Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South – a profoundly moving exhibition at Royal Academy of Arts
Review by James Brewer
“My art is the evidence of my freedom,” the late Thornton Dial would exult. He was among a generation who were barely free from poverty, descendants of slaves, but finally liberated himself from drudgery. He was born in 1938 to an indebted sharecropping, family labouring in the cotton fields in Alabama, and spent years working in heavy industry. He is one of the most articulate – verbally and artistically speaking – African Americans celebrated in Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South which has opened at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
Thornton Dial passed away seven years ago but left a rich heritage of ingenious visual storytelling. The distinctive creativity of the 34 artists featured in this exhibition blazes forth in artworks reverberating with the recent and sometimes shameful history of the supremacist South. Most of the work is from the collection of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation of Atlanta, Georgia.
There are sculptures made from bits of iron, wood and old tyres picked up from the outdoors, and vibrant quilts woven by accomplished women whose creations have become American treasures.
Families of these artists, some living in the western flatlands of Alabama, suffered not so long ago from inhuman enslavement, from the vicious segregationist policies and lynch mobs of the Jim Crow era and more recently from institutionalised racism – but they displayed indomitable spirit.
Inspired in part by the Civil Rights Movement, the artists at times find it hard to repress their anger over the raw cruelty of and disparagement by white groups and individuals responsible for, or participating in the anti-Black laws, rules, and customs that blighted society until the mid-1960s, brutal replays of which continue to this day. The Jim Crow name originated from a racially stereotyped character created by a white travelling performer for his blackface act in the early 19th century.
Living often hand-to-mouth, the artists featured here lacked resources including conventional art materials, but they made up for it by scavenging for local, materials and objects that could be repurposed – even in one instance an old muffin-baking tin – into their opus.
Just consider the materials gathered for the most emblematic work of Thornton Dial. Stars of Everything, completed in 2004, was made from used paint pots, plastic cans, spray paint cans, spray paint, clothing, wood, steel, carpet, plastic straws, rope, oil, enamel, and Splash Zone compound (which is normally used for repairing and sealing cracks in steel, concrete, and wood) and Thornton superimposed all these on canvas fixed to wood.
He cut and splayed the paint cans into a field of brilliant stars, energetically transforming the melange of “junk” into a colourful universe meant to satirise the illusions of celebrity, so-called success and its rewards. In the centre is the figure of an American eagle in a shabby suit, with a piece of old carpet and strands of rope – symbolising oppression – over its shoulders. The work is a kind of self-portrait, as the artist sees himself as a scavenger or “pickup bird” of material scraps.
Similarly, retrieved wood, roots, rubber tyre, wire, fabric, plastic air freshener, enamel, and industrial sealing compound went into Thornton’s Tree of Life (In the Image of Old Things) from 1994, memorialising the life and then-impending death of his more than 100-year-old great-aunt, Sarah Dial Lockett, who had raised him. He put the motley collection of cast-offs onto a plant stand – made from the old car tyre – which had been bought by “auntie.” In this sculpture, Dial, who was illegitimate, abandoned by his mother and grew up amid racially mixed relatives, compares his own tree of life and that of his aunt to the growth of a real tree. The used tyre, which had travelled the roads for many miles, thus nurtures new life. The whole is a reflection on the tensions between traditions and the modern age. His message was: accommodate to changing times but respect your traditions and honour the past.
Sarah Lockett’s spirit is also present in a commemorative work by Ronald Lockett (1965-1998), for she was his great-grandmother who had brought him up among three generations of the Lockett and Dial families. Ronald put together cut tin, nails, and enamel on wood, a piece he called Sarah Lockett’s Roses. As Sarah’s health began to fail, Ronald and Thornton became increasingly interested in the quilts she made over the years. Like most African American quilts, many were improvisations without patterns, more like quilt “backs” than stylised, formal patterns of fronts. Ronald began to consider the quilt a magic heirloom that tied together many generations in a shared language. Ronald completed this appreciation of his elder in 1997, a year before his death from AIDS-related pneumonia. He had been the youngest promising African American visual artist in the South and one of the few there without personal memories of the civil rights movement.
Thornton’s triumph had been to overcome the disadvantages of his early years, which started with picking cotton as soon as he learned to walk, to become a significant figure in American art with his drawings, assemblages, sculptures, and installations. He was put to farmwork at the age of five running mules around a hay baler and helping milk the cows. At school, “instead of being in my books I was into the drawing, and Professor King, the principal of the school, gave us so many ass-whippings,” he related in an interview in the Souls Grown Deep website.
Over his life, he did “every kind of work a man can do” including carpentry, painting, construction, welding, plumbing, pouring iron at a foundry, and 30 years making train carriages in the industrial city of Bessemer. His years at the iron works taught him a lot about drawing when designs were punched out to make “big, beautiful pieces of steel.”
“My art is talking about the power,” said this astute thinker. It was about the coal mines and the ore mines and the steel mills, about the government, and the unions, but “my art is the evidence of my freedom. A piece of art is like the movement of the clouds, or the sun in the sky,” constantly moving, always changing. Being raised by women made him understand how to be a man, and appreciate the love, care, strength, and power of women.
Thornton Dial’s son Richard (born 1955) made a speciality of chair-sculpture – yielding uncomfortable rather than comfortable constructs. From late 1987 to early 1989 he joined furniture with art, in searing works including the provocatively titled Which Prayer Ended Slavery? Using welded steel and wire, he reworked a metal seat: in the lower section a white figure is whipping a kneeling black, another African American is being hanged, and a third is in chains. Above this gruesome scene, black and white figures are seen praying.
Ralph Griffin (1925-1992) said that because “the boll weevils did all the work,” on his family’s cotton farm he went “bankrupt” forcing him to abandon farming to travel from one construction job to another. In the late 1970s he began scavenging roots and weathered tree trunks, using black, white, or red paint to turn them into sculpted creatures. He seldom altered the wood debris he came across, which he believed dated back to “Noah’s time” and had “come through water” to the present day.
Lonnie Holley salvaged the top of what the Americans call a phonograph (record player), an old record, and an animal skull in 1986 to erect a small piece called Keeping a Record of It (Harmful Music). This is a reminder that in the 1940s and 1950s the music of black people was berated as ‘dangerous’ to white sensibilities. In this work he literally ‘keeps a record’ of the racial assumptions heaped on black creative expression. Since he was five, in 1955, Lonnie took jobs including picking up rubbish at a drive-in movie theatre, washing dishes, and cooking. Now he is involved in drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, filmmaking, performance, and sound. He has recorded five music albums and has toured in the US, Europe, Brazil, Australia, and New Zealand. His work is on permanent display in the United Nations and has been displayed in the White House Rose Garden.
For one-time indicted criminal Joe Light, rivers represented hope and here we have his Blue River Mountain, made from enamel on wood in 1988. Joe was born in 1934 in Memphis, Tennessee, where he died in 2005. He worked on a farm before enlisting in the US Army in 1951 from which he was discharged and later incarcerated for armed robbery. His conversion to Judaism during a second prison term led him to make driftwood sculptures and paintings that expressed with a Pop Art approach his political and spiritual view. He considered himself a fighter against ignorance, injustice, and hypocrisy and he wrote biblical-like pronouncements on pavements and walls.
There is another touching story behind the magnificent, shiny Three-Way Bicycle made by Charlie Lucas. In 1984, at the age of 33, Charlie fell from the back of a truck at a construction site and was permanently disabled. Soon afterwards he produced with the addition of metal machine parts and electrical wiring the wheeled marvel, which represents the dilemma he faced: “When I come to the crossroads, I got three choices about which way to go,” he explained in an interview on the Foundation site. “I think a lot on it, ‘cause if I make the wrong one, I can’t go back.” The bicycle has three front wheels, each pointing in its own direction, representing the choices: to make art full-time, to move to a neighbouring county and become a farmer, or to retire and draw disability payments. Fortunately, he became a full-time artist, something he had wanted to be since childhood – his teacher had told the eight-year-old: “You’re talking about art, and that’s for white folks. You got to learn a trade!” He recalled: “I knew then that school didn’t have nothing for me, so I left.”
Charlie and other artists did not have access to formal art spaces, so some decided to display their work outside their houses. They built ‘sculpture gardens,’ ceding much of their surrounds to their artwork. Many of Charlie’s sculptures stand along a rural road and in the fields around his house. A contemporary, Joe Minter (born 1943) created near Birmingham, Alabama, one of the largest examples in the American South called African Village in America.
The Royal Academy exhibition includes emphasis on the quilting village of Gee’s Bend, whose residents include descendants of slaves who worked on the cotton plantation established in 1816 on a bend of the Alabama river by a planter named Joseph Gee. Many inhabitants still bear the surnames of the slave masters. The community remained intact in the Depression thanks to government loans and protection from forced evictions, unlike members of other communities, who departed in what was known as The Great Migration, during which more than 6m rural African Americans moved to the cities of the North, Midwest, and West.
In the 1960s, inspired by a visit of Martin Luther King Jr to the local Baptist church, community members became active in the Civil Rights Movement, and cultural traditions from the 19th century like quilt-making flourished. The vivid, multi-layered fabrics have been described as architectural abstraction, and recognised as an important chapter of American art.
Among the superb quilters is Marlene Bennett Jones, born 1947, with such bold pieces as Triangles from 2021, in denim, corduroy, and cotton. Marlene, the eighth oldest of 14 children, began quilting at the age of eight, and grew up working the field with her family. She went on to study electronics and became an aeronautical electrician. After retiring, she returned to Gee’s Bend to help her ailing mother, quilting at her mother’s bedside. Her passion for the art form was exemplified by an exhibition in which she showed her work in 2021 in Florida with the theme “I don’t ever want it to be a lost art.”
In total, the Royal Academy assembles 64 works from the mid-20th century to the present. Its collaboration with the Souls Grown Deep Foundation produced the show in just 16 months, a great achievement considering the scale of logistics of selection, transport, research and cataloguing that goes into any major exhibition. Many of the artists are well known in the US, but most of the works are having their first airing in Europe.
The Souls Grown Deep Foundation derives its name from a 1921 poem by Langston Hughes (1902-67) entitled The Negro Speaks of Rivers, the last lines of which are “I’ve known rivers:/ Ancient, dusky rivers. / My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” Langston Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, the flourishing of black intellectual, literary, and artistic life in the 1920s. The foundation holds what it says is the largest collection of works by black artists from the southern US, encompassing 1,000 works by more than 160 artists, two-thirds of whom are women.
The exhibition is curated by Raina Lampkins-Fielder, curator of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, and Axel Rüger, secretary and chief executive of the Royal Academy. Axel Rüger said: “Our view of the canon of art is informed by knowledge of our history, and our history has excluded lots of artists over the centuries. It is incumbent on us to widen our view and broaden our perception and inspire our audiences in doing so.” He said that the exhibition embraced a celebration of daily life, music, love, and laughter as well as the challenges, he said. Raina Lampkins-Fielder compared the reclamation of materials carried out by the artists to the reclamation of history. The found objects, both mass-produced and organic, had been imbued with the energy of the people, a rebuff to the era when being an artist was considered a criminal act. From the 1930s there was a move to break away from traditional forms to the improvisational – doing it “my way.”
Captions in detail:
Stars of Everything, 2004. By Thornton Dial. Mixed media. Souls Grown Deep Foundation, Atlanta. © 2023 Estate of Thornton Dial/ Artists Rights Society, New York / DACS, London 2023. Photo: Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio.
Thornton Dial. Photo by Vanessa Vadim.
Ronald Lockett with Sarah Lockett’s Roses, 1977. Photo by William Arnett.
Tree of Life (In the Image of Old Things), 1994. By Thornton Dial. Found wood, roots, rubber tyre, wire, fabric, plastic air-freshener, enamel, and industrial sealing compound. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Adolph D and Wilkins C Williams Fund and partial gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, from the William S Arnett Collection, 2018.62.
Three-Way Bicycle, c 1985. By Charlie Lucas. Bicycle wheels, metal machine parts and electrical wiring.
Ralph Griffin, Eagle, 1988. Found wood, nails, paint. Souls Grown Deep Foundation, Atlanta. © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2023. Photo: Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio.
Keeping a Record of It (Harmful Music), 1986. By Lonnie Holley. Salvaged phonograph top, phonograph record, animal skull. Souls Grown Deep Foundation, Atlanta. © 2023 Lonnie Holley / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London. Photo: Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio.
Blue River Mountain, 1988. By Joe Light. Enamel on wood. Souls Grown Deep Foundation, Atlanta. © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2023. Photo: Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio.
Triangles, 2021. By Marlene Bennett Jones. Denim, corduroy, and cotton. Souls Grown Deep Foundation, Atlanta. © 2023 Marlene Bennett Jones / Artists Rights Society, New York/ DACS, London. Photo: Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio.
Doris Mosely (left) and Mary Margaret Pettway quilting in Gee’s Bend, 2021. Photo Peter Pitkin/ Pitkin Studio.
Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South. The Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Galleries of the Royal Academy until June 18, 2023.
