The chairs tell everything. Worn to threads, or lashed, two of them in Whitfield Lovell’s Ode are victims equally of both violence and time. Only their permanent ghost is intact, trapped upon the wall with the young man who has otherwise vanished, like one of those shadows permanently imprinted upon the pavement by the photo flash of a nuclear blast.

Left: 1) Whitfield Lovell, Ode (1999). Mixed media on wood with chairs. Yale University Art Gallery, Katharine Ordway Fund. fine arts magazine

For me this piece is the icon of this exhibition. Everything here is etched with violence and disappearances. The price of history is never paid in full, and especially not for this country’s debacle of race. All the bodies depicted here would once have been saleable. So the question inevitably arises in front of the image entitled Man, from a triptych Man, Spirit, Mask by Willie Cole, are the features maimed by ritual or brutality? Is the title itself an assertion or an irony?

These uncertainties are the defining characteristic of our inheritance from slavery, and they pull at us from every piece in this show. In Kerry James Marshall’s untitled painting the subject means to become her own portraitist but the paint-by-numbers plot seals her fate as a graceful stereotype; only on the smeared palette is she freed.

In a group of four etchings with aquatint, Kara Walker renders her small theatres of cruelty as pages out of a censored Matthew Brady comic book. In Cotton, the cotton bolls are speckled with barbs waiting to impale the falling child, like a revision of Brer Rabbit who is no longer immune to the briar patch. In another, the executioner’s rope around his neck, John Brown appears to feast, like the Greek god Cronus, on a proffered infant. There is feasting, too, in Vanishing Act, with a black woman swallowing a white child, python-like, on stage. And a child gives birth under the bemused gaze of armed men in Li’l Patch of Woods. Each grotesque meant to remind us of how much more grotesque is the history of our racism itself.

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s untitled drawing holds the memory of a kindergartner’s terror, almost as if fashioned in response to one of those therapeutic suggestions accompanied by a sheet of paper and a box of crayons. A bright failure in self-defense, it cuts to the heart.

There is more, of course, and on the surface, this exhibition is simply about a museum playing catch up in its collection of African-American art, while giving students their scholarly way with objects that resist them at every turn. But beneath it all is the hard story that we have yet to read to the end.

By Stephen Vincent Kobasa, Contributing Writer

Now, through June 26, 2011

Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel Street, New Haven, CT

203-432-0600

http://www.artgallery.yale.edu/

Additional image citation information follows:

1) Whitfield Lovell, Ode (1999). Mixed media on wood with chairs. Yale University Art Gallery, Katharine Ordway Fund.

2)  Willie Cole, Man from the triptych Man, Spirit, and Mask (1999). Photoetching and embossing with hand additions. Yale University Art Gallery, A. Conger Goodyear, B.A. 1899, Fund. 

3) Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (2009). Acrylic on PVC. Yale University Art Gallery, Purchased with the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund and a gift from Jacqueline L. Bradley, B.A. 1979.

4) Kara Walker,Cotton (1996-97). Etching and aquatint on chine collé. Yale University Art Gallery, A. Conger Goodyear, B.A. 1899, Fund.

Above: 5) Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (1981). Oil stick. Yale University Art Gallery, Richard Brown Baker, B.A. 1935, Collection.