The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, Installation view, 2021 [photo: Travis Fullerton; courtesy of Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond]
We Meet in a Patchwork: Landscapes and Elsewheres
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In the following collaborative text, Makshya Tolbert and DJ Hellerman weave a patchwork of shared curiosity and mutual enchantment while physically re/situating themselves within the American Southeast. At the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts exhibition The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, Tolbert and Hellerman’s bodies and spirits converge, diverge, expand. What follows is a living and porous co-gesture to make sense of their encounters at the VMFA, encounters that translocate them to the Wacissa Slave Canal, to rural Alabama, to historic Savannah, to unnameable landscapes—physical and interior. In sharing a canvas, Tolbert and Hellerman weave an assemblage that can be read in parts, against each other, as a chorus. Part speculation, part ekphrasis, part human, and part found, what follows is a moment in time that carries the authors to a different moment in time, onward still, then back again.
THE GOER’S VIGNETTE (for Jonas)
Our visit to The Dirty South is still mysterious to me. I stood in front of Aaron Douglas’ Untitled (1934), paying close attention to the subtle movements of light and shadow. It was unlike any other Douglas work I’ve seen. For the first time, I saw his work through my body rather than through my eyes, my intellect. This was not how I thought I’d feel, and it certainly was not how I had been told to feel. Douglas lets the haze reveal the light, ethereal and atmospheric. Feeling in-between places, his placement of pigment became a portal for what I didn’t know: the layers, the lifetimes, the landscapes connecting the real with the unreal. This divine drawing was giving breath to thought.
The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, Installation view, 2021 [photo: Travis Fullerton; courtesy of Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond]
Renee Stout’s She Kept Her Conjuring Table Very Neat (1990) reminded me that interior alchemy is the intent and transformation, is where we attempt to mythologize. Throughout my life, some artists and objects have lifted me up. Others have trampled me into the ground. Standing in front of Stout’s table let me see that my attempts to articulate were actually blocking so much. Packed with the incomprehensible, can an artwork be more alive than we are? Ignorance in the world, you know, always begins at home.
Renee Stout, She Kept Her Conjuring Table Very Neat, 1990, mixed Media [courtesy of the Adolph D. and Wilkins C. Williams Fund and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond]
Art, museums, and exhibitions constitute a particular matrix of collective wayfinding through the complexities of the South. The landscape, heat, humidity, and, of course, the Spanish moss all up against and acting upon one another—conjuring histories not yet visible enough to some and not yet acknowledged by others. It’s all in there, it’s possible. Art has a way of reconciling my inability to get lost with the impossibility of knowing where and how to go, participate, and contribute. It can haunt, be an apparition or a hallucination—simple acts of imagination, mixing observation with fantasy, memory, and overflowing with the specter of profoundly unfinished business.
WATERY PANTOUM FOR THE SWAMPY FIRMAMENT
after Allison Janae Hamilton’s Wacissa (2019)
We, kept alive, hanging
from an eelgrass sky
the wake gurgling and
i can’t stop flying home
love quiet this day, the
piling theater of birds nearby
all but praying to limestone:
to be hung is to roam
as the wake gurgles
and i can’t stop flying home
across a braided river
pink from milkweed, from
bloom,
all but preying over limestone
from hung towards roam
thick dreadlock masses
thread this pickerel weed loom
into a cross, a braided river &
pink milkwood heavy with bloom,
murky water, flickering between
green, blue, alive or not—
thick dreadlock masses
thread into pickerel weed, loom,
we let our sides erode
dress the past in old light, plot
murk, a flickering between
green, blue, alive. or not.
meandering the jam as if
dizzy in song, undulated melody
we let our sides erode, undress
the past in old light, plot
return. channel this river into
a nest, sing to stones an elegy
meandering the jam as if dizzy
in song, undulated melody
of love, quiet today.
theater pile of birds nearby,
o, return. unchannel this river into
nest, sing stones an elegy
We unkempt, alive,
hanging from an eelgrass sky.
The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, Installation view, 2021 [photo: Travis Fullerton; courtesy of Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond]
BRIEF STATEMENT ON WATERY PANTOUM FOR THE SWAMPY FIRMAMENT
after Allison Janae Hamilton’s Wacissa (2019)
I can’t help but return to Wacissa. The video’s sounds raise the specter of gurgling or possibly breathing underwater, as Allison Janae Hamilton’s camera moves through the river system of the Wacissa Slave Canal. I wanted to double over and hear the river itself as best as I could. In “Watery Pantoum for the Swampy Firmament,” I’m humbled by what rots and what is kept alive on and under the Wacissa. In remnants that blur time, I try to hear the water, I try to survive the frictive journey through eelgrass, sticks, milkweed. Somewhere in the space between being upside down and moving through a place while feeling out of place, I began to get my breath back.
The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, Installation view, 2021 [photo: Travis Fullerton; courtesy of Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond]
The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, Installation view, 2021 [photo: Travis Fullerton; courtesy of Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond]
FOR AN ELSEWHERE
We unfold in messy cycles
Revolutions and counter-revolutions
I haven’t quite fallen to wickedness,
Though that’s not what I’ve been told
Filling this faith-shaped void,
Is religion
Filling this faith-shaped void,
Is church
Filling this faith-shaped void,
Is worship
This war by proxy
I’ll settle in love
Abandon me to re-create me,
everywhere you look
The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, Installation view, 2021 [photo: Travis Fullerton; courtesy of Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond]
CANOPY RUINS (for Walt)
I saw in Savannah a live oak growing
Moss hanging from those lusty branches
A picture perfect
Postcard-worthy grove
Neck-soft, a little lost
Chin perked to the sky
Wide-eyed and grinning
That unmistakable tourist smile
Come see Wormsloe with me
Nesting yellow-throated warblers
Roosting clumps of Seminole bats
Flowering mulberry trees
I saw in Savannah a live oak growing
Moss hanging from those lusty branches
Pineapples to your mattress
Goddess hair
Grandpa’s long gray beard
Truths just out of our reach
Its beauty suspended in the sky
Its beauty swaying in the thick humid breeze
Its beauty
Its lie
RaMell Ross, Caspera, 2019, Inkjet print, mounted on dibond [photo: RaMell Ross courtesy of artist and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts]
HOUSETOP
after Rita Mae Pettway’s Housetop—Fractured Medallion Variation (1977)
Above, a hum wards away the light, the night sky still living and
full. old red clothes stitch a ruptured throat
as red cloth, rather, pools at our feet. cherry auspices of crookedness
hit up against each other, always met by blue.
this shared medallion of our living & our loving. we have winter
& each other. let the clearing stay red, we say.
medallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionme
medallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionme
medallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionme
medallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionme
medallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionme
medallion medallion
medallion a september somewhere medallion
medallion red and dying halves swelling medallion
medallion with summer, apples billowing medallion
medallion blue in midair the ribbed grace medallion
medallion of old spirits in errant acts medallion
medallion of kindness a prayer for warmth, medallion
medallion safety is scarlet pooling at my feet medallion
medallion morning glories folding the sky in four medallion
medallion medallion
medallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionme
medallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionme
medallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionme
medallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionmedallionme
I dream grandma is right, even in hell there are
angels, and many rivers, the night blued in quiet and stars.
my mother colors these nights from prison and
scribbles sorry home in a card worn enough to be of use.
i see my home in a radiance of red then an ombré
of blue. sewing outward, praying the housetop sees me first.
Rita Mae Pettway, Housetop (Fractured Medallion Variation), 1977, corduroy [courtesy of the Adolph D. and Wilkins C. Williams Fund, the Souls Grown Deep Foundation from the William S. Arnett Collection, and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond]
BRIEF STATEMENT ON HOUSETOP
after Rita Mae Pettway’s Housetop—Fractured Medallion Variation (1977)
In Housetop, I could feel red spilling off Rita Mae Pettway’s quilt and across the rooms of the Dirty South exhibition, from Rodney McMillian’s From Asterisks in Dockery (2012) to Alma Thomas’ Red Rambling Rose Spring Song (1976). In truth, I could feel my grandmother, and I felt like, if I stared at the medallion enough, old stories reappeared. In the poem, I’m listening to what lives in the wake of warding off evil, stitch by stitch. I, myself, did not “grow up under the quilt.” Yet I could feel Pettway’s quilt imbuing me with the capacity to remember my own family’s scraps. In “Housetop,” I imagine those scraps sewn to each other until they become a medallion, then a quilt.
THE SPACE BETWEEN MONOLITHS (for Makshya)
How do we meet
When time doesn’t exist?
Some cannot speak
Others have nothing to say
Neither of us reduced to agenda.
Stepping closer
Impossible to pull away
Without the music stopping.
Complicating relationships,
How we embody them
How we already are them.
Intractably indivisible,
Uniform and unyielding
We’re told this place is immovable.
The histories
That could be
Take lifetimes to see light.
Nothing is ever lost, the unbearable stays
Lights bright shadows sharper,
Can we be honest about our shadows?
When everything is moving
How can I feel
Honest about our shadows?
Confronting erasure
I’ve never known,
Honest about our shadows.
Something about this life, this place,
and us.