ART REVIEW : A Contrast of Slave Heritages

The slavery of the American South is such a major chapter in the history of this country that it comes as something of a surprise to learn that the blood on the hands of Uncle Sam was but a footnote in the story of the Atlantic slave trade.

With business booming from 1534 to 1870, European flesh-peddlers herded 18 million Africans onto boats bound for the New World, but only 9% of them wound up in the United States. The majority went to South America and the Caribbean, with the lion’s share landing in Brazil--those who survived the trip that is; 33% of the reluctant voyagers died at sea.

While these star-crossed souls were fated to endure a life of indentured labor regardless of where they were taken, the life of a Brazilian slave was markedly different from that of one in the United States. Because the Brazilian slave population was so huge--Brazil has the second-largest population of black Africans in the world--Brazilian slaves managed to retain a strong sense of their African identity. American slaves, however, were fewer in number and subjected to more repressive conditions, and most traces of African culture in the United States were all but extinguished in the course of a few decades.

An exhibition at the Afro-American Museum in Exposition Park, on view to Sept. 30, attempts to shed some light on how generations of conditioning shape one’s cultural identity, as is evidenced in the work of contemporary black artists of Brazil and America. It’s a rich premise--a social anthropologist’s dream, in fact--and while “Introspectives: Contemporary Art by Americans and Brazilians of African Descent” works fairly well as a historical exhibition, it runs aground in its presentation of contemporary art.

Showcasing work by 18 U.S. artists and 14 from Brazil, “Introspectives” is missing a vital component: There’s no posted information explaining how the artists feel about their African heritage or how it’s come to bear on their work. (Yes, there is a catalogue, but you shouldn’t need to read a catalogue for an exhibition to be comprehensible.)

The African motifs in these works are often indiscernible to the untrained eye, and consequently, the paintings and sculpture on view look for the most part like generic modern art--much of it not particularly good.

The section of the show given over to new work may be a bit murky, but the historical stuff is fascinating. We learn, for starters, that 9 million Africans were enslaved in Brazil for nearly 400 years. Slavery was abolished in Brazil in 1888--26 years after emancipation came to the United States.

Though slaves in both countries were subjected to similar instruments of bondage (a chilling collection of these horrifying objects is on display), Brazilian slaves enjoyed psychological freedoms that were denied in the United States.

African culture, in fact, merged quite harmoniously with that of Brazil, whose annual Carnaval is rooted in African ritual. Evidence of African culture in Brazil is illustrated with archival photographs of Brazilian slaves marked with African facial scarification, several stunning African ritual costumes sewn by Brazilian slaves, and a contemporary shrine honoring Yemanja, the mother figure in the Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomble, which has its roots in Africa’s Yoruban culture.

Returning to the 20th Century, we’re presented with a mixed bag of current Brazilian art that includes a Neo-Surrealist (Octavio Araujo), several Minimalist sculptors (Emanoel Araulo, Rubem Valentim and Genilson Soares), a figurative painter who works in the manner of Francis Bacon (Maria Lidia Magliani), and three artists--Simon Franco, Edival Ramosa, Juarez Paraiso--who employ distinctly African motifs.

The Americans on view add up to a comparable potpourri that includes Robert Colescott (currently the subject of a critically acclaimed traveling retrospective), Marvin Puryear and Houston Conwill. Oddly enough, the African presence is strongest in the American work; whether this is a curatorial slip or the subject for another investigation is but one of the questions left unanswered by this promising but ultimately unsatisfying show.

A second exhibition dealing with the struggle to retain identity in the face of adversity is on view at the Museum of African American Art through April 30. A retrospective of graphic work by pioneering black artist Elizabeth Catlett, called “There Is a Woman in Every Color,” is a moving essay on dignity in the face of deprivation and persecution.

Primarily known as a sculptor, Catlett was born in Washington in 1919 and had extensive art schooling that included studies with Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton. Influenced by the Mexican muralists (she was, in fact, exiled in Mexico for more than a decade during the McCarthy era), Catlett is essentially a political artist whose ideology is expressed in such imagery as that found in a 1949 linocut titled “Blues”; in the foreground we see a woman playing a guitar, while the background features a Klansman dragging a black man to a burning cross.

Working in a flat, iconic style not unlike that of Grant Wood, Catlett focuses on images that celebrate the values symbolized by home and family, and portraiture--of Angela Davis and Malcolm X, among others. Catlett is still active as an artist, and the show includes a series of photos of this indomitable artist at work in her studio.