Portland Press Herald: Art review: Historic photos from Caribbean paired with contemporary art of the diaspora

'Fragments of Epic Memory' at the Portland Museum of Art feels more like two distinct shows.

December 24, 2023
By Jorge S. Arango

This article appears in the Portland Press Herald.

You have just two weeks left to see “Fragments of Epic Memory” (through Jan. 7), the headline exhibition at the Portland Museum of Art. It is well worth making an effort to get there if you want to experience how fantastically varied and vibrant the contemporary art of the Caribbean diaspora is today. It’s a celebration of kaleidoscopic talent and – with its companion display of 19th-century photography – extraordinary resilience.

The statement for the exhibition reads, in part: “Captivating contemporary works from leading artists of Caribbean descent are placed in dialogue with more than 100 photographs from the Art Gallery of Ontario’s (AGO) Montgomery Collection of Caribbean Photographs, which document the emergence of photography alongside the unfolding of emancipation.”

It’s an intriguing concept, even if the phrase “placed in dialogue” doesn’t describe the installation quite accurately. “Fragments,” in fact, feels more like two shows in one, both of them absorbing. The AGO photo collection is displayed in handsomely constructed glass-topped wood cases at the center of the second gallery, within sight of just a few of the contemporary works. This may have been a necessity arising out of conservation concerns, contractual stipulations of the AGO or some other understandable rationale.

Whatever the reason, the relegation of these images to one location represents a missed opportunity to create a genuine dialogue that might have felt more stimulating and alive. The cases containing the photographs, which we must bend over to view clearly, end up feeling like a sort of conscience for the exhibition that vividly embodies not-quite-bygone colonialist racism and imperialist power structures. It is intact and slightly removed from the contemporary works, which illustrate how far we’ve come since then.

The AGO collection is itself worth long and considered contemplation, as it includes its own wealth of diverse photographic traditions – from street photography and genre scenes to portraiture and formalist still life. It’s a pity they do not include more documentation. It might simply not have been available, the photographers who pressed the shutter releases to capture them long gone and forgotten. There are occasional names, such as two still-life photos – one of a branch of jackfruit, the other a branch of soursop. They are rigorously executed and drop-dead luscious.

At the bottom right of each still life is the printed signature of Félix Morin, a French photographer – I later discovered through an internet search – who kept a shop in the Trinidadian capital Port of Spain. Here he produced “cartes de visites,” as souvenirs for travelers. These two shots are, by today’s standards, among Morin’s least objectionable work.

Morin, as it happens, was better known for portraits that featured Indo-Caribbean women in lavish dress and body ornaments, many of them sexualized (several of them, including one called “Coolie Woman, Trinidad” circa 1890 – admittedly an offensive title – are also here). In an article from Dissent magazine, “Postcards from Empire,” Gaiutra Baha quotes Krista Thompson’s book “An Eye for the Tropics,” which pointed out that these – and many other photos on display at the PMA of indentured Black and Brown people working sugarcane, cotton and coffee plantations – were “visual testaments to the effectiveness of colonial rule,” and were also meant to “convince primarily white travelers to the majority Black colonies that the ‘natives’ were civilized.”

This is valuable scholarship that would have offered crucial context with which to view this collection. And what of a studio portrait of a barefoot Black woman taken against a backdrop of dense jungle? It reminded me of James Van Der Zee’s Harlem studio portraits, which obviously came much later. Yet Van Der Zee’s were aspirational images, depicting well-dressed couples and families in elegant interiors, while here the association seems clearly to be with a human being not far evolved from the primordial jungle.

Imagine if photos like this had been interspersed with – instead of isolated from – the contemporary works of Caribbean-descended artists. The woman against the jungle backdrop, for example, might have been powerfully paired with Leasho Johnson’s “Sweet Sugarcane” paintings of a female and a male figure. They are anime-style characters striking provocative dancehall poses on a sugarcane pole. The wall label on these works explains them as “establish(ing) the cane field as a place of pleasure and liberation and enabl(ing) these figures to rupture their ties to slavery.” But it could just as easily evoke associations with stripper poles or primates climbing a tree.

Johnson’s thrillingly painted, almost violent work “Jaw bone (man looking back at the cane fields)” could have been fascinatingly paired with any number of tropical cane field images from the Montgomery collection. A grouping of Morin’s elaborately adorned Indo-Caribbean women next to Paul Anthony Smith’s “Midnight Blue,” a unique picotage on inkjet print of an elaborately costumed Jamaican dancer, might have sparked contemplation about exploitation versus assertions of identity against oppression that were at the root of Caribbean carnival traditions.

One set of works, the single-channel videos of Rodell Warner’s “Augmented Archive” series, does effectively unite the two parts of this show. In them, Warner takes 19th-century images similar to those in the Montgomery collection, embeds them in a video, colors them and then superimposes flickering digital images above or around the figures to indicate the inner lives of these subjects that cannot be gleaned from their simple portraits. These superimposed images morph constantly, recalling jewels, butterflies and other precious objects, insects associated with sacred symbolism and miraculous transformational processes.

Videos, as it happens, are some of the most powerful works in “Fragments.” I cannot overstate how astonishing Ebony G. Patterson’s “…three kings weep…” is. It’s physically removed from the larger show, occupying a small dark space on the second floor. The location and hushed environment approximate a kind of chapel. Before us are three screens – a flat one in the middle flanked by two angled ones – and projected onto each of them is a different Black man.

The video begins with these men filmed naked from their torsos up. A young boy recites Claude McKay’s poem “If We Must Die” (“If we must die, O let us nobly die,/So that our precious blood may not be shed/In vain …”) as the men slowly begin donning shirts, vests, jewelry and so on, until they are resplendently clad in glittering, colorful outfits. Finally, they “crown” themselves. All the while, we notice they are crying, but their tears are moving upward, not down their cheeks.

There is so much being transmitted here: the nakedness of enslaved people denied their rites, rituals and manner of dress; the general and more terrifying denial of the innate humanity of Black and Brown bodies; the swallowing of their pain; the undeniable dignity of their being; their descendance from African royalty; the way they use dress performatively to establish their value; the images of masculinity and sexuality they conform to or flout; the delicate way they must navigate society by adopting one or another persona. It is nothing short of mesmerizing.

Back downstairs, Jeannette Ehlers presents “Black Bullets,” a video tribute to the Haitian revolution of 1791. It films a procession of Black children in school uniforms and their reflections against the sky above a fort built by the first Black Haitian monarch, Henri Christophe, to defend against the French. As the figures move across the screen, they fuse into their reflections, becoming dots that evoke bullets. The four-minute, 33-second video is haunting. Though it honors a victory, it also can recall mass migrations and extinctions of enslaved people. It’s the last thing you see before exiting into the museum’s Great Hall. And it will stay with you well beyond your visit.