SAN ANTONIO — A tender longing permeates the investigation into the itinerant career of Bronx-born Whitfield Lovell, who forges black history from old photographs. The exhibition begins with Lovell’s works on family and biography dating from the mid-1980s. On the belly of “Grandma’s Dress” (1990), a half-recumbent black indigenous woman, surrounded by palm trees – part Virgin Mary , part Venus of Urbino – holding a palm leaf, symbol of victory over death. Around the dress, wet green grows in frenzied arcs, like moving palm trees. Lovell’s paternal side comes from Barbados; this work celebrates the distant origins of the Black Atlantic and sets the tone of the exhibition’s interest in the search for community and ancestry.
In the next room, the smell of nutrient-rich earth and decaying tree bark, like that of cloves, subtly envelopes the viewer. The sounds of running water and birdsong accompany the scents, suggesting change or a feeling of crossing. Titled “Deep River” (2013), the work considers the conditions of runaway slaves during the Civil War, many of whom crossed the Tennessee River to find asylum in the Union Army. “Smuggling Camp” in Chattanooga, Tennessee. In the middle of the installation is a large mound of earth, strewn with bottles, lamps, musical instruments, Bibles and guns, and surrounded by turned wooden discs on which Lovell painted portraits of blacks since the Civil War. A pile of suitcases is stacked against the wall, above which is a portrait of a man holding keys, a symbol of freedom. Video projections of undulating waves flickering in the sunlight resonate with a thrilling sense of nostalgia.
Through his photographic works, Lovell mines lost origins through different types of black archival images. In the Close (2008-11), for example, he recreates in charcoal images of photo booths and identification documents dating from 1850 to 1950. In Pieces of cards (2020-21), Lovell paired each playing card with a frontal portrait of a person with humor and care: the Queen of Hearts, for example, is a regal woman gazing into the distance. Among his paintings, Lovell depicts a man seen in three-quarter view in “Wreath” (2000), surrounded by a concentric nest of rusty steel barbed wire, as protection against injury. Nearby, in “For…” (2008), a woman gazes into the distance as globes orbit around her, washed the same green as “Grandma’s Dress,” similarly conveying and bridging distances.
The show ends with Visitation (2001), commemorating Jackson neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia, the first major black entrepreneurial community in the United States, founded in the 1860s. With the large painting “Our Best” (2001), Lovell depicts the beginnings of the southern black middle class through portraits life-size on recycled wood which refuse the persistent period imagery linked to sharecropping and the civil war. And for the installation “Visitation: The Parlor” (2001), he arranges softly lit cutlery and lace, smelling faintly of stale whiskey and tobacco, around a dining table. An old radio plays blues and gospel next to a stack of Richmond newspapers from 1908. Two figures dressed in turn-of-the-century costumes face each other from opposite walls of the room, as if the ancestors of this scene of family and community, the same tender heart of all of Lovell’s re-enactments.
Whitfield Lovell: passages continues at the McNay Art Museum (6000 North New Braunfels Avenue, San Antonio, Texas) through January 19, 2025. The exhibition was organized by the American Federation of the Arts in collaboration with Whitfield Lovell. This iteration of the exhibition was curated by René Paul Barilleaux and Lauren Thompson.
