Contrary Bodies: Exhibition Proposal“I believe in making contradictions productive, not in having to choose one side or the other side. As opposed to choosing either or, choosing both.” With these words, activist and author, Angela Davis, foregrounds dilemmas of our historical moment and also identifies the challenges they pose to art museums. Diversity has become impossible to ignore, and communities are voicing their objections to a centuries-old, white-washed narrative of cultural histories embodied in traditional museum collecting and display. At the heart of these shifts in representation, many museums are working to rediscover the complexities and nuances that make up the worlds we occupy, and to center voices that were previously marginalized. Museums such as the Toledo Museum of Art are taking a fresh, critical look at their collections to celebrate a broader diversity.
The works exhibited in Contrary Bodies are all from the TMA’s permanent collection and feature BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color), women, and members of the LGBTQ+ community as artists and subjects. While these works represent a spectrum of social groups and cultures, bringing them together is not just about making differences visible. The human figure is depicted according to a variety of approaches, ranging from the intimate to the erotic to the formal. In each case the depiction seems to question certain racialized or gendered assumptions about how such a figure should look and/or behave. In this sense, these works reject the constraints of “otherness” and declare something about what it means to be an active participant in the larger culture of humanity. This exhibition is curated and designed by students in The University of Toledo’s Art Museum Practices and Graphic and Interactive Design Concentrations. |
Ivy (Reclining with Blue Shirt)
Mary Beth McKenzie
Mary Beth Mckenzie, Ivy (Reclining with Blue Shirt).
Oil on Canvas. 2015.60 x 50 in. 2019.24 |
Mary Beth McKenzie devotes her work to realistic depictions of the human figure. While she has always been fascinated with people, it isn’t their psychology that draws her. As she explains, what intrigues her is the figure: “the design, the abstract patterns and relationships, the colors, the shapes.” She tends to portray acquaintances whose forms she knows deeply, and she depicts them in random moments of daily life, shown simply for what they are, without the modification of artificial poses or the embellishment of costume. In Ivy, a young woman, casually dressed in her undergarments, reclines on a bed. Seemingly lost in thought, she appears indifferent to our presence in this space and unconcerned that we see her.
By avoiding any attempt at a “psychological” portrait, McKenzie allows the mood and character of her subject to emerge on its own terms, unaffected by the artist’s interpretation or values. |
Reading Dick and Jane with Me
Clarissa Sligh
Clarissa Sligh, Reading Dick and Jane with Me. Reproductions: photolithographs of drawings, photographs, and handwritten text
Text: photolithography (typographic design) Paper: cream wove paper. 1989. 8 3/8 x 6 15/16 in. 1990.44 |
Generations of American school children learned to read with Dick and Jane. This book also taught them that the typical American school child was white and middle-class, which left young African American readers like Clarissa Sligh feeling as though they somehow didn’t belong. Sligh’s reinterpretation recuperates the lessons of the original reader for the children it left out. In place of the original pastel watercolors of suburban white children, Reading Dick and Jane with Me gives us black-and-white photographs of Black children from the Washington, D.C. neighborhood of Sligh’s youth.
Floating around and between these photographs are drawings: outlined sketches of children, known to Sligh, but so vaguely defined as to be unrecognizable by anyone else. These figures are almost ghosts, vaguely shaped and almost devoid of facial features. Their incompleteness makes it easy to ignore their personhood, just as Sligh’s brothers and sisters and friends were ignored in the books that they were given to read in school. |
Negro es Bello II
Elizabeth Catlett
Elizabeth Catlett, Negro es Bello II. Lithograph,1969–2001.
33 3/8 x 25 1/4 in. 2006.155 |
At the height of the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and ‘70s, many African Americans began to self-identify as ‘Black’. This meant rejecting the then-common labels of ‘negro’ or ‘colored’ as demeaning terms used to exclude and oppress. The term ‘Black’ encompassed a new affirmation of Black power and Black beauty that originated in African roots and existed completely outside of white standards.
In this lithograph, Elizabeth Catlett depicts a stylized Black man and woman with full lips, wide noses, and wide-eyed, pensive gazes. Inspired by the Benin memorial sculptures that honored the Oba, or king, for his wisdom and spiritual powers, Catlett’s faces relate a communal identity of Black beauty with which any African American could identify. Catlett’s BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL stamps recall the buttons worn by members of the Black Panther party. They speak to the struggles of Black Power groups both to secure legal rights and to uplift the confidence of the Black communities in which they worked. |
In Sojourner Truth I Fought for the Rights
of Women as Well as Negroes
Elizabeth Catlett
Elizabeth Catlett, In Sojourner Truth I Fought for the Rights of Women as Well as Negroes.Linocut, 1949.
19 x 12 ¼ in. 2006.152 |
As the daughter of educators and the granddaughter of formerly enslaved people, Elizabeth Catlett felt a deep responsibility to educate society on the conditions of racism in America and to give Black Americans, particularly women, an art that reflected both their priorities and their potential. This linocut print appeared in Catlett’s series The Negro Woman (1946–47), which honored the history and heroes of Black women’s labor in America.
The dignity, strength, and accomplishment Catlett saw in these women are boldly embodied in her depiction of abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth. Catlett evokes the solemn force of Truth’s words, as she delivers her famous speech “Ain’t I a Woman? to the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. Truth’s outsized hand speaks to her authority as an enslaved woman who escaped, with her children, to freedom, while Catlett’s stark and deeply carved lines speak to the power of the artist’s own manual labor to inspire future generations. |
Purity
Jen Davis
Jen Davis, Purity. Chromogenic color photograph, 2002.
24 x 20 in. 2007.6 |
Jen Davis explores body image and identity through self-portraits. The stark intimacy of her photographs often produces a sense of intrusion, as though the viewer has witnessed a moment of insecurity that was meant to be private. In Purity, Davis appears wet and wrapped in a towel, cropped so tightly that only the upper part of her body is seen. The viewer is essentially in the room with her, as though compelled to witness her vulnerability.
Davis is aware that she does not embody normative standards of beauty. By bringing us into so close a physical proximity, she forces us to share in the discomfiture that makes her look away. And yet, for Davis, the confrontations in her self-portraits have been a means of empowerment. “I gave myself permission to turn the gaze onto myself,” Davis says. The act of photographing herself, of laying bare her doubts, has left her able to face that gaze and come to terms with it, to create empathy where before there may have been judgment. |
The Ragmud Collection, Vol. 7, Sketches:
The Life and Work of Afrikan-Amerikan Women
Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson
Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, The Ragmud Series: Volume 7, Sketches: The Life and Work of Afrikan-Amerikan Women (details). Book: mixed media, 1987-2008. 2008.173C
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The Ghanaian concept of Sankofa, “to retrieve,” states that one must honor one’s roots in order to move forward. This spirit animates the whole of Aminah Robinson’s unique, handmade book series, The Ragmud Collection. In 10 volumes, Robinson’s art of needlework, drawings, and family papermaking and sculptural traditions evoke the vibrancy of the African American community of Poindexter Village in Columbus, Ohio, where she grew up. The books also relate the unsung struggles and achievements of African American history that she learned of as a child.
Volume 7 is dedicated to Robinson’s grandmother, Juanita Taylor Zimmerman, “the oldest practicing Beautician in the State of Ohio until her retirement, in 1964.” Endearingly referred to as “Mama” by the family, she is depicted seated in her Sunday best and grasping the arms of her wing-back chair. Her enlarged hands, a motif that appears throughout Robinson’s work, suggest her long life of work and resonate with the struggles and achievements for which the women Robinson highlights in this volume continue to stand. |
Contrary Bodies Exhibition Artwork ListReading Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson
The Ragmud Collection, Vol. 7, Sketches: The Life and Work of Afrikan-Amerikan Women Clarissa Sligh Reading Dick and Jane with Me Elizabeth Catlett In Sojourner Truth I Fought for the Rights of Women as Well as Negroes Elizabeth Catlett Negro es Bello II (Black Is Beautiful) George Platt Lynes Untitled (E.M. Forster and Robert Bishop) Untitled (George Platt Lynes and Randy Jack) Ishikawa Toraji Reading Jen Davis Purity Manuel Álvarez Bravo Margarita de Bonampak Mary Beth McKenzie Ivy (Reclining with Blue Shirt) Prentice Hall Polk The Boss Roberto Juarez Apple Oil I Yasumasa Morimura Ambiguous Beauty /Aimai-no-bi |