Review: ‘Past is Present: Black Artists Respond to the Complicated Histories of Slavery’ at the Herron Galleries

The notion that the past is present in American society, in terms of its systemic racism, is debated in Indiana just as hotly as elsewhere in the U.S. The exhibition Past Is Present: Black Artists Respond to the Complicated Histories of Slavery at Herron School of Art & Design reflects this reality.

In addition to responding to the history of slavery in the U.S. and abroad, some of the 24 exhibiting artists demonstrate how racism is woven into the fabric of contemporary American life. How else to interpret LaShawnda Crowe Storm’s “redLINES”, a 421-ft. quilt printed with an actual redlined map of Indianapolis?  

Redlining was the practice, prevalent in U.S. cities, of denying home loans to residents in neighborhoods deemed to be a financial risk. Residents in red-lined neighborhoods were unable to receive mortgages, the primary means through which Americans have achieved home ownership and the ability to transfer wealth to their children. (Not coincidentally, many redlined neighborhoods were Black neighborhoods.) As a result, the effects of redlining have persisted long after the practice was banned in 1968. The redlined Indianapolis map Storm includes in her quilt, which dates from 1937, matches up with other, more current maps. That is, it correlates to areas in the city of greater minority population, higher poverty, and lower life expectancy.

Left to Right: Lobyn Hamilton and his work “DNA", Detail from ‘redLINES” by LaShawnda Crowe Storm, “Legend in Stone” by Rebecca Robinson, “Unraveled Persistence” by Sonya Clark. All images save for “DNA” courtesy of Herron School of Art & Design.

Indiana history looms large in this exhibit, as curator Jonathan Michael Square notes in his wall text. Square notes that Indiana’s capital city is nicknamed “‘the Crossroads of America’ and historically sat “at the crossroads of slavery and freedom.” He also notes that while slavery was officially prohibited in the territory that became the state of Indiana in 1816, conditions on the ground didn’t necessarily reflect that prohibition. “From the 18th Century on, the free towns and other black territories and later states were subjected to surveillance, harassment, and the ever present threat of violence…”  he writes.

That violence is the subject of “Poplar Trees,” a work by Samuel Levi Jones consisting of  encyclopedia and law book covers mounted on canvas. Jones’ great uncle was one of two men lynched in Jones’ hometown of Marion, Indiana on Aug. 7, 1930.

The title of the work refers to a line from the song “Strange Fruit '' popularized by Billie Holiday, which makes explicit the violence that left a “strange and bitter crop” of African American bodies hanging from trees. The power of Jones’ work, however, is implicit. The legal texts and other books that are part of work suggest the systems of power that allowed the extrajudicial murders of Blacks to take place in America.  

In this particular Jones work and his work as a whole, a cross-section of which was displayed at his solo exhibit Left of Center at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in Newfields in 2019, the artist is making a point that seems implicit in the work of many of the Past is Present artists: that systemic racism is still something that the U.S. has to contend with, and root out.

Indianapolis-based Walter Lobyn Hamilton’s work titled “DNA” also contends with the legacy of slavery, but through a medium that has transmitted Black music and Black culture to the masses: vinyl records.

With “DNA” Hamilton, who uses fragments of vinyl to create dead-on portraiture—primarily of famous African Americans—continues his evolution into more abstract, larger scale work.  In  “DNA”, he constructed a replica of an American flag out of a record player (replacing the stars in the upper left-hand corner), and 13 stripes composed of LP record jackets. He placed this work on a wall-hanging substrate of cut-out center labels of vintage vinyl records, 2,000 of them, all of them bearing the same title: “Alex Haley Tells The Story of His Search for Roots.”’

“DNA” riffs on Haley’s exploration of his African ancestry. Compared to that history, the history of slavery is a mere blip in time. But the trauma that transpired during those 400 years, according to one recent study led by consumer genetics company 23andMe, is embedded in the DNA of slaves’ descendents.

“DNA transcends slavery by millennia,” says Hamilton. “So it's interesting to see how a very short period of time changed a shit ton of things, even enslavement being in the DNA.”

Hamilton isn’t the only artist to explore the symbolism of systemic racism. Witness Sonya Clark’s “Unraveled Persistence”. This is a store-bought Confederate flag which Clark unraveled, so you see the individual threads hanging down from the flagpole, unattached to one another. But you see the stars and bars nonetheless. 

“The web threads have been taken out of the flag,” Clark noted in her talk at the exhibition opening. “So it's been unraveled, but still, in that unraveling, the image persists.” 

Clark, a professor of art in Amherst College in Massachusetts, is no stranger to Indianapolis. You can see her portrait of the hair care entrepreneur Madam C.J. Walker at the Alexander Hotel, located downtown. But it’s no ordinary portrait. She created Walker’s image by creating a mosaic of 3,840 black combs. 

The Circle City was the home of the Madam C.J Walker Manufacturing Company, which built its world headquarters on Indiana Avenue in 1927. That building now serves as the Madam Walker Legacy Center, which is one of the few remaining signs of the vibrant Black neighborhood that was razed to make room for Indiana University - Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI), the home of Herron School of Art & Design. Curator Square, in his wall text, makes explicit reference to this absence.

So you might see some irony in this Herron-based exhibition that traces the threads of historical racism in the U.S. and particularly in Indianapolis. But it is not an irony that has gone unnoticed by the artists and the curators of the exhibition.

Mary Sibande’s “Sophia Velucia in Conversation with Madam Walker,” however, expands the exhibition’s conversation beyond Indianapolis—and beyond U.S. borders. In this work, you see a life-size mannequin “Sophie-Ntombikayse” which the artist views as her alter-ego. The mannequin is dressed in a Victorian gown reminiscent of the uniforms worn by servants in South Africa. You see her weaving a web that manifests as a wall-hanging portrait of Madam Walker woven in fabric. As the curatorial text puts it, this web draws “a trans-Diasporic connection between South Africa and the United States.”  You might wonder what that connection consists of, in its totality, considering how white supremacy was so deeply woven into the fabric of both countries.

Cross-cultural connections are also explored in Philadelphia-based Roberto Lugo’s glazed stoneware “Ralph Ellison Teapot,” that depicts the African American novelist on its curved surface. While Lugo’s work in ceramic can be called traditional in terms of craft, it is novel in terms of style, incorporating references to hip-hop, Latinx history, and important Black figures living and dead. 

Lugo isn’t a stranger to Indianapolis either. His porcelain vase “The Expulsion of Colin Kaepernick and John Brown”, which portrays both figures, is currently on display at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. The title refers to the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback who took a knee for racial justice and the pre-Civil War era abolitionist who took up arms against slavery respectively. By juxtaposing their images on the same vase, he creates a visual dialogue of sorts between them. The museum acquired the piece in 2019, during a particularly fraught time at the museum in terms of its direction in the areas of diversity, equity, and inclusion, which culminated in Charles Venable’s resignation as director and CEO in February, 2021. 

That turmoil at the museum reflected the turmoil in America as a whole at the time, reeling from COVID, and dealing with the protests after George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. Carrie Mae Weems’  “All the Boys”, a color photolithograph on paper, seems to speak to that turmoil. Recalling surveillance footage, the photos are blurry, cast in blue. One is in a frontal pose, while the other is a profile. Both figures are wearing hoodies. In fact, it’s likely the figure in the second photo is the same man as the first. The title “All the Boys,” might make you think of the names of the African American young men and boys unjustifiably shot by police or by vigilantes. But because a hoodie factors so prominently in the compositions, you might think of Trayvon Martin, who was wearing a hoodie at the time of his being fatally shot by George Zimmerman. (Eventually Zimmerman was acquitted of murder by a Florida jury.) 

Not every work in this exhibition is so sober and grim. Consider Rebecca Robinson’s heartfelt “Legend in Stone.”  The painting is a portrait of her father; a physician and activist, Part collage, part painting using concrete, tar, and white latex paint as a media, the portrait has a gravitas that reflects the doctor’s accomplishments in the healthcare field, but it also contains a fluid exuberance that seems at once both expressionistic and heartfelt. Dr. Robinson worked in the Horner G. Phillips Hospital, which was the only public hospital open to African Americans in St. Louis, Missouri until the city’s hospitals were desegregated in 1955.  

Robinson also concurrently has work in We. The Culture: Works by The Eighteen Art Collective at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, on display through Sept. 23, 2022.   This collective is a group of 18 Black artists who originally came together to paint a “Black Lives Matter” mural directly on the asphalt of Indiana Avenue., adjacent to the Madam Walker Center. After someone vandalized their mural, the artists decided as a group not to repair the damage, to let the visual violence of the vandals’ work speak for itself. They came together, and they became a collective to support one another's work.

You might wonder at the significance of these two exhibitions running concurrently. Is it mere happenstance or does it occassion something more significant? Consider a visit to both of these exhibitions, where you can explore this question for yourself. 

Past is Present will be on view at the Herron Galleries runs through Jan. 14., 2023.

Mary Sibande’s “Sophia Velucia in Conversation with Madam Walker” Photo by Dan Grossman