1980-now: learning resources

Ruthe Blalock Jones, Medicine Woman

Key points

• The career of artist Ruthe Blalock Jones (Delaware, Shawnee, Peoria) has been shaped by her lifelong role as an educator. She served as both instructor and director in the art department at Bacone College, an Indigenous American-serving institution, from 1979 to 2010. Her distinctive images of daily life in the Native communities of northeast Oklahoma have appealed to and informed a broad audience for decades.  
• In her paintings, prints, and drawings, Blalock Jones draws on her upbringing and experience in the Native American Church, a religion that emerged in the late 19th century in
  Indian Territory
  and blends different spiritual traditions. In particular, she tends to focus on representations of women’s roles in the church, such as providing water or food to practitioners after an all-night prayer ritual, as seen in Medicine Woman. 
• Blalock Jones’s scenes strike a balance between detail and generalization, providing a view into the practices and beliefs of the Native American Church without representing specific individuals or transgressing Native beliefs about privacy regarding religious or ceremonial activity. Her images serve to educate non-Native viewers who may not be as familiar with the traditions of the Native American Church by challenging persistent and erroneous stereotypes about it. They also serve to inspire younger Native generations who wish to connect more deeply with their heritage and community. 
• Blalock Jones works in a version of Flatstyle painting, a distinctive approach to Native American imagery that emerged at Bacone College in the early 20th century. As the name suggests, Flatstyle presents subjects in flat shapes of color set against largely unadorned backgrounds. Blalock Jones’s use of the bold, opaque colors of the
  gouache
  technique accentuates the effects of Flatstyle, to which she adds refined details like fringe or hair to heighten visual engagement with her subject.

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Sam Gilliam, Purpled (Chasers Series)

Key Points

• Sam Gilliam approached artmaking with an interest in expressing both the labor of making a painting and the potential of painting to be more than just pigment applied with a brush on a square- or rectangularly-shaped canvas. He played with the expectations of what a painting can and should be, and emphasized the physical manipulation of his materials to create highly original and dynamic artworks. 
• In Purpled, Gilliam built a 9-sided, irregularly shaped polygonal stretcher for his canvas and used hard-edged implements like a palette knife and comb to apply paint in a highly varied and textured way. The effect is an object that appears to be bursting from the confines of traditional painting in terms of both shape and surface.
• Gilliam’s father was a carpenter and his mother a seamstress and quilter. He was influenced by the commonplace nature of their manual labors, and visibly applied the practices of carpentry and quilting in his work. The result was a celebration of the ordinary and its infusion into the history of painting.
• Purpled is akin to a quilt made from layers of variously shaped, paint-covered pieces of canvas. Gilliam cut and glued these pieces together in a manner that evokes the stitching together of swatches of fabric in a quilt. With its pattern of repeated triangles and rectangles, Purpled’s composition draws on the Flying Geese quilt design, which was specifically used by enslaved Black people to signal the time of year (spring) when it was best to travel northward toward freedom, following the path of migrating birds.

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Masami Teraoka, American Kabuki

Key points

• The nearly nonexistent government response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic during the 1980s was largely due to prejudices against the most critically impacted communities. Activists worked to raise public awareness and reduce the stigma around the disease, leading eventually to improved medical care and research, but not before the death of tens of thousands of people.
• Masami Teraoka, who grew up in Japan, draws on the traditional format of the folding screen (byobu) and kabuki theater for this piece. Popular during the Edo period, kabuki had been a popular form of theater that often used historical narratives to offer covert commentary on contemporary politics during a period of censorship and suppression. Similarly, the artist uses traditional symbols, including the blackened teeth and makeup of the female figure, to speak to the personal and universal tragedies of HIV/AIDS.
• This screen is modeled in the style of ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Masami Teraoka uses a strong, violently undulating line to add drama and tension to both the figures and the waves that threaten to overcome them. He depicts a struggle against an overwhelming destructive energy, echoed in the calligraphic text inscribed on the panels.

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Since I always had been fascinated by Ukiyo-e wood block print and its beautiful vocabulary coming from Japanese cultural background, what if I use my favorite vocabulary to create my work. I could make comments on Japanese culture and US culture in Ukiyo-e style work.
—Masami Teraoka, “Bridging Life and Art,” interview with Mike Foldes, Founder and Managing Editor,” Ragazine (November-December 2014)

Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Woman Feeding Bird), The Kitchen Table Series, 1989-90

Key points

• Carrie Mae Weems has carefully staged the photographs in this series to suggest moments of everyday life, but also uses symbolism, lighting and props to create deeper levels of meaning.
• Weems suggests that the familiar, unremarkable domestic kitchen is actually important as an epicenter of family life and human drama.
• Unlike in so much art through history, the everyday lived experience of a woman, as opposed to a man, is central here.

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• How does Weems use the same setting to create different moods and emotions?
• How does Weems use formal elements (light/dark contrasts, shapes, lines, composition) in her photograph to engage the viewer and enhance its meaning?
• What broader themes about women, family, and contemporary society can be found in both of these photographs?

Turning Uncle Tom's Cabin upside down, Alison Saar's Topsy and the Golden Fleece

Key Points

• Although Harriet Beecher Stowe supported the abolitionist movement and her novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was an effective component of that campaign, her story also created stereotypes of African-Americans that have persisted in popular culture. In particular, Topsy, often considered the embodiment of wickedness and wildness, was widely caricatured and dehumanized and became an image of ridicule. Amid rapid social changes, Vietnam War protests, debates on gender roles, and civil rights, the stability of middle class American life during the 1950s gave way to a period of disillusionment and uncertainty by the 1970s.
• In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Topsy is powerless. Not only is she a slave, but her character is a passive vehicle for other people’s feelings, a stereotype created to contrast with the Christian spirit of Eva. (The gift of a lock of Eva’s hair, given from the young girl’s deathbed, then becomes a catalyst for the redemption of Topsy.) In Topsy and the Golden Fleece, Alison Saar reimagines Topsy as an empowered and angry force who has seized a blood-streaked Golden Fleece and now controls her own destiny.
• Alison Saar combines elements of two mythic narratives, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Jason and the Golden Fleece, to dismantle an African-American stereotype and give her a new sense of power and authority. Saar may be reacting to the continuing racial inequalities and contemporary tragedies that have prompted the Black Lives Matter movement.

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Titus Kaphar, The Cost of Removal

Key points

• Portraits often represent leaders as heroic, noble, and deserving of respect and admiration. Such images, however, fashion an incomplete historical narrative that may not acknowledge the problematic or even violent aspects of their legacies.
• Signed by Andrew Jackson in 1830, the Indian Removal Act authorized the president to grant unsettled lands west of the Mississippi in exchange for Indian lands within existing state borders. Native Americans were forcibly removed by the U.S. government, including 4,000 Cherokee Indians who died on what became known as the “Trail of Tears.”
• Copying and altering Ralph Earl’s 1836 portrait of Andrew Jackson is one way that Titus Kaphar calls our attention to the power of art and museums in writing a history that is, in his words, “at best incomplete, and at worst fiction.” The viewer is reminded of who is typically included in this telling of history and who is typically excluded.

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“I feel very strongly that most of the history we have been taught is at best incomplete, and at worst, fiction. The more I read history, I realize that all depictions are to some degree fiction. . . We lose something in the interpretation, and as I realized that painters throughout history have embraced this idea of fiction, I have felt complete freedom to address these paintings in a way that made sense to me.”

Dorica Jackson, Diving Whale Chilkat Robe

Key points

• The practice of Chilkat weaving originated among the Indigenous peoples and nations of southeast Alaska and the coasts of British Columbia and Washington State, including the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian. The name refers to the Chilkat region of southeastern Alaska, home to the Chilkat Tlingit people.
• Chilkat weaving is carried out on a loom with a free-hanging warp, on which the vertical warp threads for the weaving are attached only at the top of the loom and not at the bottom. The weaving is done through the twining technique, interlacing weft (horizontal) threads of yarn with the warp threads by hand. Between the preparation of materials and the actual weaving, Chilkat weaving is a very time consuming process.

• Robes are one of a number of items created using the Chilkat weaving technique. Robes have previously been referred to as blankets but the term robe more accurately reflects their purpose. Robes are worn and enlivened in ceremonial dance, activating the colors, designs, and voluminous fringe.
• For this robe, Dorica Jackson recreated a woven design featured in George Emmons’ 1907 book, The Basketry of the Tlingit and the Chilkat Blanket. Emmons was a collector and
  ethnographer
  who studied the Indigenous populations of Southeast Alaska in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As part of his research, he received explanations of the Chilkat technique from Tlingit weavers.
• The symmetrical design of the robe fills the entire woven area. The design features a diving whale in the center, flanked by abstract figures on the two sides. The placement of specific colors within the design is consistent with the Chilkat tradition. Chilkat weaving is practiced by women, but the initial designs are created by men in the community.

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