Exhibition Essay
Exploding Timelines for the Love of Now
by Jeannie Simms
In the summer of 2019 in the Tufts Tisch Library, Marla McLeod combed through old print copies of Ebony and Vogue, semiotics texts, and works from Deborah Willis and James Baldwin, seeking photos and illustrations of the ways people adorned themselves during Black social movements. She sought examples of clothes and ideas stitched together with time.
The images and texts served as reference material for new paintings and wearable garments that form the focus of her study. The beret, the hoodie, the drag ball gown, church dresses and hats, baggy pants, sneakers in the brightest colors, zoot suits--the research was a diachronic plunge into the clothes people used to enliven spirits, command regard, exalt in the self and buttress against enmity. Style is connective and also individual. While individuals can don their own unique look, most people borrow bits and bobs from familiars or images from magazines, television, movies, online and historic. Clothes are alive, change every day, and hauntingly recall those who are gone.
The magic of cloth, I came to believe, is that it receives us: receives our smells, our sweat, our shape even. And when our parents, our friends, our lovers die, the clothes in their closets still hang there, holding their gestures, both reassuring and terrifying, touching the living with the dead. [1]
"Baldwin" and "Anonymous Woman," both androgynous garments from 2019, are part regalia, part memorial. They merge divergent styles, time periods and aesthetic tactics into singular garments. They incorporate texts and textiles as humble fabrics commingle with pomp and bling. "Baldwin" is topped with a black hoodie upright on the mannequin’s head, looming tall over passages from Baldwin’s writings painted in large circular patterns inspired by a range of African textiles. Tattered white cotton fringe contrasts with a draping black satin cape embellished with sequined gold. Cursive letters cascade down the entire body as if announcing the name of a reigning prizewinner making a ceremonial appearance. It is less for Baldwin the man and more as a symbol of protection for the dead and the living. Part robe and part shroud, in the raw cotton and rope details that bundle the chest, it’s an object that combines the rigor and revelation of his words with shards of the centuries before him and decades after. Emblazoned on the chest, over the heart, is an image referencing the Black Panther mask from the 2018 Marvel Studios Film. The superhero film was a galvanizing cultural event imagining a future black world epitomizing knowledge and technological achievement where time travel helps people in the film’s past (which is our contemporary present).
"Anonymous Woman" also fuses different time periods with a gown inspired by drag ball dresses. The piece is topped with a head wrap worn by women in many West African cultures. The same wrap was worn by enslaved women in the US for practical reasons or where it was a legislated requirement. The main gown is thinly woven white cotton tucked into a brown burlap bodice with exposed seams. The balloon sleeves are stamped with a manufacturer’s imprint and unfinished threads hang off the cuffs. At the bottom of the long, gathered skirt are hand-painted quotes from Sojourner Truth and Janelle Monae alongside quotes written about Grace Jones, Madame C.J. Walker and Maudelle Bass, the latter from art historian Carla Williams. The garment is topped with a black hooded shawl, but this hood is draped flat in a relaxed state.
I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off into slavery, and when I cried out in a mother's grief, none but Jesus heard and ain't I a woman? [2]
The quote attributed to Sojourner Truth remains the powerhouse as it speaks to the deep entangling of racial and gender oppression through the absence of legal rights for either at the time. These words connect directly to the intersectional politics of the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement that professes: “We affirm the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, undocumented folks, folks with records, women, and all Black lives along the gender spectrum. Our network centers those who have been marginalized within Black liberation movements.” [3]
Other contemporary artists have created clothing that cast the body as a site to remember those unjustly lost; to launch pleas for a better future; or demand equity for Black Americans, women and queer people.
Hunter Reynolds made dresses as memorials in the 1990’s. "Patina du Prey Memorial Dresses" (1993-2007) were covered in the names of those who died of AIDS while handwritten entries from Reynold’s diary emblazoned the surface of "The Love Dress" (1994). Both were styled after ball gowns and were worn in performances until 2007 in which Reynolds “would vogue, lounge, or speak to viewers as part of a daily endurance performance.” [4]
New York-based artist Lorraine O’grady performed in the early 1980’s as "Mlle Bourgeoise Noire," “Wearing a costume made of 180 pairs of white gloves from Manhattan thrift shops and carrying a white cat-o-nine-tails made of sail rope from a seaport store and studded with white chrysanthemums,” which O’grady called the “Whip-That-Made-Plantations-Move.” [5] O’grady appeared as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire first at the Just Above Midtown Gallery in 1980 and at other sites thereafter to critique the exclusion of blacks and women from mainstream art world exhibitions and to demand that “Black Art Must Take More Risks!” [6] Alabama native Willoughby Lucas Hastings’ uses colonial calico and cotillion style lace fabrics in her “Dissenting Debutantes Dresses,” (2020) which proclaim messages like, “Mask up. BLM” or “Vote No on Alabama’s Amendment 2” or “Protect People, Not Traditions” [7] to subvert and co-opt historically white, plantation aesthetics to promote black lives and reproductive rights for women.
McLeod’s oil-painted portraits of women in simple black clothing were created simultaneously to the garments and emphasize the women’s direct address of the viewers, the ease of the subject’s poses and significant exposed brown skin. Clothing is mostly absent in this series, leaving room to observe the women’s bodies holding their gestures, the ways they have styled themselves--and how they have elected to pose for the painter--and viewers. Hugging a raised knee in her arms, "Erica Ancrum" appears seated in a black t-shirt that disappears into the black background, pronouncing the muscles in her legs, arms—as well as a floral tattoo with a camera on her foot—that all pop out to the foreground. "Adriah" appears with long blue braids and hands resting gently on her legs painted with a chiaroscuro that creates a vibrant and luminous three dimensionality. Hanging near the paintings are custom cloths with words from each of the women’s mothers and designs inspired by protective Mali mud cloths. "Erica Ancrum (textile)" is embellished with the words: “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.” The Jamaican proverbs “Mi mouth a mi market” and “Wha nuh kill, fatten” are written on the outer margins of "Forest, textile." In these works, fabric again is a messenger of protection and desire, shared through mothers to their daughters, to Mcleod and onto viewers in a network of communicative care.
In contrast, McLeod’s sculptural garments offer clothing without bodies. They stand on forms used by museums, historic displays and retail shops that are almost always aspirational in their staging. Mannequins hold the garments in a pregnant way, as if they are half alive or arriving from the past and waiting for a future body. They are theatrical and ghostly at the same time, like a monument to a person gone or yet to be. McLeod's use of visual styles and symbols focus on past and present codes of identity connecting history and the present, old laws and new policies for which living bodies continue to fight and perish. In her works, painting and clothing design are tools to explode a chronological timeline of feminist and black and brown activism to form works that emotionally resonate right now. In these “bodies of work” past centuries and decades all feel simultaneously present and thrust into 2021, with bodies wrapped in both history and momentous possibility.
Special thanks to Amy Sadao and Peggy Simms.
[1] Peter Stallybrass, “Clothes, Mourning and the Life of Things,” The Yale Review 81, no. 2 (1993): 35.
[2] [Sic] Transcribed from Marla McLeod’s Anonymous Woman sculpture.
[3] https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/, accessed on July 17, 2021
[4] https://www.artspeak.nyc/home/2019/11/18/hunter-reynolds, accessed on July 10, 2021
[5] https://www.lorraineogrady.com/art/mlle-bourgeoise-noire/, accessed on July 19, 2021
[6] Mitter, Siddartha, “Lorraine O’Grady, Still Cutting Into the Culture.” The New York Times, February 19, 2021
[7] https://www.willoughbylucashastings.com, accessed on July 17, 2021
Jeannie Simms is an artist who produces photographs, videos and objects often focused on precarious geopolitical situations, conjuring desires and fantasies from real people in settings of labor and migration. Through an interplay of intercultural collaboration, conversation and staging, her works incorporate performances, interviews and observational filming to create media works that defy categorization. She is a professor of the practice in photography at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Tufts University.