Part of an ongoing series of recommended movies, shows, books, music, artworks, or other form of expression.
Note: My accompanying original photographs in the Memorial Art Gallery purposely obscure the art to avoid legal infringements. I guess you’ll have to go see these pieces for yourself! (Or, click the links to see an unobscured photo on MAG’s collections pages for each item).
In kindergarten I loved art time. A LOT. Things got real with paint and paste, both of which I used liberally (more is better, right?). And both of which often ended up caked on my smock (one of my dad’s 70s dress shirts).
Tempera paint pools for orange pumpkins or electric green trees would harden on the thick paper, cracking and flaking when I stuffed it into my bookbag. My heavy application of paste and glue would ripple the construction paper before completely stiffening it. I would lay down so much wax with my crayon scribbles. I wanted my art to be BOLD.
I still love art and still make it for myself. It’s marginally better, although it never quite comes out looking like what I intend.
That’s why I love art galleries and museums. I love seeing the result of a practiced artist’s time spent creating what they envision. Art is their dreams made solid.
Well, sometimes art is nightmares made solid. Art is also the lessons of those dreams and nightmares.
And living in the spaces between dreams, nightmares, and lessons, there is, sometimes, resistance.
Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, NY
My hometown is extraordinarily lucky to have a world-class art museum near its geographic center: The Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester (MAG), founded in 1913.
Today its 12,000 objects from 5,000 years of art history are housed in an 84,000-sf set of connected buildings on a 14-acre campus. Prints, paintings, textiles, digital and film media, sculptures (inside and outside) in bronze, wood, glass, stone, ceramics, metals, plastics, organics … if a person made art out of it, it’s here.
About 1,000 pieces are on public view at any given time, plus special on-loan exhibits and shows.
The following four are beautiful examples of sculptures that pull back the curtain on difficult truths. And that’s important, because art isn’t always meant to simply decorate the world. Sometimes art issues a challenge to the viewer to bear witness and be better.
In these cases, the artist’s act of creating may itself be an act of resistance.
Note: Links throughout are to Memorial Art Gallery’s collections page for the mentioned objects, and to other useful information. Click to learn more but come back to finish reading!
Swing Low, Bronze Maquette, Alison Saar, 2007
There’s a lot happening with and around this little bronze statue of Harriet Tubman.
You come upon it in the center of the gallery exhibiting American art, where visitors typically begin. On the way in you pass an oil portrait of Colonel Nathaniel Rochester, one of America’s original ‘western pioneers’ settling what would become my home city around 1810. (I won’t even get into the legality of buying and settling land where people already live.)
Oh, and he made a fortune buying and selling people. He excelled at it down in Maryland and owned and enslaved Black people himself, including while living in New York right up until state law prohibited enslavement in 1827. What a guy!
Over the left shoulder of Swing Low is another bronze that is the life mask and hands of Abraham Lincoln. Right there in a case are the exact facsimile of the hands that wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, which, on January 1, 1863, freed the enslaved people of the Confederate states — a great use of executive order power, if you ask me.
But I digress.
Swing Low the maquette was cast by artist Alison Saar as a 1/7th-sized practice piece in the process of creating the full-sized (13 feet tall) public sculpture of the same name.
(You can see that one in the traffic triangle at West 122nd Street, St. Nicholas Avenue, and Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem. And if you do go see it, send a selfie with it and I will add it to this post!).
The commission honors Tubman’s vital role in American history as an abolitionist and conductor on the Underground Railroad. She spent over a decade leading up to the Civil War shepherding people escaping from enslavement in the South to their freedom in Northern states, Canada, and beyond. Tubman herself was born in Maryland to an enslaved family (hmmm, who else do we know from Maryland?), and she, too, escaped to her freedom via the Underground Railroad.
Let that sink in. After escaping chattel slavery herself, Tubman voluntarily returned to that region 13 times to help others claim their natural born freedom. Thirteen times she, technically a ‘fugitive slave,’ risked her life leading dozens of people to their own freedom.
Resistance in a Small Package
If you are local to western New York or planning a visit, I highly recommend a trip to the Harriet Tubman Home in Auburn, New York. Auburn is where she made her home post-Civil War, carried on another chapter of important humanitarian work, and was buried with military honors.
This maquette of Swing Low, a piece small enough to put on your coffee table, focuses on Tubman’s considerable power, in an era when someone like her typically possessed very little, if any, power. Her life was full of big acts of resistance carried out by a diminutive Black woman (she was 5’2”, exactly my height).
If the Underground Railroad was a figurative path to freedom, Tubman was the locomotive thundering along the tracks. Just look at her petticoat cow catcher peeking from under her skirt. Climb aboard this train or get out of the way.
There is a lot more to see of this sculpture up close. A pattern of faces across her skirt and the deep, sinister roots she’s shouldering to rip out remind us that doing the work may be an arduous task, be we undertake it because people matter.
Because. People. Matter.
And it matters what we do to help people in the face of unspeakable conditions, and at our own personal risk.
Nam and Texas Tale, Welded Steel, Melvin Edwards, 1973 and 1992
Sometimes art is autobiographical, like these abstract sculptures further in the American Art gallery.
Nam and Texas Tale, both of welded steel, are two of Melvin Edwards’ series Lynch Fragments, to-date around 300 pieces the artist has made since 1963 symbolizing “The lived experience of Black men and women in America.”
Yeah, that kind of lynch.
And, yes, you read that right – THREE HUNDRED pieces and counting. It’s as if the topic is inexhaustible for Edwards, and as if the goal is to put it on display for as many people as possible to see. Worldwide.
There are Lynch Fragments at MoMa, the Met, Museu De Arte De São Paulo, Brazil, Hammer Museum of UCLA, in private collections, and probably a lot of other places.
“Through his practice of assemblage and transformation, Edwards addresses political, cultural, and social themes through abstracted forms. Nam and Texas Tale—made nearly twenty years apart—remain true to Edwards’ distinct vision, evoking themes of protest and resistance.”
From MAG’s object pages on Nam and Texas Tale
Sharps and Chains
Both sculptures look like farm implements, hand tool scraps, and industrial rubble welded and looped together by big rings and chains. Like a bad dream where disparate objects cleave together, or one of those brain teaser puzzles. How does it fit together? How does it come apart? Maybe the pieces can never be separated or the puzzle solved. There are edges and points, and heaviness.
What first caught my attention about Texas Tale are the pointy tines facing outward; they resemble railroad spikes, which I have a knack for finding on hiking trails. I know how much a single spike weighs, so seeing these sculptures, made of similar bits, makes me wonder how they are anchored to the wall. Positioned like this, tines splayed out to the viewer, feels like a trap. Or a warning.
Joy and Vitality
Edwards’ life began being born Black in racially segregated Houston in 1937. By 1963, he had undoubtedly seen plenty and would soon witness how the Vietnam conflict impacted hundreds of thousands of his generation. He apparently stopped making pieces for Lynch Fragments in 1967, feeling the topic had run its course.
But America said, “Oh, we think we can inspire you to make more.”
During 1973, pro-segregation demonstrations and the denouement of the Vietnam conflict did inspire him to make more pieces for Lynch Fragments.
There’s a lot about Edwards I don’t know, but I do know he is still creating, including a new piece for Lynch Fragments as recently as in 2019. I imagine the heaviness of being Black in America hasn’t lightened much since 1963. I imagine it still often feels like a trap, made of points and edges and chains.
But.
Not far from these two sculptures hangs a 1948 painting of intense color and movement, Summer Street Scene in Harlem. It looks like a party you want to be at, and it is a party for the Black community depicted therein. The scene is the artist capturing “the joy and vitality of a summer in Harlem,” where, in the 1940s, many Black people had migrated to escape the Jim Crow South.
Because joy and vitality—and existing—are resistance, too.
San Quentin West Block II, Ostrich Egg Shell, Gil Batle, 2017
Continuing through the first floor of MAG and on the way to the second-floor staircase is the Brush Gallery exhibiting American Folk and Decorative Art. Folk art often employs materials that the casual observer would think atypical for artmaking. Think of it as refashioning common objects for a higher purpose.
Have you ever seen an ostrich egg up close? They are huge, compared to what you’re used to cracking for breakfast. They are just a little smaller than a Nerf football. However, I don’t recommend throwing one in a spiral. And at 2 mm thick, an ostrich eggshell is five times thicker than a chicken eggshell.
So, why not use a high-speed dental drill to carve intricate designs on an emptied ostrich eggshell?
Not The One That Might Reopen
That’s exactly what artist Gil Batle does.
San Quentin West Block II is also autobiography, and a nightmare made solid. San Quentin is a notorious state prison for men in California (which they now call a Rehabilitation Center. Ooof.). It’s located north of San Francisco on land that juts out into San Francisco Bay, about a dozen miles as the crow flies from that well-known and long closed (for now) island prison, Alcatraz.
Batle knows the California prison system well, including San Quentin, thanks to multiple visits over 20 years for fraud and forgery.
San Quentin West Block II is panels of prison life etched onto the shell of an ostrich egg. Visions of institutional brutality, methods of survival, racial violence, despair, and trying to maintain humanity amongst it all. Each panel is a story of mass incarceration played out on the smooth surface of a vessel symbolic of burgeoning life.
If Batle can relive those moments, the least we can do is witness.
“When I do a piece, I actually have to go back to prison mentally to feel the loneliness the anger the fear. I have to go back there in order to recreate that scene again. The brick wall, the bars. And when I look up from the egg … I feel gratitude that I’m not there anymore.”
Gil Batle, in the 2015 CBS Sunday Morning segment shared below
Art is Resistance
An ostrich egg is still an egg. It is still a symbol of fragility but also of hope and trust. Yet, the promise of an egg is only that there is a chance at life. Not a promise that all will be beautiful, or, in the cracking, a warning that all will be ugly.
Is it still art when the subject matter bumps up against ugliness?
It is. Even if art turns your stomach, it’s doing its job. That’s what makes artists disruptors and their art resistance.
If you can’t get to Memorial Art Gallery, find an art museum near you. There will definitely be some resistance afoot.
If you are in western New York, this is where you can learn about visiting Memorial Art Gallery. If you are a resident of Monroe County, New York, and have a valid library card, you can visit for free by checking out the MAG VIP Pass, which admits two adults and all children aged 18 and under.
Lastly, if you know me personally, hit me up to visit. I have a membership. 😊
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