Georgetown – A Howl Is Also A Prayer
Look at your hands and think about what you see: a family ring, calloused knuckles, a childhood scar.
Everything you notice about your hands reflects your personal experience. Maybe only you, or others who have had a similar experience, understand how memories stirred by what you see affect you. That doesn’t make your experience any less real.
Injustice is also like that. It does not have to be experienced by someone else to be real. But articulating that injustice to those not directly affected by it can foster a broader understanding of what it means.
As a white woman who has never experienced the racial injustice faced by the Black community, I cannot honestly write about that injustice at any level other than that of an observer. But I can acknowledge that these injustices persist and try, in some small part, to understand them through the work of those who endure them.
My quest to learn more brought me last weekend to the Anne Wright Wilson Fine Arts Gallery at Georgetown College where I spent time viewing its current exhibit A Howl is Also a Prayer. The exhibit — on display throughout Black History Month — gives viewers a glimpse into aspects of the Black experience through the hands, eyes, and minds of the Black artists whose work is on display.
Takeaways from the exhibit depend largely on the observer. That said, anyone who watches or reads the news has some idea of the struggle of being Black or brown in America. The need for everyone to accept that the struggle exists has reach critical mass – something that the artists in this exhibit acknowledge and reflect.
Prince Lang
Prince Lang’s mixed media Sharon Hunter, Shirley Lewis, Archangel Michael serves as a memorial to Black and brown lives lost to violence and disease in society. His canvas is paper that Lang found scattered on streets in his Cincinnati neighborhood where Black lives have been lost. Imagery from roadside memorials to the dead – a memorial wreath, a basketball, balloons –combine with verse and religious iconography (most notably, an image of the Archangel Michael represented by a sketch of a West African mask) to honor the fallen.
Lang includes two of his aunts, who died from COVID-19 and cancer respectively last year, among those remembered.
For all its pain, Lang’s piece conveys both loss and hope that the work’s caption states “… remind us that healing can also come through collective, public intention,”
Kiah Celeste
The sculpture A Tumor A Day stands in the center of the room, rocks and white sugar pearls collecting at the ends of a sloped sheet of brown latex. It is a memorial to Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose cancer cells were taken from her body for medical research without her permission before her death in 1951. Her cell line, called the HeLa line, remains in use to this day.
Sculptor Kiah Celeste chose the rocks and sugar pearls to substitute for Lacks’ numerous deadly tumors, small and large. The latex (with its “skin-like resemblance, smooth and chocolatey,” Celeste states in the caption) represents Lacks’ body, “poked, stretched to its limit” by physicians.
To this observer, the memorial calls out racial inequities in professional ethics as readily as it pays homage the woman who suffered to advance countless medical treatments and careers.
The artist says it best:
“The medical community’s disregard for Lacks’ privacy and humanity was both a personal affront and an action that reveals the general indifference, if not contempt, for Black bodies.”
Kiah Celeste
Social and cultural expectations of Black individuals – both from within and outside of the Black community — are immense subjects that can be magnified through the eye of the artist. Exactly how people from within and outside the Black community respond to these expectations are as different as the individual.
Sandra Charles
Sandra Charles’ Your Wall, An Artist and Venice explores self-confidence and beauty that rejects white- and male-driven ideals. That message coalesces in Charles’ portrait of a fellow artist, Lucy Azubuike.
Charles states in the caption to the work that the painting “addresses the façade of the Western idea of beauty and the confidence to accept that this idea is not universal but one of many.”
James Williams II
Never had a Jumpshot, Never had a Plan by James Williams II looks at expectations placed on young Black males to excel in basketball and other areas, as dictated by American culture. Williams’ piece conveys the discomfort that such expectations can cause, and which Williams himself experienced as a Black youth.
To quote the caption: “The consequences of these societal pressures shouldn’t be dismissed; there is nothing trivial about their effects, many of which linger for a lifetime.”
Samuel Trotter
Respect for the humanity of Black individuals — their needs, wants, losses, successes, and every experience in between – resonates in each of these works. But perhaps the most reverent among all the pieces is Untitled, a digital print by photographer Samuel Trotter.
Printed in black and white, Untitled uses its contrast to venerate a Black subject listening to music with earphones. A beam of light offsets the subject, conveying Trotter’s intended message of ascension and the divine. That is a lot to reveal, and it is up to each of us to see it for ourselves.
A Howl Is Also A Prayer, curated by John Brooks, can be viewed through March 6, 2021 at the Anne Wright Wilson Fine Arts Gallery located in the Wilson Art Building at Georgetown College. The Wilson Art Building is located at the corner of East College and South Mulberry Streets in Georgetown. More information can be found at www.georgetowncollege.edu/galleries or by calling the college at 502-863-8399.
