Essays
Foreword
Susan Zurbrigg
VISIONARIES, the Harrisonburg, Virginia, TRHT Changing the Narrative project recognizes African American history through creative visual art forms. The project centers on the under-recognized histories and peoples of African American descent living in the Shenandoah Valley.
In 2019, the Northeast Neighborhood Association of Harrisonburg, Virginia, was awarded a grant from Virginia Humanities, made possible by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, as part of the statewide Changing the Narrative projects. The Harrisonburg Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation Advisory Committee is sponsoring this project in Harrisonburg in order to cultivate a more inclusive narrative – one in which all Virginians can feel valued.
The TRHT VISIONARIES project features original artworks created by students ages 13-18 who participated in my 2019 TRHT Summer Youth Art Workshop. The project also includes video and photographic documentation of a TRHT Art Intervention project created by my James Madison University fall 2019 painting students with assistance from JMU School of Art, Design and Art History colleague, Maureen Shanahan. In addition, VISIONARIES presents two paintings I have created for the project, as well as catalog essays written by Aderonke Adesanya, Sarah Brooks, Beth Hinderliter, Maureen Shanahan, and Hannah Sions.
Inspired by the often-invisible stories of African Americans, this project is centered on the belief that visual representations of these narratives in all forms (artistic, creative, historical) are crucial to who we are as a nation. These narratives have been afforded a limited presence in the collective lexicon of American history. This project redresses the removal of African American presence and embraces the potential of inclusion through art and creative representation.
Visual histories and the creative arts support the living record of ourselves. They serve as the reminder that our humanity is a complex endeavor and knowing who we are as a people necessitates reflecting upon our lived experiences. Yet if the record of one’s history and ancestry is consistently erased from a cultural record, it remains quite a task to weave together projections for the future. Consistent displacement created by those with power often serves its purpose to disenfranchise and undermine the potential growth and developing strength of those without equal power.
This project understands its focus centers on the first part of a Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation endeavor. Truth is never one sided. How do we begin to make visible the invisible? How can we change the narrative so it doesn’t continue to remove the full breadth of experiences? How can we work to change the narrative so that it doesn’t endlessly loop back through the same narrow lens created and dominated by a culture of racism and injustice? If more of the erased truths are brought back to the fore, then collectively we have the potential for the next phases of racial healing and transformation.
Visual culture matters. How and who we study in visual culture matters. Those who are selectively supported in the creative making of visual culture matter. Without an adequate representation of more voices, then culture itself suffers. At the end of January 2020, Yale University announced that it will no longer offer the introductory survey courses in art history that many believe have insufficiently addressed a range of cultural backgrounds and have privileged a “canon” of white European western art. The new art history classes at Yale will be divided into new categories, such as “Global Decorative Arts,” “Sacred Art and Architecture,” and “The Politics of Representation.” The Yale Director of Undergraduate Studies states that these courses “are an essential opportunity to continue to challenge, rethink and rewrite the narratives surrounding the history of engagement with art, architecture, images and objects across time and place” (Hedeman and Kristoffersen).
There are other ways visual culture should work to address the visual representation, historic records, and artistry of African American voices. In July of 2019 it was announced that the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Getty Research Institute will acquire the photographic archives of Ebony and Jet magazines (McFadden). These more than 4 million prints and negatives include the work of globally-renowned Gordon Parks (1912-2006) and other leading photographers of the 20th century; they now count as part of the permanent collections in our leading national museums and research centers. Ebony and Jet provided the main photographic record of African Americans throughout the many decades when mainstream weekly and monthly magazines in America, such as Life, did not adequately include coverage of African Americans. Ebony and Jet captured the expansive lives of people of color, both important and impactful events as well as the everyday, ordinary joys and celebrations of African Americans.
The photographs from Ebony magazine will include images like the one seen here. Pictures that tell our stories. Images that tell the narrative of who we’ve been, who we are, and who we can be. Images like this photograph from part of a September 1954 Ebony photo essay series featuring my own family and showing my Aunt Lynn holding the hand of Rev. Martin Luther King Sr. while my birth father waves and walks beside them. They grew up in Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church while both Martin Luther King Jr. and Martin Luther King Sr. were at the helm. I’m so glad Ebony magazine was there to document all their lives, because the visual record remains important.
It is my sincerest hope that the Harrisonburg Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation project will inspire artists, historians, writers, educators, activists, and others to work together to change the narrative. The narrative needs to change in order to more truthfully reflect who we are as a country. After working to establish more of a collective truth, we will be able to move into the next promising chapter of racial healing and transformation. Let’s do it together.
Art Interventions
Maureen Shanahan
How can the visual arts intervene in changing national narratives invested in historical amnesia? The W.K. Kellogg Foundation and Virginia Humanities Foundation support projects that aim for truth, racial healing and transformation, including Harrisonburg’s Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation (TRHT) project. Led by activists and artists Steven Thomas and Susan Zurbrigg, the Harrisonburg TRHT has organized students, faculty, and community members in retrieving and remembering local histories of African Americans in the Shenandoah Valley. The project’s title and discourse gesture to the recent history of truth and reconciliation commissions in South Africa after the end of racial apartheid and in Latin America after an era of military regimes in order to apply those concepts to communities in the United States. Formed in the 1980s and 1990s, these commissions spent years conducting investigations into histories of human rights’ violations. Despite a growing international movement demanding truth, reconciliation and reparations for African American slavery and native genocide, the United States has never apologized for these original sins and has conducted only a single day of testimony. Taking place on Juneteenth (June 19), 2019, the four hundredth year after Dutch traders first brought slaves to Virginia, the testimony was part of hearings on H.R. 40, the longstanding reparations bill first initiated in 1989 by Representative John Conyers (D-MI), then annually by him, and now by lead sponsor Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX).
It is within these larger campaigns demanding nation-states to account for the wrongs of their state actors, state-sanctioned violence, and systematic oppressions that the re-assessment of public spaces, place names, and monuments have come into question. Motivated both by the lineage of authoritarian violence linking the slave lash to police brutality and the fatal neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12, 2017, citizens from Baltimore to Richmond and Atlanta have demanded the removal of public sculptures of Confederate generals. Public officials at schools, universities, cities and states have launched renaming and replacement projects. Within days of the Charlottesville confrontation and in the throes of accountability for Freddie Gray’s death in police custody, Baltimore residents graffitied the marble pedestals of the Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson sculptures with “smash white supremacy,” “terrorists,” and “Black Lives Matter.” (Baltimore Sun, n.p.) An impromptu plaster sculpture of a pregnant Black woman with her fist raised and a child wrapped on her back in rainbow-colored sling appeared as a counter-monument and a visual confrontation to the Confederate generals. (Fig. 1) Then overnight from August 15 to 16, the city removed the Lee-Jackson sculptures and three other Confederate monuments. At the same time, the mayor of Atlanta established a committee to rename Confederate streets, such that what was once Confederate Avenue leading to Grant Park is now United Avenue.
In Richmond, Virginia, the onetime capital of the Confederacy, the Valentine Gallery initiated an international design competition re-envisioning Monument Avenue. First developed from 1890 to the 1920s to commemorate Confederate generals, the grand tree-lined boulevard still displays the “heroes” of the Confederacy. The Valentine exhibition, Monument Avenue: General Demotion/General Devotion (February to December 2019), presented plans responding to the question of whether to maintain the status quo, add context in the form of text or more statues, or destroy and/or remove existing statues. Submissions from artists, urban planners, architects and others variously re-imagined the Richmond mall as a site of Black histories and Black futures, a space of conversation, a suspension of sculptures “in a state between stasis and removal,” and in one case, a parodic swapping of the horse head and general’s head on each sculpture. (Valentine 20-22) (Fig. 2)
Confederate monuments and place names, especially the equestrian sculptures, function as condensations of memory and forgetting, making them useful targets for the re-thinking of history. Symbols of white supremacy, the bearded general on horseback is also a configuration of virile masculinity. The horse’s neck and head serve as a phallic extension of the man, making the Valentine Gallery submission switching horse and general heads a carnivalesque undoing. Cities have elevated these equestrians on pedestals, often atop a grassy knoll, raising them high above the viewer, often several times her height. The compulsory upward gaze invites an identification with dominance for those wanting to invest in a Confederate past and mandates a position of subjugation for the descendants of slaves. The inscriptions and plaques of such monuments want to render unforgettable a set of proper names and narrate a hero’s hagiography. In doing so, they disavow the corruptible human body and corroded ideology of slavery and segregation while participating in a perverse nostalgia. The cities, civic leaders, and societies that commissioned Richmond’s Monument Avenue and Baltimore’s Confederate sculptures, participated in a symbolic system aligned with the Jim Crow era of racial segregation and sanctioning lynching. The boulevards leading to and around the Confederate statues centralize such figures along the main arteries of urban life, compelling their widespread public recognition. The apparatus of trees, hills, malls, parks, and vistas aestheticize visual routes surrounding him with the grace of nature while providing plausible deniability for the cruel path to power and the tree as an instrument of torture.
To return to the question this essay began with, the many examples of Confederate monuments and imagined counter-monuments show just how the histories and structure of public art serve regimes of power and affect. Dedicated to Charlotte Harris who was lynched in Harrisonburg on March 6, 1878, Susan Zurbrigg’s painting class performed a nighttime anti-monument action in November 2019 on James Madison University’s campus. Wearing dark clothing and hoodies, six of the students circled a round base illuminated with candles and imprinted with a female silhouette and the text: “This is where we destroy history. Who is Charlotte Harris?” (Fig. 3) Kneeling before the base, they called her name and posited an alternative politics, social relations, and memory in opposition to those inscribed by the Confederate equestrian. Such interventions in the visual arts can disturb the many forms of willful amnesias embedded in our daily lives. Other artists such as Jay Jarrell, Fred Wilson, Yinka Shonibare, Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi have re-interpreted museums, public squares and freeway underpasses. (Jones 2017) Signage --the poster, the billboard, the calling card, the flag, the temporary memorial -- can parody and critique the passivity of the viewer and prick the conscience of the complicit bystander. Installations and performance work provide a range of strategies for re-narrating shared histories and retrieving repressed narratives. (Pezzullo 2007, Ryan 2016, Thompson 2016) The project of decolonizing our minds and public spaces invites a complex and ongoing set of interventions that depend upon visionary thinkers who can re-narrate our past and re-envision our futures.
CTRL Shift Narrative
Beth Hinderliter
How do we shift received narratives when the work of uncovering new perspectives and voices is often met by institutional silence and erasure? Who will hear these counter narratives once we give voice to them? Often, institutional change is needed first for new narratives to take root. Yet, the change most needed for institutional transformation comes from the narratives and stories of those most marginalized and silenced.
Even when it might seem that an institution is changing and opening to new voices and new narratives, often such change is only surface deep. Diversity workers have long recognized the institutional adoption of multiculturalism in the 1980s and 1990s can be a screen, guarding against real change. Multicultural jargon celebrates diversity in a superficial way, advocating that we are all diverse and supposedly obviating the need for difficult conversations around racism, classism, heteropatriarchy and other systems of oppression. Inclusion becomes rhetoric for unchanging institutions which understand the best way to make a protest go away is to say yes to it, to dress in its colors, and to talk its language.
To bring these narratives of transformation into our institutions requires an understanding of how we internalize practices of ableism, heteropatriarchy, classism and all other forms of oppression that order and discipline our bodies. In the academy, ethnic and area studies remain underfunded and undervalued. As a white cis woman trained in art history and working interdisciplinarity in the area of Africana studies, I have written about the need for co-conspirators to amplify narratives other than their own especially given the ongoing perpetuation of domination in movement spaces. I have been frustrated within diversity committee work to see the same actors and the same stories promoted time again on campus. And I have been challenged by the refusal of institutional change, its silos and outmoded structures which limit potential for change. One such instance was when I applied for tenure and was told that none of my work with the Africana Studies program would be counted as service to the institution or towards my promotion. Rather than see interdisciplinary work- particularly work in ethnic studies- as a service to the larger institution, interdisciplinarity was seen as a threat to my home department, something that took time away from departmental engagements.
Africana studies, which had been a department of seven full time faculty in the 1970s, had by the time of my arrival at the institution become an interdisciplinary minor run by faculty across many departments- a small “coalition of the willing.” Sometimes when I hear comments lamenting that institutions have left ethnic studies stuck in the 1970s, I almost wish it were so, as that moment was a peak of institutional commitment and funding- which has since been whittled away with federal and state budget cuts and neoliberal reforms during the 1980s and 1990s. Another example would be North Carolina governor Pat McCrory’s claim in 2013 that if students wanted to study Women’s and Gender studies, they should have to do that at a private college. More recently, the N.C. Board of Governors mandated a two and a half million dollar payment by UNC Chapel Hill to the Sons of the Confederacy as they took possession of a campus confederate statue known as “Silent Sam” toppled by protesting students in 2018. These actions by the campus system went against the explicit wishes of the campus involved, including the university faculty senate which spoke out against the decision as counter to the university’s mission of diversity and capacity to create an inclusive environment for black and non-black students of color.
Recent struggles to change dominant narratives center around debates over the nature of free speech. The conservative right has consistently aimed to roll back advances made in both human and civil rights by claiming that the right to discrimination is protected by freedom of speech. The supreme court case over bakery owners who sought the right to refuse to bake cakes for gay weddings is one prominent example of this strategy, which has been found protection in the Trump government’s creation of a government office for Conscience and Religious Freedom within the Office of Civil Rights. The Alt Right has sought to make inroads into higher education institutions in particular with this argument- claiming that liberal campuses abuse conservative students, forcing them into silence and stripping them of freedom of speech. For example, the right-wing institution Campus Reform argues that professors seek to indoctrinate students with progressive agenda and to silence those with differing opinions. Right wing media organizations like Breitbart in particular have targeted college campuses as frontline battles in a war to control national narratives, arguing in particular that politics roll downhill from culture. To shift college campus culture would also entail a shift in politics as students move into careers and greater influence in public life. This strategy has been particularly effective due to the historic defense of free speech by liberals and to the institutionalization of vapid discourse of diversity that supplants difficult conversations around the exercise of power and privilege in our public and private lives. Finally, in the face of those individuals and institutions who refuse change and enforce oppression, how do we begin that work of shifting dominant narratives?
In 2017, I taught a class on issues around racial justice and the Black Lives Matter Global Network. A student in the class was very concerned with how personally she might best effect change in her lifetime. Would it be better to become a lawyer and work within the legal system and perhaps seek political office, she wondered? Or would the system change her, molding her to its norms and expectations until she no longer was effectively fighting for change? Change agents can come from within or outside of a system or institution. Audre Lorde reminded us that what matters are the tools we use to effect change- that they are wholly our own. As we work to refine our tools in the struggle, we could remember that, as James Baldwin wrote, “not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
The refusal of change wears down its opponents, exhausting us so that we might not act at a critical moment. Institutions understand the temporal nature of change can move either in a crawl or a snap of the fingers. Even the quickest change, however, relies on long struggles for visibility, which brings increased communication as people learn of shared experiences and begin to coalition build. This is one danger of the “fake news” agenda which seeks to erase hard won visibility. However, as we begin to source our strength from our visions and goals more often than from our wounds, we draw energy to overcome these barriers of change.
Education, Race, and Revising Virginia's History
Hannah Sions
While history is taught in our education system and perceived by most as concrete fact, it is in truth quite subjective depending upon which side of the lens you view it through. What is recorded in history books can be one person’s “truth” that contradicts the experiences of an entire group of people. Over the course of years, decades, and centuries, some perspectives slowly become erased while one perspective remains in history books and becomes accepted “fact”. Through this process, one facet of history lives on while the voices of many get silenced. We only have to look at Virginia’s history books to see examples of this erasure.
Virginia has a rich history being the location of the first colonies set by European settlers, playing a vital role in the establishment of our country. History books tell a tale of heroism, sacrifice, and courage that helped build the foundation of the colonies. History books, however, do not focus as much on the violence that happened in pursuance of colonization, for example, the massacre and displacement of Native Americans and the enslavement of African Americans. History books also fail to discuss the long lasting trauma and oppression experienced by these communities that continues to this day.
Education plays a vital role in which perspective is circulated, as it is in schools that we learn “facts” and we trust educators to teach us what we need to know to become ready for the world. However, many times education fails to present history as multifaceted as the events were; even with more recent events, we only hear one side of the story. In schools, we learn about emancipation and desegregation, but rarely learn about counter movements that fought to legally uphold segregation and oppression. We learn about the ways our country has developed, without much attention to the resistance that these movements encountered. Resistance is important to acknowledge as it highlights the individuals championing for change, predominantly Black and Brown activists, while honestly discussing the harm that these communities faced.
In the past 150 years, there have been movements, predominantly led by Black activists, to change racist and inequitable social structures in society. However, with each big change came counter movements which fought to legally uphold the old ways of segregation, oppression, and enslavement. With the emancipation of enslaved individuals came Jim Crow laws which sanctioned racial segregation, next the Eugenics movement oppressed Black mothers through forced sterilization. A recent countermovement to equality is the controversy concerning the conservation of the confederate monuments. Many Southerners have argued for the conservation of the monuments, stating that the monuments stood for legacy and not racism. However, many of the monuments were constructed well after the Civil War, during the 1890’s through the 1920's, in retaliation of movements that championed for more rights of people of color. Because the intention behind the monuments were in retaliation of equality movements, supporting their maintenance supports the malintent behind their construction.
Racism is a touchy topic, many equate racism as a character flaw that is detrimental to be associated with; many know that they do not want to be racist, but do not necessarily understand what racism is. Race is a social construct (a socially made-up criteria) that separates individuals into categories based upon perceived physical differences. In the United States, this categorization of individuals into separate races has been used to justify the enslavement of African Americans and the genocide of Indigenous Americans in early colonies. Racism, then, is the (false) belief that there is a hierarchy to humans that is based upon biological factors. Racist oppression exist on micro and macro levels to this day. For example, privatized mass incarceration, with a biased judicial system that incarcerates Black and Brown individuals at a higher rate, has been frequently cited as “the New Jim Crow” or “legalized slavery.”
The impact of racism is not only felt by people of color. Once again, we only have to look to our education system to see the impact of racism on our students. Virginia was a state that constructed public schooling for White and Black children concurrently, but measured the funding and supports that the schools would receive based upon the race of the student population. White schools were funded with state funds, while black schools were frequently funded by the black community. After Brown vs. Board of Education desegregated public school systems, Virginia had massive resistance to integrating its student population. Laws were passed to find ways to uphold segregation and, in the case that these laws failed, schools were closed to avoid desegregation. Some school systems in Virginia closed for five months (Norfolk) to six years (Prince Edward County), only reopening when mandated by federal or supreme courts. The closing of schools had a long lasting effect on all students and their communities that impacted multiple generations. The story of Virginia’s decision to close schools in response to racial integration is not always told in classrooms. The neglect of mentioning this past is another example of how history is curated to depict the past in a much tidier fashion.
So where do we go from here and how can we begin healing some of the harm of racism? While there is no easy answer to this question, one way we can begin to undo some harm is to listen to the voices of those who have been erased and acknowledge that their truths look very different than the truths that we may have been taught. Through projects such as TRHT, art students are able to express their truths and retell the stories from their perspectives. As we enter these spaces, let us be open and listen to what they say and give space to their narratives. To acknowledge and accept these counter-narratives as truth is the first step in racial healing.
Enclaves, Enclosures, and Frames of the (un)Forgotten
Adérónké A. Adésànyà
Introduction
In her recent body of work, Susan Zurbrigg has devoted her signature bold and large-scale paintings to the thorny issue of racial injustice. These new works emanate Zurbrigg’s research on African American history and her collaboration with organizations such as Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation [THRT], the Northeast Neighborhood Association [NENA] and W. K. Kellogg Foundation. Their partnership geared towards addressing racial injustices and how to create an inclusive, and better society has produced important milestones and studies in the Harrisonburg community with broader implications for the larger American society. Zurbrigg’s painterly reflections and response which opened for viewing at the Smith House Galleries on February 7th 2020 represent one of her important contributions to the project spearheaded by the aforementioned consortium.
This essay offers some thoughts about the artist’s recent work noting the influences and tendencies that helps one to locate them within an art historical context. Key ideas presented here are twofold: Zurbrigg provides a painterly response to a quilting tradition—offering a fresh direction in her art. Also, the artist uses her peregrinations into a sordid past and a fractured present to reimagine a beautiful memory of entities pushed into the margins of society and history. She presents in them spots for contemplation. Quite instructive is the fact that lines, demarcations, shapes, enclosures are prominent elements in Zurbrigg’s paintings. Abstractions, the category to which these new works belong, do not readily yield to meanings as do figurative or allegorical paintings, however they invite and enable contemplations. Consequently, knowledge about Zurbrigg’s sources of inspiration are combined with a contemplative study—including the author’s aesthetic response to the paintings to generate the discussions in this write up. Five examples of the artist’s recent paintings, a diptych (Figures 1 and 2) and a triptych (Figure 3), are instructive in considering the subsequent paragraphs.
In the paintings, developed in predominantly rectangular frameworks that feature geometric shapes notably rectangles, squares, triangles, biomorphic forms, and outlines, a medley of colors asserts their spaces. Zurbrigg’s distinctive liberal use of colors is reaffirmed in the black, lilac, green, red, pink, yellow, grey and other “Zen” colors. Her risk-taking tendency noted in the experimental mix—fluorescent and matte colors—rendered in flat, controlled and distressed brushwork define and distinguish the shapes. At a glance, one might be persuaded to classify the paintings as pure geometric forms, geometric abstraction, and locate them in the league of hard-edge pieces. However, they transcend pure geometricization, and have evolved from cultural, historical, and heuristic spaces. Zurbrigg’s new collection ushers the viewer into her odysseys and conversations with a checkered history, vibrant traditions and contemporary works. This fresh look at two streams of aesthetic consciousness; the African American women quilters of the Gee’s Bend, and paintings/painters from the past to the twenty-first century, sets Zurbrigg’s bold, new direction.
Influences and Redirections
Though Zurbrigg has been investigating the trauma visited on black bodies, the politics of forgetting and remembering in a racially charged society, the erasure of blackness in body politics, and the struggle for memory, truth, and reconciliation, she is intentional in developing the content in her work. Rather than focus on the dominant stereotypical pathology of blackness, she makes celebration and triumph the language of representation. Black ethos is adroitly symbolized in the medley of palettes on her canvases. Her choice of palette—plush and pale, tempered and feisty, dark and bright—and the way the artist’s brush has mediated them, are also intentional; they signpost and emphasize Zurbrigg’s preoccupations in this season. One of these is her deliberateness to redefine the melancholy of blackness and the sordid representations that often mark the narratives and traumas about the past and present of black bodies. The artist also flips and polishes the visual vernaculars that she borrows from the archives. For instance, while Zurbrigg’s choice of geometric shapes is consequential and referential—hinting at the tragic conditions of the slave era, and alluding to the works of Gee’s Bend quilters famous for “bending” geometric shapes—squares, rectangles, triangles, polygons, and trapezoids in their quilts, she is not fixated on revisiting trauma. The shapes she uses are not the wavering types that one often encounters in many quilts but hard-edged ones. Additionally, though her choice of concentric geometric shapes and the use of blocks and strips may have captured some of the distinctions of African American quilts, these elements do not pigeonhole her works. Indeed, the artist expertly redirects from them in the way she juxtaposes controlled flat spaces with loose brush strokes within the shapes. In Zurbrigg’s reinterpretation, authenticity trumps tradition.
In pursuing a fresh creative trajectory, Zurbrigg drew inspiration from abstract tendencies of other black artists, particularly ideas conveyed in the works of African American artists such as Stanley Whitney, Al Loving, Alma Thomas, Ed Clark and William T. William, among others. Outside this group, one is inclined to see some parallels between Zurbrigg’s concentric squares and the abstract tendency of the German artist, Josef Albers (1888-1976), who spent over two decades making paintings of concentric square, and developed a signature in the painting series, Homage to the Square (1950-1975). With such a varied pool of accomplished influencers, it is quite hard to pin down the specific influences of such abstractionists that went into parts or the whole of Zurbrigg’s current work. She has simply mined a rich archive and blended form and matter together to create her own distinctive visual language. One comes away from observing these recent works with a resolve that the extensive research that Zurbrigg invested into her new paintings has resulted in successful outcomes. The paintings dominate the ambience that they occupy, and challenge the viewer’s perception and sensation. The viewer is drawn into labyrinths where the artist pays homage to artistry and heritage (the archives she studied), memory (entities, history, and her distillation of ideas), and charts new vistas. To be sure, Zurbrigg’s research into African American quilting tradition, and her involvement in social justice and activism, have yielded assemblages that task the viewer’s introspection. A brutal history and a beautiful artistry—are intertwined and reimagined.
Before a discussion of select paintings, some thoughts on quilting, one of the archetypes that inspired Zurbrigg’s recent works, are apposite. It is also important to examine points of convergence and divergence between the archetype and its modernism. The Quilting to the African American is more than just cloth; it is embodiment, emblematic, about empowerment and a tool for liberation. The tradition also exemplifies survival and memory for the population. Though quilting served as standard covering for protection against harsh terrains, it was and remains a fulcrum for centering, identification, and remembering. To quilt for them is also to remember and to reimagine the aspects of the African cultures that they were forcefully removed from. Additionally, quilting also “offered the quilters the psychological and spiritual will to survive in the slave era. They were used as signposts to guide fleeing slaves and as markers in underground railroads. They also represent “monuments to women’s lives and labors.” Every story got its place setting in the tapestry of time. In blocks and strips, strings and scraps of textiles —porches, grain barns, the utility sheds, plantation houses, housetops, windows and doorways, fences and steps, ceilings and railings, and many more—found their way into what Bernard L. Herdman captioned “Architectural Definitions” in his essay. Herdman reasoned further, “Contemplating the “architecture” of the quilt, we must consider not only the processes of design and construction, but also the social, cultural, and personal meanings that quilts create and enable-meanings that are, in turn, enacted in behavior, conversation, and relationship.” Quilting, therefore, is a combination of many things including historical, spiritual, literal and metaphorical, and in some cases, the formal assemblages offer platforms for developing personal and group narratives.
Lots of other significance and sensibilities are also attached to the tradition. In tears, sweat and blood, during the slavery era, African American women congregated in ‘safe’ hubs to quilt covers for bodies, beds, and walls. The work “was a communal activity and a source of networking for rural women in farming areas. Slave women went from cabin to cabin to help each other make bedcovers for the winter. Post-Civil War rural black women went from home to home to make utilitarian quilts.” The women also applied colorful appliqués on broad and narrow cloths to tell personal and collective stories. They passed down the tradition from generation to generations, experimenting and innovating over the centuries. Ultimately, the quilts evolved from patchworks of bits and pieces of sackcloth and discarded cloth made by determined hands and resolute minds into constellations of beautiful textiles that are now collectors’ items and showcased in themed exhibitions. The contemporary pieces are made from locally sourced or imported textiles from African homelands. Narratives on some of them continue to recall vanished eras, others are simply beautiful arrangements of appliqués of shapes, patterns and forms. Quilting continues to be important cultural markers, a tradition passed down to generations of black women, and frames of reference for the experiences of African American in the United States. It is within these and other contexts that one locates Zurbrigg’s allusions to them.
The work entitled Resilience II (Figure 1) brings into sharp relief the tenacious spirit of these women and their tribe. The capacity of an embattled group to evolve, against all odds, from enclaves and enclosures—literal and psychological. Zurbrigg extends the liminality of the African American quilters and their works into her canvases. They have been described as powerful cultural objects that travel easily between worlds. Well established is their capacity to hold their own space in a New York or Boston museum and then resonate with the rural South by speaking the language of black improvisational patchworks. Similarly, they simultaneously straddle functionality and formalism— on the one hand, they serve as covers for bodies and spaces, and on the other, they serve as platforms that convey the aesthetic expression of the highly imaginative women quilters of the Deep South. It is their capacity for temporality, reimagining, and their power to straddle and inhabit new contexts that Zurbrigg brings into her own work. Old wine is poured into new wine skin.
Frames and architectural configurations are also central to understanding the interface between Zurbrigg’s work and those of African American quilters. Borders, edges, and rectangular shapes in African American quilts are visual reminders of the enclosures, spaces of seclusion where quilters in the slavery era often retired after farm work to quilt, share stories (biblical and those from life experiences), create moments for relaxation, healing, and perhaps try to achieve a centering for their overall wellbeing. In such hubs, the people were quarantined and under heavy scrutiny. The spaces did not altogether offer comfort or wholesomeness. However, quilting offered the quilters (and those who congregate with them) outlets to douse the tension of the intense daily labor that they did for their masters. Quilting also afforded them the opportunity to scheme utopian imagery, to express their wishes, their sorrows through the forms, patterns and textures embedded in their work. Their quilts reflect the high and lows of their experiences. Beyond narratives, the quilt, as Arnett observed, “was a vital piece in the understanding of other branches of black visual identity. Indeed, it was an important part of a common language seen and “listened to” by many generations of black painters and sculptors in the South.” Black painters—old and new—have drawn inspirations from their formalism and their historicity. Some artists focus on history, others concentrate on form—working out the visual language, while others combine the two. It is attractive to speculate that Zurbrigg belongs to the latter category.
Some points of convergence are worth noting. Similar to African American quilts, Zurbrigg’s geometric paintings make allusion to the control, strictures, and rigid structures that marked the confined spaces, the complexities and the sustained uncertainties that slaves endured. Spaces of containment are hinted at in the hard-edge lines and shapes, dark areas of the works, and in the conflicting colors. The swirling and undulating brushwork in two of the paintings (see Figure 3: “Remember When We Picked All That Indigo? Remember When We Picked All That Cotton?” II and III, and the details in Figure 4) evoke the idea of slippery surfaces and recesses. Slippery surfaces can be viewed as poignant metaphors of instability, the uncertainties and precariousness that complicate or truncate life journeys of embattled black bodies. Ditto, turbulent waves—a profound visual trope, also a grave reminder of the forced migration of black bodies from Africa to the Americas. Other conflictions evident in the same work include the bright green hue that alludes to hope and regeneration, an idea amplified by the openness of the green space and its resemblance to a portal. However, the hope is mediated by the pitch-black outer frame. The width of the frame gives the illusion of a fortified wall. Layers of diminishing rectangles in the work appear simultaneously rhapsodic and melancholic. The superimposed rectangular frames are referential and indexical. Just as a quilt is multi-layered, the ideas the paintings evoke are also complex.
Frames are also apt reminders of the motifs that African American women use in their quilting and gender roles in quilting production. Quilting is a female preserve activity. However, men offered the women assistance by providing them with rectangular wooden frames made out of oak wood. The “men made two kinds of quilting frames…A frame which hung from pegs in the ceiling and was pulled up at night” or one which stood on the floor against a wall. The latter is usually positioned in what is called the “front room” or guest bedroom. They recall the captivity, confinement, containment, and the denial of autonomy to blacks that characterized the slave era. They also reference patterns and shapes that feature in the canons of quilt makers. So, the use of rectangular shapes is pivotal to Zurbrigg’s work. However, instead of getting fixated or locked into their constricting frames, Zurbrigg privileged colors as liberating force in the paintings. Almas Thomas, one of her influencers once said, “Through color, I have sought to concentrate on beauty and happiness, rather than on man’s inhumanity to man.”
At a strictly formal level, the paintings are exercises in colors, shapes, lines and brush work—the assemblage speaks to the apparent rigor that went into their making. Resilience I and II, placed side-by-side on a wall in an exhibition space at the Smith House, the paintings aptly fit into a series. The diptych, marked by a color field of red punctuated with thin lines of four rectangles of increasing/decreasing sizes, stimulates a radiating energy. If the viewer’s eyes rest on them for a fleeting moment, the sensation dilates the eye, and leaves an inexplicable experience. In the triptych arrangement, the blood red canvas is visually the most arresting. Given the context and archive one knows Zurbrigg to have examined, it is apt to say, the work represents the volatile and ruthless periods of slavery in America—a period of untold brutality, exploitation, and denigration. A grim, terror-filled era when the blood and sweats of slaves wet the grounds of plantations and assuaged the angst of their tyrannical owners. The title of the triptych, “Remember When We Picked All That Indigo? Remember When We Picked All That Cotton?” also evokes this imagery. Conversely, the red color could also be emblematic of new life and the energy of freshness. Since Zurbrigg’s intent for making her new oeuvres is all about celebration, red may be interpreted as the preservation of memory of many resilient spirits—mangled and murdered—who remain (un)forgotten.
Still on the triptych, color red is constricted to a small bar and it covers a marginal section of the inner rectangular frame. Black color is somewhat privileged in the way it fills the outer frame, but pink contends its dominance. Thin-lines of eggshell white demarcates the shapes. Inner rectangular is partitioned with distinct hues of yellow, dark brown, white and finally, lilac. The variations in the texture and sizes of the colors—full, faint, or if you may, fault lines and hard edges offer interesting twists in the painting. If one ties the formal elements to the apron strings of the history of racial tensions in America, new thoughts will emerge. What message(s) is/are implied here? Is this piece an allusion to the post-antebellum period? Given the shrinking of spaces that the vibrant or volatile colors occupy, one is tempted to see the transition as a reflection of a changing climate. The painting creates another quagmire for the viewer as shown in the greyish contusion in the outer frame. Could the blending of white and black be a metaphor for the period of integration? Is it an allegory of the perceived reduction of violence against minorities, or a changing demography? The multiple questions that the formal elements raise parallel the rhetorical title of the painting, “Remember When We Picked All That Indigo? Remember When We Picked All That Cotton?”
Conclusion
Zurbrigg’s new works offer platforms for memory and musings. The artist has traveled two worlds; those of African American quilt makers and contemporary Black abstractionists. She has also declared her interpretations from these influencers in the geometric spaces on her canvases for observers to explore her labyrinths of curbs and colors. The formalism of Zurbrigg’s imposing works, and the history which partly inspired them, reveals the artist's interest in reimagining ideas and experiences in her own unique way. Zurbrigg mediated history, memory, and materiality to develop a lively interpretation of the past and present. Memory is not just about digging into the past, but also about creating new ones. To this extent, one could argue that Zurbrigg also uses the platform of her new works to make statements about new directions. Just as much as it is necessary for societies to exhale from travails and trauma of the past, Zurbrigg provides sites on the canvases for viewers to exhale. A close study of viewers as they toured the exhibition space of Smith House Galleries on February 8, 2020 reveal that they lingered in front of the Zurbrigg’s works to contemplate, and perhaps muse on the tradition(s) that authorize them. Why the intense hues? Why the constricting frames? What is past, and what is prologue? As an observer in that space, the author also participated in the meditation, and pondered about the temperaments that the assemblages stirred in the viewers. Invariably, one came to a conclusion that besides the notion that the works pay homage to the past, celebrate the (un)forgotten, and indicate the artist’s research outcomes in a season, the success of Zurbrigg’s work resides in the series of important questions and answers that the viewers generate. It is in the power of their contemplativeness that Zurbrigg’s new works will continue to find resonance.
Changing the Narrative: Museums as Agents of Historical Memory
Sarah Brooks, PhD
Among our most influential and revered cultural institutions, museums present, and represent, what society values most at a single moment in time. So as long as the communities in which they are valued continue to sustain them, museums will illuminate the great and minute ways that truths are denied or suppressed every day.
Our rapidly changing, overly connected world offers ready access to data on our past and present histories. Consequently, museums across America grapple with important and difficult questions, such as: How do we address issues of race in our mission for the present and in our vision for the future? Are there great or minute ways that truths are denied or suppressed such as in the selection of works to form our collections and the exhibitions that we curate; in the scholarship that we fund and disseminate in public education at all levels; in the leaders we hire to make critical decisions for the museum’s future; and in the audiences that we welcome or exclude from full engagement in our shared work? One pathway forward should be for the museum, ‘the memory of humankind,’ to be illuminated by truth in the telling of our common story, towards racial healing.
American institutions, including those dedicated to the history of art, design, science, and technology, will continue to engage with these critical issues into the mid-21st century. Questions of race and equity are critical to all these institutions, from local museums, whose resources and programming may have the greatest impact on the community surrounding them, to the largest, most well-endowed museums whose reach extends throughout the nation and possibly beyond it. In the case of the latter, a museum’s cultural diplomacy beyond America can impact perceptions of race and history on a global scale.
The opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in 2016, for example, was a watershed moment in this history. First envisioned by African-American veterans of the Union Army in 1915, the museum’s realization began in earnest with the establishment of a 2001 presidential planning commission; in 2002 Congress passed legislation that led to the 14-year fundraising, planning, and building campaign for the new museum at the north-west corner of the National Mall in Washington, DC. Located adjacent to the Washington Monument and the Smithsonian Museum of American History, this 2016 addition to the Smithsonian is a museum where truth, racial healing, and transformation are made manifest. Both African and African American visual traditions inspired David Adjaye and Philip Freelon’s three-tiered building design, as well as its pierced latticework surfaces and copper-coloration. Their new museum building physically transforms this larger landscape from one long dominated by whiteness in limestone and classicizing architecture to a space where brownness and an alternative aesthetic define the monumental and inspiring.
Here the museum’s transformative power is scale-able to local spaces and landscapes in our own communities. Harrisonburg’s Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation (TRHT) project highlights this work through the ongoing efforts of Karen Thomas and her non-profit organization to preserve The Historic Dallard-Newman House (DNH), which is now being renovated and will open to the public as a Museum of African American History and Culture in 2022. Thomas is Founder and Board President of the Northeast Neighborhood Association (NENA,) a grassroots community organization centered in the city’s historic black neighborhood, the former Newtown. Federally-sponsored but locally executed, Urban Renewal programs of the 1950s and 1960s cleared away much of the historic past of black Harrisonburg, underlining the unique importance of the DNH to this community today.
Through NENA’s tireless efforts, the DNH has achieved its distinguished status as a Virginia Landmark and a site listed on the US National Register of Historic Places. These official points of recognition reflect the deep historical importance of the site: Ambrose and Harriet Dallard built the home at 192 Kelley Street c. 1895 as a wedding gift for their daughter, Lucy Dallard, and her husband, Charles Cochran, on the same street where their own house at 243 Kelley Street stood, as well as the other homes of their extended family, all built on Dallard-owned land. Ambrose and Harriet had moved to Newtown at the end of the Civil War, escaping enslavement on the Yancey family plantation, Riverbank, on the Shenandoah River. They counted among the formerly enslaved persons who grew the businesses and cultural and social institutions of Newtown, making this a thriving African American community.
The DNH will be the historic house museum in the City of Harrisonburg dedicated to African American History and Culture. Its wooden frame architecture with neo-Gothic elements was widely popular in this period and region; families—black and white, Jewish and Christian—among many others, lived in homes just like it. The home symbolizes African American belonging, accomplishment and success. In this local, southern landscape, the shape and form of the DNH Museum presents a post-Civil War picture that includes African Americans as thriving middle-class families, with multiple generations nurturing their tightly-knit community on land purchased by family founders after emancipation.
A number of other museums in Harrisonburg and the surrounding county occupy historic houses, almost all dating before the years of the Civil War. Harrisonburg’s Hardesty-Higgins House is one prominent example. Home to the city’s first mayor (built 1848-1853,) it today includes the city’s bureau of visitor services and features the “Shenandoah Valley Turnpike Museum,” focusing on transit and settlement along Route 11 from 1834-1865, and a smaller “Shenandoah Valley Battlefields National Historic District Civil War Orientation Center.” As of the writing of this essay, to the best of this author’s knowledge, there is no consideration of race or the contributions of African Americans in written educational materials or public gallery displays designed for either the museum or orientation center.
In this local context, the DNH Museum will be a counterpoint to the narrative. It will present and represent what many members of the community seek, providing one pathway forward towards racial healing, as one ‘memory of humankind,’ illuminated by truth in the telling of our common story.
Acknowledgments
Edited by:
Susan Zurbrigg
With Contributions by:
Aderonke Adesanya
Sarah T. Brooks
Beth Hinderliter
Maureen Shanahan
Hannah Sions
The Harrisonburg Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation Changing the Narrative Project is made possible through support from a number of people and institutions. First, I would like to thank the Virginia Humanities and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation for the major funding of the TRHT project. Special thanks to David Bearinger and Carolyn Cades from the Virginia Humanities for their time and efforts. Additional funding was generously provided by Daryl and Cindy Byler; Matthew and Greta Bucher; and the Immanuel Mennonite Church of Harrisonburg, Virginia.
I would also like to acknowledge the work of the Harrisonburg TRHT Advisory Committee. The committee is co-chaired by Steven Thomas and me. Committee members are: Daryl Byler, Adriel Byrd, Joanne Gabbin, Panayotis Giannakouros, Meg Smeltzer-Miller, Maureen Shanahan, and Melody Wilson.
In particular, I would like to express gratitude to TRHT Advisory Committee members Steven Thomas, Meg Smeltzer-Miller, and Maureen Shanahan for their exceptional contributions to the success of the TRHT project.
Steven Thomas’s work on the TRHT project has been invaluable. He is the activist and community leader that championed this project from the very start. It is his vision that paved the way for VISIONARIES. His lecture during the TRHT Summer Youth Workshop contextualized local African American history for the students. He also contributed to the informational labels created for exhibition. He is a remarkable agent of change.
Meg Smelzer-Miller serves as the TRHT financial officer. Her financial expertise has made it possible for the TRHT project to seamlessly move forward at every phase. Her enthusiasm and support for the project were instrumental in its success.
Maureen Shanahan’s contributions are also significant. She prepared and delivered an art history lecture on Art Interventions for my JMU painting class. Her work helped guide the critical inquiry of the student’s Art Intervention project. She has also written a fantastic essay for the TRHT catalog.
I would also like to thank Jenny Burden, Executive Director of the Arts Council of the Valley. When I first approached her about exhibiting and premiering the TRHT project at the Smith House galleries, she readily offered her support. Additional thanks to Ann Leatherwood, Communications and Programs Coordinator for the Arts Council of the Valley.
The TRHT Changing the Narrative project is supported by NENA, its sponsoring non-profit. NENA, the Northeast Neighborhood Association, is a non-profit dedicated to culture, community, and history. Karen Thomas, the founder and President of NENA, is one of the most active and committed community leaders I have had the privilege to know. I serve on NENA’s Board and have had the opportunity to work under her leadership. Her tireless efforts have paved the way for a number of community initiatives that simply would not exist had she not devoted enormous time and energy to them.
Extended gratitude to my incredible 2019 TRHT Summer Youth Workshop teaching assistant, Erin Fusso, a JMU School of Art, Design and Art History alum. Her assistance during the workshop was exceptional. She is an art teacher of the highest caliber, and future students will greatly benefit from her positive energy and her commitment to excellence in teaching.
A most sincere thank you to TRHT catalog designer, Kristi McDonnell. Her immense talents are seen throughout the TRHT catalog pages. She has been a pleasure to work with, and we cannot thank her enough for her thoughtful design work.
Many thanks to the website design company Generate Impact. Their company mission is to “Develop digital solutions to support humanitarian organizations as they fulfill their mission around the world.” Their designer, Daniil Pogoretskiy (JMU SADAH alum), oversaw the creative direction of the TRHT project website. He is a gifted designer, and since I have had the opportunity to work with him during a JMU painting course, I’d like to share that he is also a noteworthy painter.
Many thanks to professional photographer Gaelen Smith, who provided all of the photographic and video documentation of the TRHT project. His superb work has been a genuine benefit to the project.
Haden King, JMU MFA graduate student, provided assistance to the overall organization of this project, and it’s greatly appreciated.
Thank you to JMU SADAH Woodshop Director, Eric Morris, and his students for kindly donating their time and efforts towards framing all of the TRHT Summer Youth Workshop paintings.
Thank you to all the 2019 TRHT Summer Youth Workshop participants: Zaharia Ford-Byrd, Rebekah Copeland, Faith Evans-Haywood, Sophie Hinderliter, Farina Mallek, Breanna Moats, Theo Risch Mott, and Jade Shull. Their artistic gifts and commitment to equality and justice are remarkable.
Thank you to my fall 2019 JMU intermediate and advanced painting students: Charles Biggs, Blake Brown, Vilma Castro, Aubrie Cook, Olivia Innamato, Kyrin Jones, Kofi Karikari, Cailey Keenan, Tuker Noelke, Jordan Pepper, Sophia Rhafiri, Erykah Tinnin, and Rose Young. They are artists and thinkers of incredible talent.
Thank you to JMU School of Art, Design, and Art History Director, Kathy Schwartz, and JMU CVPA Interim Associate Dean, Wren Stevens, for their support and for visiting students during the 2019 TRHT Summer Youth Workshop.
Finally, an expression of upmost gratitude to my SADAH art historian colleagues Aderonke Adesanya, Sarah T. Brooks, Beth Hinderliter, and Maureen Shanahan and to JMU School of Art, Design and Art History alum, Hannah Sions, for their outstanding TRHT catalog essays. They are all incomparable scholars, and each of them does behind the scenes heavy lifting for justice even when no one is watching.