The charcoal drawing in black and white, reminiscent of Picasso’s Guernica, is huge, truly monumental in its artistry and sheer size, 6' × 9 ½', entitled The moral arc of history ideally bends towards justice but just as soon as not curves back around toward barbarism, sadism, and unrestricted chaos (2010). The title is apt. Beautifully drawn with Walker’s expert draftsmanship, the piece embodies the second part of the title in scenes of atrocity.
A black body lynched over the flames.
Beatings of black people, some naked, some clothed.
A cross burning.
The small figure of candidate Barack Obama delivering his speech on race in America, dwarfed by a naked black figure sucking off a gigantic white man as an older black woman looks on.
Yes, these are recognizable scenes from the iconography of American history. At the same time, this is not an assemblage to make you feel good about being black. It’s more a reminder to white people that American history is more than Diarylide-yellow enterprise and democracy in viridian green.
Revolt ensued.
One of the Newark Public Library’s librarians, an organizer who had convened meetings of Newark artists that I had attended, told the Newark Star-Ledger,
It can go back where it came from. I really don’t like to see my people like this.
She had a good point, and she spoke for masses of African Americans who needed to see something less distressing. Once again, art-world enthusiasm confronted African American tastes. The Newark Public Library worker expressed what so many had so deeply felt for so long, that black people had been cruelly stereotyped as stupid and ugly, when not exiled entirely from American visual culture, that we needed to see not more ugliness, but a corrective that showed our beauty.
In the face of uproar, the Newark Public Library director had panicked, covering the drawing with a drape. Obviously, in an institution serving a majority black city, a large work by a major black artist could not remain shrouded. To deal with the crisis, the Friends of the Newark Public Library called an emergency session. We talked to Kara Walker.
Kara Walker to the rescue!
She came to Newark with her images, her assistant, her gallerist, and her gallerist’s assistant, all without charging the Newark Public Library a cent. A cent the Newark Public Library didn’t have but would somehow have found if necessary. Walker sat with me on a raised platform in Centennial Hall to show her work and answer first my, then the audience’s, questions, the audience, rapt, overflowing, and full of Newark artists thrilled to be in the presence of so renowned an artist. Walker charmed Newark artists who were already her fans. Artists, after all, were not protesting her work. Artists weren’t her critics.
She showed slides of the drawing as she made it in her studio as part of a larger exhibition, Dust Jackets for the Niggerati. Walker spoke softly—she said she felt a little anxious. She explained that her work expressed the “too-muchness” of race in America. When she said her images of racial terrorism “should be horrible to behold” and “should feel both familiar and uncomfortable,” was she thinking of black viewers? I don’t know that she convinced those hungering for something uplifting. After Walker’s visit, the drape came down.
IN THE FALL I had another residency, at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York, where I resumed the Odalisque Atlas I had begun at Yale in the spring before my father’s needs superseded my own.
Maps have always intrigued me as visual images and as representations of human and geographical presence. They depict at once physical space and cultural significance. At Yaddo I used my atlas to draw regions of enslavement on tracing paper, arranged them according to my plan, and scanned the assembled tracings as an imaginary geographic template. Most of the tracing paper disappeared in the scan, but the rectangle around Puerto Rico showed up, purely an artifact of my process. Liking the way it looked, I kept it in my paintings. Viewers could interpret its meaning as they wished, especially if their roots lay in Puerto Rico. It could be a cobalt-green rectangle as a green rectangle or a cobalt-green rectangle of Puerto Rican innuendo. I forgot to show Cuba, an oversight that also prompted political interpretation.
I projected the template on 26" × 40" sheets of Yupo, traced the projection in charcoal, and applied acrylic paint and ink thickly on some and thinly on others. I painted eight maps that contrasted visually, though all derived from the same template. One looked like it might be a real map, with local names in the right local places, but the places where slave girls came from jumbled together. Haiti scrunched up by Crimea. Thailand abutted Russia and Ukraine. New Orleans and the Mississippi River delta stuck out into the Black Sea. West Africa turned around to face east. Istanbul lay near Moldova. The Caucasus occupied a prominent place at the top. One map in whited-out color had no place names. Place names on another bore no relation to actual geography, so that the rivers on the turned-around shape of West Africa bore European names. One map was splotchy angry red and blue. Two were gray, with textures I made with different kinds of erasers.
LEFT: Black Sea Composite Map 4 Historic Map, 2012, acrylic on Yupo, 26" x 40"
RIGHT: Black Sea Composite Map 7 Washed Away, 2012, acrylic on Yupo, 26" x 40"
With a freedom unavailable to me as a historian, my imagination was feeding off history that I had written. After my eight maps, I turned to two new paintings, repeating a figure I took from a New Orleans brothel photograph in the Beinecke. The backgrounds of these two paintings were from detailed maps, one of West Africa, one of the Caucasus. I was relishing my work, savoring it as a kind of secret pleasure, for I still lacked confidence in my own eye. If I liked something I had made, I couldn’t be sure it was truly any good.
So dumb to still be so insecure! One evening in the library (the only place with internet connection), I confessed to Richard, another Yaddo guest—at Yaddo, residents are called “guests.” Richard was a composer nearly as old as me, but with a long list of prestigious achievements befitting his age. The world had listened to Richard’s work and applauded it. In the library I confessed to him that I had asked a more experienced artist friend to stop by and look over my new work on her way up to the Adirondacks. She could tell me if my Odalisque Atlas was actually okay. Or not. I was so fucking self-doubting.
Richard of the long experience and impressive achievements made a confession of his own:
I’m still insecure.
Now that was good to hear.
My artist friend rightly skipped Yaddo, leaving me to trust my own eyes. Eventually that trust crept into me. Eventually. But more as I-don’t-care-if-this-is-good-or-not-I-like-it than as certainty as to the objective value—objective value?—of my work.
RIGHT THEN THE longtime partner of my Dear Cousin Diana called me from Oakland. Devastating news. Diana had liver cancer. Liver cancer kills, kills fast. It would kill her before my next visit to the Bay Area. And now, with my father in New Jersey, when would that be? If I wanted to see Diana alive, I would have to suspend my work and leave Yaddo to go see her now. Once again, family won out over art.
But there was no going to see her now, as Superstorm Sandy shut down air travel. I was stuck; Diana was dying. I spoke to her by phone, both of us choking up, both of us crying. She said she really wanted to see me, with an emphasis stronger and deeper than the usual afternoon visits I would pay her whenever I was in Oakland. This wasn’t whenever-you’re-in-Oakland. This was now. She really wanted to see me urgently. This meant now. A now feeling more urgent than my father’s nows, which belonged to a series. Please, Diana, hold on. Hold on. Diana’s now would expire.
I felt that now, that impending ending as a muddy gray mashing down, the green-tinged brown on an unwashed palette, the same heaviness as in my mother’s death. Diana’s dying seemed like my dying, too.
Growing up we had been like sisters, close in age—she a little older—and sharing much of the looks of my father’s mother’s side of my family, but not his pale skin. Same braids. Same composed e
xpression. My parents drove us around California with the abandon of southerners finally allowed the freedom of the out-of-doors that had been denied them in the South. California was ours, experience was new, and we drove all over. Both generations experienced California with the freshness of first time, before repetition and familiarity dulled the edges of our delight. As adolescents, Diana and I diverged. We became less sisterly while remaining close cousins. She went to Hayward State. I went to Berkeley. I visited her every time I came to California, year after year.
Stuck at Yaddo until the Superstorm passed and I could travel, I called my friends and cried to them for consolation. Finally in California, I sat with Diana in convalescent care, where a woman down the hall cried out ceaselessly, Help me! Help me! Help me! Diana, weakened and in pain, was not yet moribund, but I saw death coming for her. This took her partner totally and unaccountably by surprise. He was determined she would recover, and, bent on recovery, he refused her hospice care. Shortly after I departed, Diana died, hooked up to machines intended for cure.
My return flight east traced, no, retraced, a gorgeous transit I had made countless times over nearly countless decades, over the Phthalo-blue San Francisco Bay, over the yellow ochre hills of the Coast Range, over the Jenkins green fields of the Central Valley with its aqueducts, over the now sepia, not yet nevada-snowy Sierra Nevada to the arid neutral gray flats of Nevada where you can hardly see any roads.
From the Bay to Nevada I wept over losing Diana, the sister of my girlhood, and the shutting down, the closing out of even the memory of my youth in my hometown and home state. When Glenn remarked to my father on leaving after seventy years, I had sensed an ending, but as more a thought than a sensation. I had become the parent of my parent, and I was bringing him home to me. His was an ending, yes, but an ending as a transition opening to a continuation elsewhere and in that way an opening to something new.
Losing Diana meant an ending as transition only in that New Age denial of the finality of death. My ending flying over California this time leaving Diana did not open onto new. This was chopping off a root, the closing down of the time when I was learning my way around for the first time, not as the constant readjusting of age to keep up with change over time, a severing of the connection to the personal deep past of my geographical history.
FROM MY YADDO residency I took a yield of eight maps and two paintings of my Odalisque Atlas. My early years as a painter, in Providence, New Haven, and Saratoga Springs, felt as much about family and loss as about art making. But how else could it be for a grown-up with a grown-up’s attachments? After a certain age, you’re responsible for your family, and family means crisis; family means loss.
BACK IN WEST Orange, New Jersey, I was reading my father Toni Morrison’s new novel Home. He was praising it, savoring Morrison’s language, following her plot. Then he weakened. Suddenly he couldn’t sit up in his wheelchair or keep his eyes open. Uh-oh, he was sinking. He had seemed terminal before, actually several times before. But he had always bounced back. Still, I had never before seen him this unresponsive. I fetched the nurse to check on him, and she called hospice. Someone would come the very next day.
The hospice nurse came the next day, but, she said, she couldn’t find the right room. The man in the room she’d been sent to was sitting at his table eating peanuts. Wrong room? Wrong person? No. That was my father at the table eating peanuts. He was back in life again.
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ART HISTORY BY NELL PAINTER
One evening after Yaddo, after Cousin Diana’s death, I had dinner in the Village with Friends Michele and Charlie from the Adirondacks. An agreeable evening, talking mostly about art and artists we knew. In the most innocuous way, Charlie asked me if I was expecting to have a career as an artist. Charlie is a real artist, making work and selling through a gallery for years, my definition of a real artist. Was I expecting a real art career?
He didn’t say it like that, of course. His words, his tone, all were totally innocent. But here’s what I heard:
Is so baby a painter as you expecting really to succeed as an artist?
Is so crummy a painter and as old a person as you going to get anywhere in art?
Probably he was just curious about the prospects of a newly minted MFA painter as old as I was.
Charlie didn’t know my exact age, or maybe he did, as my age was not only an object of curiosity, but also public knowledge, as I discovered at Jerry’s art supply store in West Orange.
I was standing in line for a demonstration of art printing papers. Printing paper is a hot topic, so the audience exceeded the seating around the expert and his printer. We stood in line fifteen minutes and more, time to strike up a conversation about our art with the woman next to me. She wanted to see my work, so I pulled out my cell phone and Googled myself.
Usually when I Google myself, my own website comes up first without my having to type in the URL, and there’s my art on it. Not this time. Not noticing a change, I clicked on the first link. What came up was a simple site with the photo from my own website—a nice photo—and a few lines of text.
The first line read, simply, age 70.
The second line, born in 1942.
I was mortified.
M O R T I F I E D
There were my age and my date of birth proclaimed for all to see, clear as the sun, stark as death. I hadn’t been able to acknowledge my birthday, so strong my consternation on turning seventy. I didn’t go as far as Jacques Derrida, who called seventy hell and wished for some way to un-age. Still . . .
What? Who? is a woman in her seventies? She is, I was, indisputably old. You can pass for middle-aged in your sixties. And I was looking forward to my eighties.
A woman in her eighties is a sage. She is dignity and wisdom. She inspires the world. She has gravitas. She is elegant. She is Maya Angelou, all eloquence and sagesse.
Eighties? Yeah!
Seventies? Arghhhhhh!
Knowing I couldn’t remove or even bury that page, I left Jerry’s stripped naked and feeling sad. The first thing anyone looking for my work would see was my age. Not that I had ever lied about my age or even fudged it by leaving dates off my CV. No lying for me. If you visit my own website you’ll see that I graduated from Berkeley in 1964. Do the math, and you’ll know how old I am. But you would have to do the math that Google had now pre-done for you.
M O R T I F I C A T I O N
In the morning I felt a whole lot better. Google, in blurting out my age, broke down my chagrin. I felt like my mother once she overcame her reluctance to use a cane (a.k.a. walking stick), because then people would know she was old. Just as her walking stick had restored her confidence, Google’s revelation gave me freedom something akin to the freedom I’d experienced years earlier when I’d stopped dying my hair and let show my gray. Then I had freed myself from the tyranny of youth—or the tyranny of the appearance of youth, of its simulacrum—over physical attractiveness. That gesture was long years behind me, now so comfortably gray haired.
The freedom produced by the bald announcement of my age was one just as precious, a freedom that I had edged up to repeatedly but failed to grasp securely: the freedom to disregard the career path that art graduate school had laid out for all of us. You could have a past, but it had to be in art. You couldn’t have responsibilities to aged parents or children or attachment to a spouse with work of his own. The fact of children had complicated the education and career path of Keith among my RISD colleagues. Keith tortured himself over his selfishness, as he felt it, for dedicating himself to the exalted-but-iffy future of a visual artist instead of providing for his family through a reliable vocation.
Assuming youthfulness, that path was hard for me. But lacking an alternative, I kept trying to walk that path, stayed attuned to that narrative. Google’s announcement of my age made me examine that path and query that narrative, both intended for youth’s lack of obstruction. For me there was family, most starkly in the pers
on of my father, with his alternating confusion, weakness, and great good spirits. He would telephone me in high dudgeon to demand my presence right now. Then the very next day or days later and recuperated from cataclysm, he would hold an unperturbed conversation about the state of the world or his memories of the University of California College of Chemistry or his youth in Texas. He could blast me with flaming anger or thank me tenderly for his care. I never knew what each day would bring, which version of my father I’d encounter, only hoping for no fall and no emergency room.
EASY AS IT was to recognize the part family played in my past that was still with me, it was harder to see how art school had redefined my relation to history. What I heard in art school soundly rejected my history and what history meant in me.
Academic.
Academic as bad.
Academic as what things meant rather than how things looked.
Fussiness.
Tired images.
Technique in place of freshness.
Me with my lying twentieth-century eyes and my attachment to meaning.
I TAMPED DOWN that part of my past and tried to believe it no longer connected to me as something I actively thought about. This misconception ensnared me at Yale.
While I was at Yale, my Host Elizabeth chaired an interview between me and Crystal, one of my favorite former graduate students who was on the faculty. Crystal asked how art school had changed my thinking about history. Not how history entered my art, but how art entered my history.
Old In Art School Page 25