‘Mementos’ of the Civil Rights Movement

With “Mementos,” Kerry James Marshall’s new multimedia installation at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the artist took a risk. The installation commemorates an American subject of the most profound significance, yet, unlike much politically themed art, “Mementos” is offered without cynicism, irony, rancor or one-dimensionality. Instead, Marshall’s quietly moving installation seems infused with faith.

“Mementos” is a kind of eulogy for the civil rights movement, which followed a trail of blood to the landmark passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and beyond. In paintings, sculptures, prints, two photographs and a video projection, the Chicago-based artist records a litany of artists, writers, thinkers, activists, ordinary citizens and other African American heroes who died between 1959 and 1970.

Still, this multimedia requiem is more than a mere accounting of names. Marshall comes both to praise the ‘60s movement and to bury it, secure in the knowledge that praise and burial precede resurrection. The installation quietly bets on renewal.

It also seems to include a generalized extrapolation of specific autobiography. An untitled photograph shows a wall adorned with a simple mirror and a picture frame, into which have been tucked photographs, news clippings and other mementos to protagonists of the era and the installation. A partial reflection of the photographer is glimpsed in the mirror, thus deftly knitting a fragment of Marshall’s own image into the collage of others.

The artist was born in Birmingham, Ala., the Southern industrial city where the civil rights movement came to a critical head in the months before the historic march on Washington. (Incidentally, the exhibition catalog, which is still in production, includes a blisteringly insightful essay by UCLA law professor Cheryl I. Harris on the recent fate of the movement’s historical telling.) Marshall would have been 7 or 8 years old when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his devastating letter from a Birmingham jail, which eloquently laid out his activist philosophy of nonviolence.

The anchor for the installation is a strong group of four large paintings on unstretched canvas--two in color, two in black-and-white. Each banner-like painting shows a nearly life-size, middle-age black woman alone in a comfortable living room. Glitter-encrusted wings adorn them. Vases of flowers are abundant.

From late Renaissance and especially Baroque art, Marshall reclaims the pictorial device of spiritual visitation. The names and faces of dead secular “saints” hover above the women within atmospheric clouds of wispy paint: Dinah Washington and John Coltrane, Medgar Evers and Malcolm X, Lorraine Hansberry and Langston Hughes. Like Marshall’s photograph showing an informal collage of mementos, these banner paintings depict domestic memorials that undergird his more public installation.

A sequence of paintings, each bearing the legend “We Mourn Our Loss,” memorializes a pantheon of slain martyrs--John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. So does a remarkable wall sculpture at the entry; here, a great tower of silk flowers rises atop a sign, rendered in the shape of a cross and reading “16th St. Baptist Church.” The shrine remembers the children killed in a notorious 1963 bombing in Birmingham--children of about Marshall’s age.

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Flowers are a recurrent motif in the show, turning up in the entry sculpture, in the paintings, along the border of the photographed mirror and in the video projection that dominates the first of the show’s two galleries--a big, mausoleum-like block, composed from wood or Masonite panels painted in imitation of white marble and punctured with eyeholes. Peering inside you see a faint video triptych: Animated pictures show spinning coins, flashes of violence, faint images of Jesus and more, all hovering above a funereal bank of vibrant flowers.

The video installation smartly builds on an art museum’s quality as itself a kind of mausoleum, where we inter ways of life that are dead and gone. But it suffers from a small technical glitch. The bright whiteness of the tomb’s painted “marble,” intensified at close viewing range by the reflection from gallery lighting, makes it rather too difficult to see through the eyeholes to the dimly lit video projections within. A potentially powerful moment is smudged.

By contrast, Marshall’s five stamp-sculptures and accompanying prints are simple yet remarkably effective works. Roughly 4 feet tall, each stamp is constructed from painted fiberboard. The base of each stamp is a printing plate of etched metal.

Using oversize ink pads, Marshall employed the stamp sculptures to make a series of relief prints. Each declares a well-known slogan identified with the period: Black Power, Burn Baby Burn, We Shall Overcome, By Any Means Necessary, Black Is Beautiful.

Like the stamps on a civil servant’s desk, these oversize sculptures seamlessly merge the authority of officialdom with the indifference of bureaucracy. It’s as if the sentiments expressed are universally known and assumed by all, having been woven inextricably into the fabric of recent American history; at the same time they languish in a nether world of phantoms, an intensity of feeling simultaneously numbed.

Metaphorically, the sculptures and their accompanying prints form the flip side to the angelic imagery ethereally celebrated in the surrounding paintings. They represent a painful realm of punishment after death--the death that any social movement inevitably experiences. The deceptively simple stamp sculptures are Marshall’s most acute invention here, and their pairing with the banner paintings, the video mausoleum and the flower-bedecked cross adds depth and resonance to the commemorative installation.

The black church was central to the success of the civil rights movement honored in Marshall’s work, and central to that church was both an acknowledgment of the depth of human suffering and a committed faith in its eventual transcendence. In Marshall’s “Mementos” the deeply felt, carefully nuanced memory of a dear, departed movement for social equality contains within it the inescapable seeds of its rebirth.

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* Santa Monica Museum of Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., (310) 586-6488, through Feb. 27. Closed Sunday and Monday.