the night.27 Just as Turner’s watercolor balances the darkness of the curtained bed’s interior with exterior light through the application of rich red, the moon in Stevens’s poem balances the “total blue,” promising clarity and the “voice of the night,” which allows only darkness.28
The combination of colors and connotations associated with the ‘total blue’ reflects what George McFadden describes as the space “where the sounds of poetry are shaped out of the creative dark.”29 From this entity, whether representative of the violet night sky or a metaphor for the poet’s mind, something emerges from nothing. Just as the speaker in Stevens’s poem contemplates “Conceiving words,/ As the night conceives the sea-sound in silence,” this concept of creation within the darkness of vacant space represents Stevens’s artistic self-fashioning.30 As in Stevens’s poem, Turner achieves a balance of obscurity and clarity in both imagery and self in his watercolor studies; as a result, Turner heightens the internal battle of light and darkness demonstrated on the watercolors’ surfaces.
The color-centric reading of Stevens’s poems solidifies Harold Bloom’s identification of Stevens as the “last giant” of American Romanticism “who defines the tradition quite as strongly as it informs him.”31 This essay’s comparison of Stevens’s works to those of Turner amplifies Bloom’s statement to delineate how both painter and poet fuse and balance the modern and Romantic. Furthermore, the comparison with Stevens intensifies the significance of Turner’s use of color manipulation—his handling of a single color or pair of contrasting colors to modify a subject and distinguish both the color and the subject in equal measure. For Stevens, the comparison reveals his interest in conveying a visual sensation of transformative energy and movement, as well as the underlying instability and ambiguity in his poems. The subliminal tension stems primarily from his lived experience and observation of a subject—his many poems documenting his vacations in Florida, for example. Ultimately, the juxtaposition of two creators working in separate mediums and time periods uncovers the full richness of their images and poems by drawing out the more radical aspects of their works in a non-linear and tangible way.
For Turner and Stevens, abstraction and obscurity go hand in hand. The two artists employ instruments of obscurity to imply a sense of the imagined and the unknowable. In doing so, they illustrate the sublimity of nature, the creation of image through language, the embodiment of light, and the artistic representation of emotion. Yet, as both artists move toward the edge of the inexplicable, the undefined, and as their narratives appear increasingly obscured, the more necessary and impactful their application of color becomes. Color composes the language by which they navigate unrealistic, mentally-manipulated environments; the ambiguous power of metaphor; the simplification of shape and form; and the images and thoughts too conceptual to otherwise convey.
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Amy DeLaBruere received her BA in history of art and English from Yale University and is currently pursuing an MA in history of art and architecture at Boston University. She is particularly interested in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American, French, and British art as well as text and image relationships.
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Footnotes
1. Both Lawrence Gowing and John Gage describe the Colour Studies sketchbooks primarily, if not solely, as “erotic” images. Gowing includes a minimal amount of further exploration through visual analysis in his groundbreaking exhibition catalogue, while Gage sees the images as diverting from Turner’s usual subject matter. Lawrence Gowing, Turner: Imagination and Reality (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1966), 24; John Gage, Colour in Turner: Poetry and Truth (New York: Praeger, 1969), 58.
2. To clarify, beyond the two paintings by Turner and two poems by Stevens that are included in this essay, more parallels between the two bodies of work exist and may appear in a larger version of this project.
3. Stevens did not begin his poetic career in earnest until later in life. Despite the fact that Harmonium was Stevens’s first published collection and Turner’s sketchbooks were created during the middle of his artistic career, both artists were of a similar age and maturity. Stevens was forty-four at the time of Harmonium’s publication, and Turner would have been fifty-nine in 1834, the presumed commencement date of his sketchbooks.
4. Glen MacLeod, Wallace Stevens and Modern Art: From the Armory Show to Abstract Expressionism (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1993), 123.
5. Wallace Stevens, “Fabliau of Florida,” in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, 2nd ed., ed. John N. Serio and Chris Beyers (New York: Vintage Books, 2015), 25, lns. 1, 3–5. Referenced poems of Stevens will hereafter be noted by poem title, page number, section number (if applicable), and line number. All citations refer to this edition of Stevens’s Collected Poems.
6. Stevens, “Fabliau of Florida,” 25, lns. 4–5.
7. As this essay makes a comparison across media, the term ‘audience’ is used in place of the distinction between ‘viewer’ and ‘reader.’
8. Stevens, “Fabliau of Florida,” 25, lns. 9–10.
9. Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 1977), 17.
10. Stevens, “Fabliau of Florida,” 25, lns. 4–5, 10.
11. Glen MacLeod, Wallace Stevens and Modern Art: From the Armory Show to Abstract Expressionism (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1993), 157.
12. John McDade, “The Moon Prince and the Angel of Reality,” The Way 28, no. 1 (January 1988): 19–26.
13. Nidhi Khatana, “Wallace Stevens’ Affinities with Romantics,” Indian Journal of Applied Research 3, no. 7 (July 2013): 356–358.
14. J.M.W. Turner, Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth, 1842, oil on canvas, 36 in. x 48 in. Tate reference N00530. Tate Britain, London.
15. J.M.W. Turner, A Dark Interior or Curtained Bed, with a Figure or Figures, from Colour Studies, ca. 1834-36, watercolor on paper, 3 in. x 4 in. Tate reference D28841; Turner Bequest CCXCI b 39. Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856. Tate Britain, London
16. Inés Richter-Musso, “Fusion,” in Turner and the Elements, ed. Inés Richter-Musso and Ortrud Westheider (Munich: Hirmer, 2011), 209.
17. Monika Wagner, “The Fusion of the Elements in Turner’s Painting,” in Turner and the Elements, ed. Inés Richter-Musso and Ortrud Westheider (Munich: Hirmer, 2011), 65.
18. Richter-Musso, “Fusion,” 208.
19. Ortrud Westheider, “Turner and the Four Classical Elements,” in Turner and the Elements, ed. Inés Richter-Musso and Ortrud Westheider (Munich: Hirmer, 2011), 16.
20. Stevens, “Six Significant Landscapes,” 78, section II, lns. 1–6.
21. Stevens, “Six Significant Landscapes,” 78, section II, lns. 1–2.
23. J.M.W. Turner, A Curtained Bed, with the Naked Legs of a Reclining Woman, from Colour Studies, ca. 1834-36, watercolor on paper, 3 in. x 4 in. Tate reference D28795; Turner Bequest CCXCI b 5. Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856. Tate Britain, London. Image courtesy of Tate, London (2022).
24. Jeremy Lewison, “Atmosphere,” in Turner, Monet, Twombly: Later Paintings (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), 112.
Renée Brown is a PhD student at Boston University where she studies twentieth-century American visual and material culture with a focus on the history of photography. Her work on these topics engages questions of epistemology and representation, considering the different forms of knowledge shaped through text and image.
Amy DeLaBruere received her BA in history of art and English from Yale University and is currently pursuing an MA in history of art and architecture at Boston University. She is particularly interested in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American, French, and British art as well as text and image relationships.
Sarah-Rose Hansen is an MA candidate in art history at Columbia University. Her current research deals with representations of the nocturnal in the sixteenth-century Veneto. She holds a Graduate Diploma in the history of art from the University of Warwick and a BA in psychology and Portuguese from Stanford University.
Elizabeth Mangone is a first-year MA student in art history and archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis. She holds a BA from Furman University. Her research focus is broad ranging in European art with a special interest in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century abstraction.
Katherine Mitchell is a PhD candidate in history of art and architecture at Boston University. Her ongoing dissertation research is focused on the history of riverine photography in the nineteenth-century United States as an instrument of imperial control and illustration of Euro-American ecological sensibilities.
Xiaoli Pan is a second-year PhD student studying medieval art at Case Western Reserve University. Her major interests are medieval and early modern medical and anatomical imagery, images of disease as representations of bioethics, the aged body, and sculptural bodies in medieval art.
Althea Ruoppo is a PhD candidate in history of art and architecture at Boston University. Her dissertation focuses on three German artists who have gradually developed their own specific approaches to transnational sculpture through the medium and strategy of assemblage: Isa Genzken (b. 1948), Reinhard Mucha (b. 1950), and Rosemarie Trockel (b. 1952).
Francesca Soriano is a PhD candidate in history of art and architecture at Boston University. Her dissertation research is focused on U.S. art and visual culture associated with South American and Caribbean birds and avian products in the nineteenth century and how it participated in imperialistic activities as well as a hemispheric extractive economy.
Jin Wang is a doctoral student in art history at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She focuses on modern and contemporary art in a global context and is interested in transcultural and intercultural exchanges, modernisms, and decolonial/postcolonial practices.
There is a certain comfort that is brought only by the stillness of the hours between dusk and dawn. Nightfall has long held a fascination for artists and, especially since the nineteenth century, has had rich treatment in the United States and Europe as our contributors to the Spring 2022 issue of SEQUITUR show. In his 1881 poem, “A Clear Midnight,” American poet and journalist Walt Whitman (1819–1892) muses on the night as a time of great solitude, an occasion for the temporary transcendence of mundane pursuits:
This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless, Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done, Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best, Night, sleep, death and the stars.
In night Whitman found a source of solace and reverie, and his poem provides a late Romantic response to the subject which emphasizes spiritual, psychological interiority. In contrast, other artists featured in this issue move beyond the self, rendering the nocturne in terms of its connections to secular, earthly exteriority.
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Figure 1. Andreas Gursky, Connect I (2018). Copyright: Andreas Gursky / ARS, 2022. Courtesy: Sprüth Magers. Andreas Gursky, VG BILD-KUNST, Bonn.
Picturing individuals seeking nighttime diversion, the 2018 photograph Connect I by German photographer Andreas Gurksy (b. 1955) shows, for example, how night can invigorate bustling after-hours entertainment (fig. 1). Many of Gursky’s works capture global mass phenomena, and Connect I is no exception. This full-bleed C-print, which extends to the edges of the picture plane, depicts a vast crowd in a large, darkened space. Their bodies, lit only by flashing red and white lights, sway to the grandiose sounds of DJ Solomun performing at the Connect Festival on the West Stage of Messe Düsseldorf, Germany, in the early morning hours of October 13, 2018.1 More than 20,000 people, including locals and “techno tourists” from around the world, attended this and many other overnight performances during the fourteen-hour event.
Gursky’s photograph, a preliminary version of which is the cover art for Solomun’s second studio album Nobody Is Not Loved (2021), is now on view at the Kunstpalast Düsseldorf for the first time. An entire gallery of the current exhibition Electro. Von Kraftwerk bis Techno (Electro. From Kraftwerk to Techno) (December 9, 2021–May 15, 2022)—tracing the 100-year history of international electronic music—features a selection of Gursky’s famed images of nighttime rave, club, and festival culture (fig. 2).2 A long-time enthusiast of the techno music scene in Germany, Gursky has taken awe-inspiring photographs of the annual Mayday electronic music festival in Dortmund and the legendary techno club Cocoon in Frankfurt since the 1990s.
For this issue of SEQUITUR, we invited current and recent graduate students to submit further instances of how artists and makers have responded to the theme of “Nightfall.” The six selected authors explore the diverse ways in which night has been experienced, imagined, celebrated, and critiqued in art, architecture, and material culture in the United States and Europe from the early nineteenth century to the contemporary period.
In the history of art and architecture, nightfall has often been a catalyst for creative inspiration of various forms. Artists past and present have employed light or its absence as both subject and medium. Some have used darkness to harness tonal contrasts, highlight points of emphasis, or accentuate emotional tension in their compositions. Others have responded to the unique challenges of making things visible at night, experimenting with photography, film noir, and nocturnes. Following the industrial revolution and introduction of electricity, architects conceived of architecture of the night, using artificial illumination to redefine the nocturnal presence of buildings, monuments, and urban spaces. In recent years, scholars such as Hélène Valance have delved deeper into the darker contexts of nocturnal imagery, examining the genre not simply as a stylistic response to nighttime fascination and evolving technologies but also as an aesthetic that is often wrapped up in racial and imperial discourses.4
Elizabeth Mangone’s feature essay, for example, shows how French artist Adolphe Yvon’s (1817–1893) use of striking contrasts between day and night; light and dark; and white, Black, and Indigenous figures is reflective of racial anxieties and biases in the post-Civil War era. In her close examination of Yvon’s allegorical painting, Genius of America (ca. 1868), Mangone demonstrates how this work, which was meant to celebrate the abolition of slavery and reunification of the American Republic, actually registers the artist’s paternalistic attitudes toward people of color and reflects the sensibilities of his time.
Jin Wang’s research spotlight, which focuses on the lesser known Belgian Symbolist painter and graphic artist Léon Spilliaert (1881–1946), similarly explores the sociopolitical implications of nightfall’s representation in art. While existing scholarship on Spilliaert has emphasized his position as a insomniac loner who wandered his hometown of Ostend at night, Wang seeks to place the focus on Ostend’s rapid urbanization in the late nineteenth century and Spilliaert’s relation to early twentieth century empathy theories. Spilliaert’s city- and seascapes, Wang argues, should be read in terms of the “darkness” out of which they emerged; much of the infrastructure that the artist recorded was a direct result of Belgian imperialism and colonialism.
Three authors examine nightfall or darkness by forging connections between fine art and the written word. In her feature essay, Xiaoli Pan offers a preliminary reading of Odilon Redon's illustrations for La Maison hantée, the 1896 French translation of British author Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1859 novella The Haunted and the Haunters; Or, The House and the Brain. Pan emphasizes the material characteristics and macabre undertones of Redon's lithographs, as well as their divergences from Bulwer-Lytton's ghost story. Her focused analysis of Redon's imagery sparks further investigation into themes such as mesmerism and the subconscious prevalent in Victorian gothic literature.
Amy DeLaBruere finds striking parallels between the artistic methodologies and oeuvres of nineteenth-century British painter J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) and twentieth-century American poet Wallace Stevens (1879–1955). In her close examination of two of Turner’s paintings and two of Stevens’s poems, DeLaBruere shows us that both creators progressively abstracted and obscured their images and texts—which often illustrate terrestrial or celestial nighttime skies and darkened bedroom scenes—through their visual and verbal application of essential color.
Renée Brown’s discussion of the German photographer Anneliese Hager’s (1904–1997) 1964 book of poems and photograms—images made by placing objects directly onto photographic paper and then exposing them to light—continues the compelling relation between visual art and language. In her review of the exhibition White Shadows: Anneliese Hager and the Camera-less Photograph at the Harvard Art Museums, Brown contends that Hager’s juxtaposition of complexly layered text and image should be seen as indicative of her larger interest in distortions of perception and legibility. Harvard’s revisionist exhibition brings the artist’s innovative achievements out of the shadows, even if her works appear alongside other photographs by nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientists and artists.
Hager’s knowledge and fascination with science is shared by Argentina-born, Berlin-based artist Tomás Saraceno (b. 1973). In their review of the exhibition, Tomás Saraceno: Particular Matter(s), at The Shed, New York, Sarah-Rose Hansen describes the visitor’s ocular experience of moving through Saraceno’s interactive installations which employ sensory perception as a means of inviting environmental awareness of our shared planet. These works, which contain references to solar eclipses and sun orbs, feature dramatic shifts in lighting that animate human physiological processes scientifically referred to as light and dark adaptations.
Our issue concludes with a summary of Under(Water), this year’s Mary L. Cornille (GRS ’87) 38th Annual Graduate Symposium in the History of Art & Architecture, co-organized by Katherine Mitchell and Francesca Soriano. Eight graduate students, presenting on a broad range of topics spanning cultures, geographies, and centuries, engaged with the theme in two panels titled “Water as Resource” and “Water as Connector,” while keynote speaker Dr. Stacy L. Kamehiro’s examined water as a vital space of transit in Oceanic art and visual culture. While at first it may seem like the themes of “Nightfall” and “Under(Water)” have little in common, deeper consideration of these paired topics reveals intriguing parallels. One such correlation between bodies of water and the period between dusk and dawn is that both often have particular connotations of mystery, mythology, and peril. In her research spotlight, SEQUITUR author Jin Wang shows us artist Léon Spilliaert's images of lone figures in bleak coastal environments while symposium speaker Marina Wells analyzes the dangers posed by the whaling industry as reflected in nineteenth-century representations of the subject. The congruences between water and night’s immersive qualities is suggested by speaker Krista Mileva-Frank’s discussion of simulated underwater submersion at the Expositions Universelles and SEQUITUR contributor Sarah-Rose Hansen’s analysis of Saraceno’s large-scale installations.
The editors would like to thank the authors for illuminating the hidden nuances of nightfall, showing us that the possible subjects related to this topic are far more myriad and expansive than we thought when we released our call for content in February 2022. At this challenging moment in world history, marked by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Russian aggression in Ukraine, and attacks on civil liberties as well as gun violence in the United States, we may struggle to see through the veil of darkness in order to find a path forward. We must choose community and solidarity with others in a time of social distance, suffering, and the denial of human rights. Despite an uncertain future, nightfall offers just one occasion for different groups of people to come together, and may it bring the kind of acceptance, connection, and freedom like that written in Whitman’s poems or pictured in Gurksy’s images of urban nightlife.
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Althea Ruoppo is a PhD candidate in history of art and architecture at Boston University. Her dissertation focuses on three German artists who have gradually developed their own specific approaches to transnational sculpture through the medium and strategy of assemblage: Isa Genzken (b. 1948), Reinhard Mucha (b. 1950), and Rosemarie Trockel (b. 1952).
2. The exhibition Electro: De Kraftwerk à Daft Punk originated in Paris in 2019 at the Musée de la Musique-Philharmonie de Paris, where it was curated by Jean-Yves Leloup. In 2020, an expanded version of the show traveled to London’s Design Museum under the title Electronic: From Kraftwerk to The Chemical Brothers.
3. Wall label, “The Dancefloor,” Electro. Von Kraftwerk bis Techno, Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, December 9, 2021–May 15, 2022.
4. See Hélène Valance, “PART II: Heart of Darkness: The Nocturne as Metaphor for Racial Difference,” in Nocturne: Night in American Art, 1890–1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 87–146.
Figure 1. Japheth Asiedu-Kwarteng. I Miss You Dada (2021). Ceramic, Kente, American flag, jute rope, epoxy. 28 x 18 x 13.5 in. Image courtesy of the artist; Figure 2. Japheth Asiedu-Kwarteng. Picking the Pieces Together (2020). Ceramic, epoxy. 28 x 18 x 15 in. Image courtesy of Anthony Kascak; Figure 3. Japheth Asiedu-Kwarteng. Ruffled Feathers (2020). Ceramic, mixed media. 84 x 48 x 3 in. Image courtesy of the artist; Figure 4. Japheth Asiedu-Kwarteng. Everything and Nothing: The Diary of One Who Leaves (2020). Ceramic, mixed media. 74 x 30 x 30 in. Image courtesy of the artist; Figure 5. Japheth Asiedu-Kwarteng. As a Result of My Responsibilities (2020). Ceramic, wood. 17 x 134 x 60 in. Image courtesy of the artist.
Inspired by Kente cloth traditionally woven by the Asante men of Ghana and the Ewe men of Ghana and Togo, my mixed-media works explore the potential of textiles to communicate the complexities of the diaspora: separation, fear, rejection, love, nostalgia, racism, and appropriation. These sculptures are my visual vocabulary for discussing the experience of entering and leaving the diaspora during the COVID-19 pandemic. Thoughts of my family, conversations with them, and their pain due to my absence influence the names of my works.
As a Result of My Responsibilities (2020) borrows from the traditional Akan dinner setting in which the patriarch is served at a table in a space separate from the matriarch and children of the family to demonstrate my, as well as my father’s, separation and displacement from our family. Hung on the wall, Picking the Pieces Together (2020) envisions Kente cloth made from clay. It appears to defy gravity to symbolize my recovery from quarantine and self-isolation. I Miss You Dada (2021) speaks to my return to the United States after visiting my family in Ghana; everything once again felt strange like during my first arrival. Through the repetitive processes of molding, weaving, and assembling, I reconstruct fragile Kente in ceramic to preserve its potent revered symbolism, while reflecting on my twenty months as a separated father and husband.
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Japheth Asiedu-Kwarteng
Japheth Asiedu-Kwarteng is an MFA candidate at Illinois State University. Japheth is a member of NCECA and has been featured in several prestigious exhibitions including the 2021 NCECA Annual exhibition. He was a presenter at the 2021 NCECA Conference. Japheth holds the NCECA Multicultural, Baber, and Lela Winegarner fellowships.
Figure 1. Installation view of During the Month of August Essex Street will be Closed (2013). Essex Street, New York. Courtesy of the artist and Essex Street/ Maxwell Graham.
From Sunday, July 28 to Sunday, August 11, 2013, the exterior of Essex Street, an art gallery in New York City, was closed to visitors (fig. 1). A sun-faded red awning hung above the entrance, signaling not to the space behind the graffitied metal shutters, but instead to the text above: “HUAN JI FOOD COURT INC.” in white capital letters. The phone number of the advertised Chinese restaurant and the street address of the gallery remained on the fabric cover in a plain, white text, but the latter was obscured by a second superimposed address in black—“1918 1st Ave.” Affixed beneath the awning, heavy-duty chains and multi-colored pennants drew the eye to a shaded space where various articles of black and white clothing, in addition to some remnants of dry cleaner’s plastic, were hung to dry in front of the metal window covers.1
Staged by artist Park McArthur, the temporary installation, entitled During the Month of August Essex Street will be Closed, at first resists any clear categorization. Seemingly incongruous components of the work display visual signs of obsolescence, such as the repurposed signage for a then-nonexistent restaurant. Likewise, these components also signal to less obvious evidence of neglect and decay, such as the infinitely drying clothes, forgotten or abandoned by a hypothetical and unseen tenant of the space. Importantly, however, the exhibition does not initially look out of place; while residents of the neighborhood or frequent gallery visitors may notice the minor changes to the gallery’s exterior, including the painted-over address and wet clothes, the installation, both in its individual elements and culminating effect, is incredibly ordinary. The only thing that suggests it fits elsewhere is the second superimposed address on the awning, which belongs to Draper Hall, a former nurses’ dormitory next to Metropolitan Hospital in East Harlem that remained vacant after flooding from Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and began new development as senior housing in 2015. Prior to this, the dormitory building housed nursing students and, on occasion, elderly patients in need of affordable housing near the hospital facilities. These details of neglect in public view, things in need of continual maintenance alongside that which requires a complete overhaul to function, point to how During the Month of August participates in an ongoing discourse around institutional care, to which disability scholars and activists have called attention since the 1960s when the disability rights movement began to take shape and foregrounds the devastating consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on these institutions and subsequent responses.2
By incorporating concrete examples of these systemic issues, McArthur emphasizes the connection to this discourse with the inclusion of a 112-page document accompanying the installation written by Clarence J. Sundram, Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Special Advisor on Vulnerable Persons, that visitors can access via the gallery’s website. Released in April 2012, the report, titled The Measure of a Society: Protection of Vulnerable Persons in Residential Facilities Against Abuse & Neglect, details the findings of a year-long investigation in response to the concerns of Governor Cuomo and others over failures to report and respond to instances of abuse and neglect in state-certified or funded residential facilities.3 Paired with the visual and contextual components of the installation, the report insinuates how little is known about what happens behind closed doors, especially because egregious acts of abuse or neglect only become newsworthy as “deviations from the norm.”4
Writing about McArthur’s work for Art in America in 2018, Ariel Goldberg describes Sundram’s text as “a conceptual framework for the suspended clothing, alluding to histories of buildings where practices of care have either been erased or distorted into dehumanization at the hands of the state.”5 Human traces have been all but erased from the installation, remaining only in the physical evidence of previous unseen actions. In bringing together the various elements of the exhibition—the installation site, the then-defunct building, and the government report—McArthur emphasizes the tension between private and public spaces and the fraught separation between the two.
Blurred spheres of private and public life have become more apparent amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, in which personal choices and behavior have the potential to impact society on a broad scale. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO) have recommended safeguards against contracting the virus, most notably social distancing. These safety measures have impacted the ways in which everyone has learned to navigate the world, such as working from home and avoiding physical interaction with people from outside of one’s own household. Though intended as equitable, these kinds of protective measures favor those privileged enough to undertake such large changes to their daily lives at the expense of those living in high-density areas, multigenerational homes, and with public-facing jobs. The essential workers whose labor sustains society, including grocery store clerks, warehouse workers, and delivery drivers, not only continued their risky jobs, placing themselves at increased risk of infection, but also often faced more stressful working environments without adequate compensation.6 Additionally, the pandemic has exacerbated the strain on residential care facilities and the longstanding, systemic issues they already faced. Ironically, New York State’s policies regarding residential care facilities and nursing homes have faced some of the most scrutiny, prompted by the state’s requirements for retaking recovered COVID patients and severe underreporting of COVID-related deaths in nursing homes by several thousand cases.7
Moreover, these suggested safety measures, in addition to more general consequences of COVID like supply-chain and employment disruptions, place an extra burden on the lives of disabled people, especially those who require home healthcare or other personal assistance to complete daily tasks. Staffing shortages and emergency funding restrictions, including the failure of some states to designate home healthcare workers as essential, have resulted in fewer resources for agencies, and thus have reduced the availability of services.8 Conflict arises, then, when disabled people are made to choose between their own safety, by staying home without guaranteed access to basic services, and potential exposure by entering medical facilities or other public spaces.9Together these factors bring into question the ways in which institutions of care have been historically structured and how they might be reimagined in a post-COVID world. How do we provide and access better care, especially in the wake of increased physical and social isolation? Disabled people, alongside LGBTQIA2S+ and BIPOC communities, were acutely aware of these problems long before the pandemic. Consequently, they have envisioned and organized alternative means of support to meet their own needs. One compelling approach to both accessing care and fostering community has emerged in the form of care collectives, or care webs.
Loree Erickson, a Queer-Crip theorist, writes about a vision of collective care on her blog, describing it as, “the work performed by informal collectives within and between marginalized communities committed to meeting the interdependent care needs of community members.”10 With disability justice as a central organizing principle, care collectives operate within a mutual aid framework to provide support for community members and fill in the gaps left by institutional shortcomings. Since 1999, Erickson has met her own daily care needs, including tasks such as getting out of bed and using the bathroom, through this model after facing a variety of issues surrounding inadequate funding and discrimination from home health aides. In sharing her experience within activist spaces, she has noted a pattern of people turning towards collective care after encountering similar barriers to accessing adequate and respectful care.11
Figure 2. Installation view of Climate Changing: On Artists, Institutions, and the Social Environment (2021). Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio. Courtesy of Essex Street/Maxwell Graham.
Park McArthur cited her initial encounter with collective care at the 2010 US Social Forum in Detroit, Michigan, where the newly formed Creating Collective Access (CCA) collective group founded by “three disabled Asian femmes,” organized to meet the needs of fellow sick, disabled, queer, and POC.12 At this conference, CCA crowdsourced care through peer engagement with individual attendees helping to meet each other’s supportive care needs in an unfamiliar and inaccessible environment whilefostering a sense of camaraderie. McArthur engages with the lived experiences of care in her art, working from her perspective as a disabled adult who requires a significant amount of physical support. She often does this through collaborative works, such as Carried and Held, an ongoing project with iterations as recent as 2021 (fig. 2). Taking the form of a vertical museum label, the work conforms to the visual standards of the institution in which it is displayed. Whether placed on the wall ofan exhibition space or gallery, the work always looks like typical museum signageand contains the same general content. However, the specific formatting of the label depends on the specifications established by the displaying institution.
In the 2021 version cited above at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, the artist’s name is at the top of the panel, followed by the artwork title on the line directly underneath. Below, the material, specific to this version of the work, is listed as ink on paper mounted on styrene board. The most significant element of the work, however, is the list of over 250 names following the courtesy line, which begins, “Courtesy of the artist and Margaret Herman, Alexandra McArthur, John McArthur...” and so on. This grouping sequentially records the individuals who have provided assistive care to the artist through the literal acts of carrying and holding, simplified descriptions of the physical support that McArthur requires. McArthur, furthermore, adds names to the work upon each new iteration of the label. Carried and Held not only documents the care that McArthur has received, but it also frames the people providing care as part of a collaborative and ongoing effort. Grouping friends and family alongside anonymous individuals, as in “2 people living across the apartment at UM,” McArthur’s work demonstrates the ways in which affection operates to facilitate care between both strangers and loved ones.13 In this way, care work extends beyond the scope of community organizing as an active project and instead implicates everyone who performs a task in the service of another person.
These concepts of care work and collective care are only beginning steps to solving the historical injustices of government-supported institutions which have failed to supply adequate services to vulnerable populations. In During the Month of August, McArthur calls attention to the often-overt systemic deficiencies that remain normalized and, thus, overlooked in daily life. However, the fundamental ideas of mutual aid and community-based support provide opportunities to consider how we might better assist one another in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic. This kind of supportive care is already happening on a small scale for many such as ‘pods’ of friends or family who gather in-person and help each other with basic needs such as grocery shopping or childcare. McArthur demonstrates the significance of both personal support and aid from the broader community in Carried and Held, emphasizing the impact of even small actions. Moreover, she calls attention to the failures of institutional care to protect vulnerable members of society, highlighting the normalization of neglect. In reframing intimate personal support and social reform alike as different means of collective care, McArthur helps us recognize how care work fosters social connection and social justice. By engaging with her work, we might be able to start thinking about how we can better support ourselves and one another.
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Madison Whitaker received a Master of Arts in art history from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas in 2021. Madison’s research interests include care practices in contemporary art, especially through the lens of Crip theory, and concepts of queer kinship.
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Footnotes
1. Prior to the gallery’s move in 2017 from Eldridge Street to another space on Hester Street in Lower Manhattan, the flags and red awning were part of its everyday exterior. Photos of the gallery’s exterior from pre-2017 are difficult to locate, but these details are sometimes visible in interior installation views. The primary difference, then, between the exterior on a normal basis and during the span of this exhibition is the metal gate covering the windows during the day and the wet clothing hung outside.
2. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018), 43.
3. Clarence J. Sundram, The Measure of a Society: Protection of Vulnerable Persons in Residential Facilities Against Abuse & Neglect: Report Submitted to Governor Andrew M. Cuomo (New York State Commission on Quality of Care and Advocacy for Persons with Disabilities, 2012), 11.
6. Some companies did offer “COVID Pay” to their employees as a means of compensating their labor during the peak of the pandemic, but it is difficult to assign a monetary value to risking one’s own life.
11. Erickson, “Welcome to Cultivating Collective Care Website!”
12. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018), 21; Park McArthur, “What Is Collectivity, Conviviality, and Care?,” in Question the Wall Itself, ed. Fionn Meade and Jordan Carter (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2017), 248.
13. Eva Feder Kittay, “The Ethics of Care, Dependence, and Disability,” Ratio Juris 24, no. 1 (March 2011): 53. In this instance, affection does not necessarily mean a platonic or romantic concern for one another but could describe feelings of empathy and moral obligation.
MASS MoCA
April 4, 2021–September 5, 2022
by Max Gruber
Installation view of Glenn Kaino: In the Light of a Shadow (2021) at MASS MoCA. Photo by Tony Luong.
Viewers were led by gallery attendants into a vast hall shrouded in darkness. A grave silence coated the space, broken only by anticipatory coughing, shuffling, and the knowledge that the resonant sound of Glenn Kaino’s installation was about to begin. Short, brilliant infusions of light emanated from above, each flash punctuated by jolting percussion. The pulsating light gradually revealed an imposing form, fragmented yet lithe, lying just out of reach. And then, suddenly, it was gone. Small objects lined a wooden walkway, their forms impossible to discern in the darkness. Light projected outwards from both sides of the path, unveiling the shapes and materials of the forms. Sculpted shards of wood and stone cast shadows on the walls, eliciting the feeling of a primordial stasis, of a calm before the storm.
Los Angeles-based conceptual artist Glenn Kaino’s In the Light of a Shadow addresses social justice movements and their protests across time and space. The wooden shards and stones that make up Kaino’s shadow-play reference various protests from around the world. Some of these sculptures are even 3D-printed replicas of specific events. In this installation for MASS MoCA, on view through September 2022, the artist takes aim at two “Bloody Sundays,” one in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 and the other in Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1972, drawing on the legacy of these violently repressive episodes to explore broader themes of protest, exploitation, and resilience. Kaino draws on the solidarity and community present in these movements as beacons of hope for humankind. By using abstract forms in combination with iconography from specific historical movements, Kaino is able to center episodes of resilience and joy that emerge from episodes of oppression in a way that transcends their original contexts, placing them in dialogue with a pantheon of social justice and civil rights movements across history.
Installation view of Glenn Kaino: In the Light of a Shadow (2021) at MASS MoCA. Photo by Tony Luong.
The light projection moved further down the walkway, its shift heralded by a sonic wave of heavy, industrial noise and new shapes on the wall. These shapes were figurative, depicting human forms in myriad scenarios: fighting, watching in horror as a figure falls backwards off a precipice, or marching in a large group alongside a military/battle tank. Others were triumphant, even iconic, as some figures holding a flag and musical instruments struck a defiant pose, while two others raised their fists in solidarity in a gesture that recalled the Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics. Just as the drama of the visual material waxed, so too did the music, as a bombastic horn section began to swell, filling the hall with a palpable charge, as if the audience’s own energy was being invoked in the scenes playing out in front of them. As viewers’ silhouettes joined those projected on the wall, their movements became enmeshed in the work, their forms both subsumed and implicated in the piece’s investigation of humanity’s capacity to incite violence and to liberate the oppressed.
The piece’s universalizing imagery—wooden shards with recurring slogans of social justice such as “si se puede,” “climate action now,” and “end detention now”—is contrasted by moments with pointed historical associations, as the horns are succeeded by a children’s chorus singing “We Shall Overcome.” This song is repeated by a group of Irish voices, reminding viewers of the evolving role it has played in social justice and labor movements across the globe, not just in the United States.1 That two movements as different as these might be united through song speaks to the transnational nature of Kaino’s project and the importance of sound in conveying these emotions.2 Here, the artist successfully toes the fine line between the indictment of past injustices and the eulogization of liberation movements throughout time.
Installation view of Glenn Kaino: In the Light of a Shadow (2021) at MASS MoCA. Photo by Tony Luong.
Further down the hall, projections of ships that look like Spanish galleons, an ominous nod to the colonization of the new world, implicate viewers in their imperial mission as their shadows dance alongside the rigid masts of the ships. Just as viewers found themselves walking alongside civil rights activists and protestors at the beginning, so too would they embark on ill-fated conquests in the name of empire. Finally, light fills the hall, and viewers encounter a warped mirror at the end of the walkway riddled with bullet holes, prompting an eerie moment of contemplation. The mass above the center of the walkway is bathed in light, finally visible as a ship in the shape of an ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail. In fact, it was modelled after Lord Mountbatten’s Shadow V, the fishing boat on which the infamous member of the British royal family was assassinated by the Irish Republican Army in 1979. The warped hull and self-destructive imagery of the ouroboros is a statement both on the unsustainable condition of imperialism and humanity’s suicidal march toward climate annihilation. Withering yet defiant, the snake which eats itself symbolizes our monstrous appetite for control and the palpable symptoms of environmental and social disease that follow. And yet, Kaino’s piece draws its power from the warmth of community. The small forms which hang from the ceiling and surround the ouroboros, though activated individually by light projections, appear as a murmuration of starlings, each taking wing and in dialogue with the other, careening towards a utopic future that centers hope, life, and the resilience of the human spirit.
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Max Gruber
Max Gruber is a Master of Arts candidate at the Williams College / Clark Institute Graduate Art Program. His research and criticism have dealt with Latin American and global contemporary art, photography, visual culture, and socially-engaged art.
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Footnotes
1. Originally a gospel song which was adopted by the American Civil Rights movement, “We Shall Overcome” was also adopted during The Troubles in Northern Ireland and has been present in a number of social movements across the world. Freya McClements “Derry and ‘We Shall Overcome’: ‘We plagiarized and entire movement.’” The Irish Times. Accessed December 17, 2021.
2. The artist collaborated with David Sitek of the band TV on the Radio to produce the sound for the piece.
Figure 1. Installation view of Studies in Solitude: The Art of Depicting Seclusion at Agnes Etherington Art Centre. Photo: Mark Birksted.
In March 2020, the COVID-19 virus spread like wildfire. We retreated into our homes for what was promised to be a few weeks of lockdown; it was our duty to stay home in order to protect ourselves and others. More than a year and a half later, we are emerging from isolation into a different world than the one we left. Now, as we re-enter museum spaces, The Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, Ontario (Canada), presents an exhibition as a meditation on the universal isolating impacts of the pandemic.
Studies in Solitude: The Art of Depicting Seclusion is an exhibition of the Centre’s collection of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings curated by the Bader Curator of European Art, Dr. Suzanne van de Meerendonk, who contextualizes the experience of pandemic isolation within historic representations of solitude. The exhibition illustrates that the Early Modern relationship with solitude, much like our own, was a complex navigation of benefits and challenges. Throughout the exhibit, viewers confront their contemporary relationships with solitude to consider what the curator calls the “social and moral implications” of this experience.1
Figure 2. Jacob van Campen, Old Woman with a Book (1625–1630), oil on canvas. Agnes Etherington Art Centre. Gift of Alfred and Isabel Bader, 2013.
Van de Meerendonk’s exhibition illustrates how the museum can encourage contemplation in the aftershock of COVID-19; it provides a space and a visual language for considering our own mortality. Many of the subjects in the exhibition’s paintings have a complex relationship with solitude as they are nearing death and coming to terms with the impermanence of their existence. Jacob van Campen’s Old Woman with a Book (1625–1630, fig. 2) depicts the increased piety that comes with advanced age and the awareness of human frailty. As many of us sat in our homes addicted to the news of the pandemic’s spread, helplessly following case counts and infection rates, we contemplated our own mortality. The last year has marked a shift in both the acceptability and the necessity of solitude. Perhaps in viewing Old Woman with a Book, viewers see themselves.
As visitors explore the exhibition, they can enter a studiolo-esque room, which bears similarities to those depicted in many of the surrounding paintings (fig. 3).2 Van de Meerendonk presents this area as a space for reflecting on the effects of solitude; seating and writing materials are available for the visitor to aid in this practice. It is a solitary space, but also a place for engagement, much like our homes. Visitors can write a postcard that the gallery will mail, or they can leave a note or response to another visitor in the space. Intimate notes to visitors’ past or future selves, their loved ones, and those lost to the pandemic fill a display wall built for these meditations. The organization of the gallery helps the visitor contemplate their own experiences of isolation.
Figure 3. Installation view of Studies in Solitude: The Art of Depicting Seclusion at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, Ontario. Courtesy Agnes Etherington Art Centre. Photo by the author, 2021.
Studies in Solitude poses the question: who gets to be alone? The subjects depicted in these paintings are either primarily older, wealthy men shown in their private studioli, or religious and biblical figures in devotional scenes. In contrast, complexities accompany depictions of women in solitude, an experience traditionally reserved for men.3 Works with female subjects must have a religious connotation, and either directly depict a religious moment like the annunciation or carry a message of Christian morality through warning of the sexual agency associated with female privacy.4 Women were not allowed to experience solitude because of its associations with male spaces of knowledge and consequently could not be depicted in such a masculine fashion. Solitude continues to be a privileged experience as it was in the seventeenth-century. During the pandemic, many people did not have a safe place to isolate because they were experiencing homelessness, living in overcrowded housing, or working essential jobs that often put them at risk. Considering solitude as a privileged experience can reframe negative contemporary associations between the impacts of isolation and our mental health.
The isolation of figures presented in Studies in Solitude reminds us that seclusion can also provide new opportunities. Throughout the exhibit, these figures are all in the pursuit of either knowledge or religious commune. Solitude has also served another purpose in the context of the pandemic. Perhaps the increased activism and involvement in the Black Lives Matter movement and other social movements precipitated from this pause in our lives and contemplation in a solitary space. Would we have stopped to pay attention if we had not been forced into isolation?
Studies in Solitude reminds us that, like others before us, we are not alone in our struggle to define the consequence of solitude in our lives. Our experience of COVID-19 amplifies our ability to identify with the subjects of this exhibition. In this way, viewers experience a renewed appreciation for these works and for the connection Dr. van de Meerendonk makes between Early Modern depictions of solitude and our newly-defined relationship with isolation. This exhibition draws attention to our need for connection and how our shared experience of the last eighteen months has been universal in its isolating effects. Ultimately, the experience of solitude during the pandemic has revealed systemic social inequities that deserve our focus. Solitude has given us pause to re-evaluate and make changes in our own lives, and serves, as it did in the seventeenth century, as a place of reflection rather than simply a state of being.
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Hailey Chomos
Hailey Chomos is a Master of Arts candidate in art history at Queen's University. Her research focuses on the reception and collection of European art in North America in the early twentieth century. She holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts in history and art history from the University of Toronto.
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Footnotes
1. Studies in Solitude: The Art of Depicting Seclusion, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, Ontario, 2021. Unless otherwise noted, quotations in this review come from exhibition label text.
2. Van de Meerendonk created the installation and reflective exercise in collaboration with Emma Tow, art history student at Queen’s University, and Sebastian De Line, Associate Curator of Indigenous Care and Relations at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre.
3. Wall text, Old Woman with a Book (1625–1630), in Studies in Solitude: The Art of Depicting Seclusion, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, Ontario.
4. Wall text, Woman with a Pear (1651), in Studies in Solitude: The Art of Depicting Seclusion, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, Ontario.
Japheth Asiedu-Kwarteng is an MFA candidate at Illinois State University. Japheth is a member of NCECA and has been featured in several prestigious exhibitions including the 2021 NCECA Annual exhibition. He was a presenter at the 2021 NCECA Conference. Japheth holds the NCECA Multicultural, Baber, and Lela Winegarner fellowships.
Heather Burich is an emerging art historian and administrator with interests in collections and exhibition design. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in history with minors in art history and museum studies from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and is currently pursuing a Dual Master’s in arts administration and art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her research involves the social, political, and environmental implications of collections management and cultural heritage protection.
Hailey Chomos is a Master of Arts candidate in art history at Queen's University. Her research focuses on the reception and collection of European art in North America in the early twentieth century. She holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts in history and art history from the University of Toronto.
Colleen Foran is a PhD student studying African art at Boston University. Her research focuses on contemporary West African art, particularly on public and participatory art in Ghana’s capital of Accra. Prior to coming to BU, Colleen worked at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in the curatorial, editorial, and advancement departments. She completed her MA in May 2020, as well as a Graduate Certificate in African Studies from BU’s African Studies Center
Max Gruber is a Master of Arts candidate at the Williams College / Clark Institute Graduate Art Program. His research and criticism have dealt with Latin American and global contemporary art, photography, visual culture, and socially-engaged art.
Jake Matthews is a recent graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. At a broad level, his research is focused on the politics of visuality and medium-specificity. His recent work has considered Indigenous uses of video and new media as responses to environmental degradation and state violence.
Madison Whitaker received a Master of Arts in art history from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas in 2021. Madison’s research interests include care practices in contemporary art, especially through the lens of Crip theory, and concepts of queer kinship.
ICA Watershed, Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston
July 3—September 6, 2021
by Colleen Foran
Figure 1. Installation view, Firelei Báez. ICA Watershed, East Boston, 2021. Photo by the author, 2021.
Since 2018, the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston (ICA) has annually commissioned a site-specific installation for the Watershed, its outpost in East Boston.1 This year’s exhibition highlighted the work of Dominican-American artist Firelei Báez (b. 1981). Báez’s family had roots in both the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and her childhood was inflected by growing up near the Haitian border. She was acutely aware of shared histories and ethnicity-based tensions between the two nations—and of the power of visual representation to either reinforce or break down such barriers.2 This early understanding of cultural identity as in flux inspired the work that made Báez an art-world star: lush, detailed depictions of bodies in transformation and hybrid folkloric creatures, often painted or drawn over reproduced historical maps.
The exhibition centerpiece, however, was Báez’s vision of the ruins of Haitian palace Sans-Souci, titled To breathe full and free: a declaration, a re-visioning, a correction (19º36’16.9”N 72º13’07.0’’W, 42º21’48.762’’N 71º1’59.628’’W) (2021) (fig. 1).3 The architectural fragment included five arches, angled precariously to suggest that it was slipping into the seabed as a blue tarp undulated overhead to mimic waves. Sans-Souci was a complex space to resurrect; the luxurious nineteenth-century palace was built by Henri Christophe (1767–1820), a leader of the Haitian Revolution who would controversially rule as king of northern Haiti from 1811 until he died by suicide in 1820. His political rivals would go on to unite the fractious nascent nation, while Christophe’s royal residence was left to decay after a destructive 1842 earthquake.4 The Haitian Revolution is the most successful rebellion of enslaved people in history. From 1789 to 1804, African-descended residents of the colony Saint-Domingue liberated themselves from French rule and built the first Black republic in the world.5 Yet the legacy of colonialism and white supremacy has continued to hamper Haiti. As natural disasters and political violence rocked the Caribbean nation throughout the summer of 2021, these resonances weighed heavy for the exhibition visitor.6
The recreation of Sans-Souci struggled to bear this density of reference. Its scale, while enormous, still failed to fill the massive industrial warehouse, making the installation feel less immersive than overwhelmed. This issue was shared by the audio component, which, according to didactics, featured recordings of migration stories from residents of East Boston.7 The testimonies were intended to emphasize the exhibition’s site-specificity and reinforce the goals of the artist and curator to embed it within a specific neighborhood.8 However, they were played at such a low volume that the soundscape was reduced to an occasional burble. An opportunity to root the exhibition in its surrounding community—long the home of recent immigrants, including its current majority-Hispanic population—was lost in the cavernous space.
Figure 2. Firelei Báez (b. Dominican Republic, 1981). Detail, To breathe full and free: a declaration, a re-visioning, a correction (19º36’16.9”N 72º13’07.0’’W, 42º21’48.762’’N 71º1’59.628’’W) (2021). Installation view, Firelei Báez. ICA Watershed, East Boston, 2021. Photo by the author, 2021; Figure 3. Firelei Báez (b. Dominican Republic, 1981). Detail, To breathe full and free: a declaration, a re-visioning, a correction (19º36’16.9”N 72º13’07.0’’W, 42º21’48.762’’N 71º1’59.628’’W) (2021). Installation view, Firelei Báez. ICA Watershed, East Boston, 2021. Photo by the author, 2021; Figure 4. Firelei Báez (b. Dominican Republic, 1981). Detail, To breathe full and free: a declaration, a re-visioning, a correction (19º36’16.9”N 72º13’07.0’’W, 42º21’48.762’’N 71º1’59.628’’W) (2021). Installation view, Firelei Báez. ICA Watershed, East Boston, 2021. Photo by the author, 2021; Figure 5. Firelei Báez (b. Dominican Republic, 1981). Detail, To breathe full and free: a declaration, a re-visioning, a correction (19º36’16.9”N 72º13’07.0’’W, 42º21’48.762’’N 71º1’59.628’’W) (2021). Installation view, Firelei Báez. ICA Watershed, East Boston, 2021. Photo by the author, 2021; Figure 6. Firelei Báez (b. Dominican Republic, 1981). Detail, To breathe full and free: a declaration, a re-visioning, a correction (19º36’16.9”N 72º13’07.0’’W, 42º21’48.762’’N 71º1’59.628’’W) (2021). Installation view, Firelei Báez. ICA Watershed, East Boston, 2021. Photo by the author, 2021.
This was an installation intended to be seen (or, perhaps, photographed) from a distance. The sensation of being plunged underwater was potent—and important—in a city threatened by rising sea levels.9 Closer inspection dispelled the illusion. The sinking arches were anchored by blocks (textured to look like stone but without convincing heft) and what was clearly shredded rubber (fig. 2). The tarp’s distressed appearance was disproved by its regular, repeated holes, which only partly screened the harsh industrial lighting that punctured the watery impression (fig. 3, see also fig. 1). These aspects destabilized some of the less-convincing connections being drawn between Sans-Souci and the Watershed—the real palace, after all, was not submerged by a flood, but damaged by an earthquake. They accentuated that these ruins occurred artificially, outside of historical processes, and lent the installation an appealingly aesthetic sense of fantasy.
Age and decay were further connoted through fabricated barnacles. There was evident care and attention here, with sand carefully applied to blur the edges of each cluster (fig. 4). But the barnacles did not withstand scrutiny, especially when compared with the real-life creatures abundantly visible on nearby harbor structures. Viewers were encouraged to look closely at these additions because of what they partially obscured: repeating patterns stenciled across the monument’s blue-painted surface that alluded to African diasporic identities and lineages of Black resistance (figs. 5, 6). The color and symbols referenced indigo textile techniques that enslaved Africans brought with them from West Africa to the Americas and that became a staple good of the transatlantic slave trade—of which Boston’s harbor was a crucial node.10
Figure 7. Stephen Hamilton (b. United States, 1982). Owners of the Earth (2020). From The River and The Forest series. Acrylic on indigo-dyed adire oniko. Installation view, Stephen Hamilton: Indigo. ICA Watershed, East Boston, 2021. Photo by the author, 2021.Figure 8. Installation view, Stephen Hamilton: Indigo. ICA Watershed, East Boston (2021). Photo by the author, 2021.
The sense that Baez’s version of Sans-Souci was a theater set, rather than a real place, was thrown into sharp relief by the paired exhibition Indigo featuring Boston-based artist Stephen Hamilton (b. 1982). The small exhibition punched above its weight and grounded Báez’s smart exposure of cross-continental histories. Without it, the allusions to indigo as a connection point for the African diaspora would have been far more abstracted, only semi-visible on the intentionally deteriorated palace surface (see fig. 6). The show featured five textiles by Hamilton in the educational area at the rear of the building. These works displayed the techniques he had studied in southwestern Nigeria, including the making of natural dyes and loom-weaving (figs. 7, 8). Accompanying wall labels included photographs taken in Nigeria that illustrated these methods for the visitor. The showstopper was Owners of the Earth (2020), a mixed-media wall hanging that depicted three reposed women surrounded by emblems of classical Yoruba art against the backdrop of resist-dyed indigo fabric (adire) (fig. 7). As a Black American, Hamilton understands his process-oriented practice and research into historical African art as a restorative recovery of stolen knowledge.11
It was tactility that distinguished the artworks; Hamilton’s pieces rewarded long, careful looking, with evidence of the hand-at-work in every layered detail. Showing the exhibitions in the same venue was an inspired choice to drive home the material legacies of the transatlantic slave trade. The worldwide dispersal of indigo fabric and its production trailed that of millions of kidnapped and enslaved Africans to the Americas and the Caribbean. That exchange underwrote Boston’s growing wealth as a colonial port, just as it foreshadowed Haiti’s eventual liberation and struggles to succeed in the face of colonial underdevelopment.
From the shores of Boston, Haiti might seem distant, as do the cultures and traditions of West Africa. Yet these locations are intimately linked, historically and presently, through the forces of migration, global trade, and a changing climate. Báez and Hamilton are artists both extremely adept at revealing these connections. This presentation of Báez’s work, however, emphasized aesthetic over substance, the imaginary over the tangible, surface over depth. Its details called to mind the constructed nature of the space more than the passage of time. The set dressing contrasted with Hamilton’s textiles, which he created as a labor of time-intensive love informed by deep research into West African traditions of making. Seen together, these two bodies of work marked the distance between fantasy and reality—in all its painful, messy, intertwined layers.
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Colleen Foran
Colleen Foran is a PhD student studying African art at Boston University. Her research focuses on contemporary West African art, particularly on public and participatory art in Ghana’s capital of Accra. Prior to coming to BU, Colleen worked at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in the curatorial, editorial, and advancement departments. She completed her MA in May 2020, as well as a Graduate Certificate in African Studies from BU’s African Studies Center
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Footnotes
1. With the exception of the summer of 2020, when the initiative was suspended due to COVID-19 and the Watershed pivoted to become a food distribution center for hard-hit East Boston communities.
3. The parenthetical of this lengthy title references the geographic coordinates for Sans-Souci in Haiti, followed by those of the Watershed in Boston, thus explicitly indicating distant physical locations were entangled within the space of the installation.
4. Wall text, Firelei Báez, ICA Watershed, East Boston.
5. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Michael J. Drexler, “Introduction: Haiti and the Early United States, Entwined,” in The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States: Histories, Textualities, Geographies, edited by Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Michael Drexler (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 1–2.
6. The first half of 2021 saw continuous protests in Haiti’s capital against President Jovenel Moïse after he controversially retained power beyond expected term limits. Then, on July 7, 2021, Moïse was assassinated in a shocking attack on his Port-au-Prince home. The political situation in Haiti remains uncertain, as various groups vie for political and on-the-ground power. This instability was compounded when a 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck the island nation on August 14, 2021, causing widespread damage and killing thousands. Shortly after, recovery efforts were hampered by a severe tropical storm. Early autumn brought news of thousands of Haitian migrants gathering on the southern United States border seeking asylum—a further reminder of the interconnectedness of Haitian and American histories and futures.
7. Wall text, Firelei Báez, ICA Watershed, East Boston.
8. Báez previously created a smaller fragment of Sans-Souci for an exhibition on New York City’s High Line, on view from May 2019 to May 2020. This version shared the Watershed example’s patterning and appearance but was titled solely with the palace’s geographic coordinates: 19.604692°N 72.218596°W (2019); Mitter, “In Boston, Art That Rises From the Deep.”
9. Not far from the ICA’s Seaport location, the corner of an almost entirely submerged luxury condo building surfaced from the waters of Fort Point Channel—a reminder of what the area could look like in just a few years. This portent, a work of art titled Polarity (2021) by Boston artist Zy Baer (b. 1993), was on view in the harbor throughout the summer, like the Watershed’s installation. It was not, however, sponsored by the ICA, but by the local group Fort Point Arts Community.
10. Wall text, Firelei Báez, ICA Watershed, East Boston.
11. Wall text, Stephen Hamilton: Indigo, ICA Watershed, East Boston.
Figure 1. Billy Metcalf. New Orleans Skyline (April 24, 2012). Courtesy of Billy Metcalf Photography.
United States art museums located in geographically hazardous zones should be well-informed about the considerable risks posed to their collections at any given time. As the impact of climate change intensifies, public institutions need to review their collection management policies in response to the growing frequency of natural disasters. After the devastation of Hurricanes Katrina and Ida over the past two decades, the city of New Orleans (Louisiana) has become an example for how to develop and rework protocols for emergency preparedness. These museums' efforts in protecting cultural heritage have ensured the survival and longevity of their museum collections for both local and tourist communities to learn from, identify with, and celebrate.
My master’s thesis investigates cultural heritage protection for art museums that are threatened by climate change and natural catastrophes. Focusing on three case studies—the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the New Orleans African American Museum—I want to learn from their experiences with disaster preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery of art objects. By interviewing museum staff and professionals in the field of disaster preparedness, and assessing each organization’s collection management policy, I will analyze how these museums implemented precautions that could be transferable to future catastrophes at other institutions in the United States, and possibly how to establish collaborative initiatives for endangered institutions.
My main research questions revolve around the locus of cultural heritage management and resiliency in New Orleans (NOLA). What are the issues of cultural heritage protection in a city facing climate change or one located in natural disaster hazardous zones? What have these institutions learned from catastrophic experiences, and what does learning mean here? I am curious as to what organizations in New Orleans have learned from their experiences enduring Hurricanes Katrina and Ida, and if this learning has translated into a collaborative process to create specialized initiatives for art object longevity. If this is the case, the communication, planning, assessment, and comparison of goals and missions add layers of depth to the formulation of effective disaster preparedness protocols nationwide. What other agencies have been involved in emergency planning, mitigation, response, and recovery of cultural heritage, and what benefit do they contribute to the museums in question. Most importantly, the outcome I hope to achieve in this thesis is to evaluate how the lessons learned and precautions implemented by NOLA art museums are transferable to other projects in the United States. I believe that my chosen case studies serve as prime examples for others located in geographically hazardous zones, or more urgently, for places where climate change will have a future impact.
My research methodology has closely engaged with contextual reading and conceptual mapping. Using Joseph A. Maxwell’s Qualitative Research Design: An Interactive Approach, and engaging in collaborative activities, myself and student colleagues have developed our personal research designs to undertake our summative master’s theses. In early October, I remotely attended the Smithsonian’s annual National Conference of Cultural Property Protection. Over two days, various organizations and professionals across the country spoke about current initiatives in cultural property protection both within and outside of institutions. These discussions highlighted the resilience of staff and consultants even in the face of natural disaster. I have also reached out to staff at select museums nationwide with a brief questionnaire about the evolutions of their collections management policies and how these policies might have changed due to natural disasters that may have impacted their respective cities and to gauge interest in participating in a more formal interview process. The responses to this survey have been promising, and I have been awarded a grant to travel to New Orleans this winter to visit my case study institutions and complete interviews with staff and specialists in the field. Another interview I will conduct will be with Samantha Forsko, the current Director of Collections at the Art Institute of Chicago, who also wrote her master’s thesis on emergency preparedness in cultural heritage organizations and cooperative disaster networks. In 2022, gathering and interpreting primary source information will be my main focus as I finalize my thesis and complete my dual degree master’s in arts administration and art history. With this research, my hope is that these methods of inquiry on art museums’ current collection management policies and protocols will continue to be applied to institutions with similar situations that may find themselves in need of disaster preparedness in years to come.
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Heather Burich
Heather Burich is a third year dual-degree graduate student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago finishing her Master’s in Modern & Contemporary Art History, Theory, and Criticism and Arts Administration & Policy ('22). Her research involves the social, political, and personal implications of collections management, archives, and cultural property protection.
Figure 2. View of the work Untitled XV (2008), Andreas Gursky, © Andreas Gursky / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2021. Courtesy Sprüth Magers, exhibition Electro. From Kraftwerk to Techno, photo: Kunstpalast/ Katja Illner.
