![]() Infant souls are learning to adapt to the human form and to the world around them. There is an emphasis on very basic life-skills, both individually (food, shelter and so on) and as a family or small community (protection and reproduction). At this first stage the focus is very much on choices to do with moment-by-moment physical existence and survival. Learning to surviveĪll stages of reincarnation confront the individual soul with certain choices. They have more enthusiasm for life than most of us. Yet those who are relatively new to the journey are still close to that cosmic urge to experience, learn and evolve. It is a journey of many steps, many difficult lives, many births and deaths - often traumatic. Joe Minter’s And He Hung His Head and Died draws on the artist’s experience as a welder in the construction industry, also in Birmingham, Alabama, to evoke “the 400 years journey of Africans in America” – a theme that also runs through the immersive environment, African Village in America, that he has installed behind his house to preserve the tradition of the yard show – artists, for want of any kind of institutional support, would exhibit works at their properties.Any soul that volunteers for the journey of reincarnation is courageous indeed. Jesse Aaron, working as a cabinet maker in Lake City, Florida turned his skills in woodworking to the task of carving faces on trees around his property to act as protective presences. In the early 1980s, when the boxcar factory that was employing Dial and his sons shut down, they went on to set up a metal patio furniture business together where they would, on the side, experiment with making sculptures from scrap metal. Clemons Collection / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph: Maciej Urbanek/© 2023 The Larry T. Purvis Young, Untitled (Narrative Scene), 1980s. “I came to realise,” Loretta Pettway has written, “that my mother, her mother, my aunts, and all the others from Gee’s Bend had sewn the foundations, and all I had to do now was thread my own needle and piece a quilt together.” The theme of intergenerational conversation and a creative tradition sustained through adversity underpins the exhibition and is also evident in the display of quilts (intended as objects to help people keep warm economically) that were made through the course of the 20th century in Gee’s Bend, on the banks of the Alabama River, by artists including Rachel Carey George, Martha Jane Pettway and Loretta Pettway. His Tree of Life pulls together fragments of found wood, roots, rubber tyres and air freshener to create a monument to being that also reflects his 30 years’ experience as a steelworker in Bessemer, Alabama, where his sons, Thornton Jr and Richard (both artists in the exhibition too) also worked. Photograph: Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio/ARS, NY and DACS, London 2023ĭial’s Stars of Everything, for example, transforms old cans into a cosmic night sky and a spray paint can and a piece of old carpet into an almost human presence that dances in the centre of this assemblage. ‘The 400 years journey of Africans in America’ … Joe Minter, And He Hung His Head and Died, 1999. In Keeping a Record of It (Harmful Music), Lonnie Holley, also a native of Birmingham, Alabama, positions an animal skull in the centre of a salvaged record player, gripped as though by a pincer in the record player’s arm while Ronald Lockett’s Oklahoma, made in 1995 in response to the Oklahoma City bombing, pieces together sheets of metal, tin, wire and nails on wood to conjure the horror of murderous white supremacy. Alabama native Thornton Dial’s Blue Skies: The Birds That Didn’t Learn How to Fly, for example, where cloth rags hang limp from a rubber-coated copper wire, paints a picture of abjection, while Mary T Smith’s We All Want a Jobe, created in the early 1980s during her retirement in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, positions a line of blurred faces beside the desperate, scrawled text of the title to create a tableau haunted by otherness. The psychic scars of that collective trauma run deep through many of the works in the show. Communities that remained there in the aftermath of the civil war continued to be exposed to extremes of racial violence, segregation and the hardship of economic exclusion. N arratives of the great migration and the Harlem renaissance have dominated conversations around African American art in the 20th century, but a new exhibition, Souls Grown Deep Like the Rivers, which opens at the Royal Academy in London this week, invites us to consider the cultural contribution of artists from the American south. ![]()
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