Review: "American Story" at the Kohler Arts Center

By Mary Louise Schumacher of the Journal Sentinel

July 17, 2009 

Sheboygan—Before he was elected president, Barack Obama gave an important speech about race. Devoid of bitterness and time-worn platitudes, it was an exercise in truth telling that is rare in politics, particularly at that level.

Obama addressed complex realities through the telling of his own story. He is the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas, the husband of a woman who descends from both slaves and slave owners. He attended some of America’s best schools and lived in one of the world’s poorest countries. He has relatives of “every race and every hue,” he said.

Then he said this: “And for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”

The idea that there are uniquely American narratives is at the heart of “American Story a sprawling and ambitious exhibit at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.

Ultimately, the show seeks to explore the magnitude of American diversity through the work of 15 artists. It’s only the second time in its history that the Kohler has staged a show of this scope, filling the entire institution and giving us an immersive experience with each individual artist.

Each of the 15 artists stakes a claim to his or her prsonal, and sometimes complex, cultural heritage.

Xenobia Bailey, who grew up in Seattle in the 1950s and ’60s, created an environment of empowering beliefs, a multilayered space of liberation and expectancy.

Although she studied art in college and took classes with legendary African-American painter Jacob Lawrence, her current practice is more rooted in imaginative play. It was the textiles, masks, costumes and sense of storytelling that she encountered in graduate coursework in ethnomusicology that perhaps has inspired her holistic approach most. It was the choreographed folktales of a Shona ensemble, the patterns of chime-like gongs played by Philippine musicians and the Venezuelan ceremonial dance.

Walking into Bailey’s intense yellow gallery space at the Kohler is like wading into a healing source of sunshine.

What is perhaps most freeing about the installation is the way Bailey employs the accessible, lo-fi language of crochet. It is the familiar stuff of potholders and craft class. With a funk aesthetic. Huge, pulsating, mandala-like circles erupt across the walls like newborn celestial systems.

A revival tent anchors part of the room, with an African-style tea set out before us like an invitation. The tent is topped with a pointy, turquoise mushroom shape and is outfitted with flower-like pompoms and tassels, like some giant, funky hat. It is the spiritual house of Sistah Paradise, a powerful seer, according to Bailey.

Nine-foot-tall chandeliers and crocheted costumes are set about the space, too, creating a theatrical sense of ceremony and a homey atmosphere. Bailey’s childhood sewing machine is here, too, sending the signal: This is project space, a work in progress. As a girl, she used the sewing machine to turn what was in her mother’s bag of scrap cloth into clothing and other concoctions. It was an early instrument of transformative power.

Jose Bedia, born in Cuba just days after Fidel Castro came to power, was allowed to leave his homeland in the early 1990s, he believes, because his work became an unwelcome presence. His art, which is given a particular place of honor in the Kohler’s main exhibition space, was not an overt statement about Cuban politics. But his re-examinations of racist histories were seen as incendiary.

 

A familiar brood of symbols populate his large-scale paintings — the long-legged trickster, the pointy-eared beasts, the silhouetted face, the modern warships, the lush trees. And always there is a sense of downpour and a liquidy expanse, undoubtedly references to waters that represents a profound separation between Cuba and the United States.

Though Bedia’s art fundamentally celebrates Afro-Cuban cosmologies and American Indian traditions, it possesses a sense of mourning and loss.

In “Isla, Pais, Mujer (Island, Country, Woman),” a silhouetted female figure, covered in foliage, drags her form across the canvas. She hunches over, as if walking under a great weight. Fire and smoke pour from her mouth.

The figure is surrounded by murky blue, like an island. It is set perfectly into the flat ground like a puzzle piece but is as visually separate as the second dimension is from the third. Gestural torrents of white paint, like milk thrown against a flat pane of glass, give the artwork a sense of downward pull.

It is a profound symbol for an island country that is both inseparable and separate from the U.S., where Bedia has settled, in Miami.

A revelation, too, were the magical, talisman-like works of Gregory Van Maanen, a Vietnam veteran born in Glen Rock, N.J., into a family of Dutch and Iroquois heritage.

Van Maanen has had an awareness of the spiritual world from the time he was a child, he’s said, sometimes visually sensing “fluid, humanoid spirits.”

Returning from the war, he began to paint some of those visions on whatever blank surface he could scrounge from his environment, including scrap metal, smooth river rocks, even skulls and bones. It was a means to ease his psychological restlessness, of finding a way through his days.

There is a sense of the beyond in these simple, brightly colored images of amorphous creatures, all seeing eyes, crosses and graphic shapes, many lovingly embellished with fine dots of paint. They are laid out and lined up precisely in display cases, in brigades.

Since the show offers such an in-depth experience of each artist, it is wonderfully appropriate that the exhibit remain on view through the end of the year. It demands repeated viewings. I hope to return to explore the work of more of the artists here at Art City, as well. Also, please read my review of Lesley Dill's work, handled separately in last Sunday's Cue.

“American Story,” which quotes Obama’s speech on race in its exhibition catalog, incidentally, feels very much of the moment. In many ways, though, its organizing idea is too broad, too romantic, too pat. By definition, creating a show that celebrates cultural diversity is a tall order. By such a standard, how many artists would qualify?

The Kohler does offer up a caveat, conceding the show can only scratch the surface. And this curatorial sin of overreaching seems a venial offense, in any case, in the face of such an exceptional show.

In truth, I learned a little something about the Kohler that in retrospect seems obvious. The art center is highly regarded for its scholarship and its collecting of vernacular, or self-taught, art. What become clear, though, is that the Kohler is also simply interested in art that, like vernacular art generally, possesses a sense of story.

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