Is Folk Art Dying?

John Haber
in New York City

John Dunkley and Paa Joe

Race, Myth, Art, and Justice

The American Folk Art Museum sets John Dunkley in "Neither Day nor Night." It shows the Jamaican as neither happy for his country nor less than proud of it. It shows him, too, as neither simply a folk artist nor sophisticated, yet often as not in the know.

It must seem a long way from the Americas to Africa—or from a coffin to a castle. Not for the very same museum and Paa Joe, who toiled for decades on figurative coffins before sculpting the forts and castles of Ghana. It was not altogether a release from death. So is folk art dying or obsessed with death? The photographers in "Race, Myth, Art, and Justice" in Harlem have roots in Africa and the Caribbean, too, and a presence in Europe and the United States. They are speaking out in public, but they are also sharing very private histories.

Cheek to cheek with death

Diamond Wedding poses a couple cheek to cheek. The warmth of their smiles more than matches the warm red of the bricks to either side and the shine of the bower that encloses them. John Dunkley loves settings like that, returning again and again to landscape, and the museum pairs it with a heart-shaped garden at the center of a long road. As the title has it, he has come Back to Nature, but have he and the aging couple also come closer to dying? The paired floral arrangements might be their grave—and the two urns to either side the setting for a funeral. Dunkley never lacks for warmth, even in the chill of a night sky, but he is always cheek to cheek with death.

Has the couple found love in middle age, or is this their diamond anniversary? Are they a portrait at all, or just a sign of Dunkley's love affair with Jamaica? Either way, his art pays tribute to a homeland, but at a sober remove from home. When he titles a landscape Most Faithful, its narrow path runs up against tall rocks, and it is literally hedged in. Fences, stairs, stones, and perspective itself—again and again they confine a seen or unseen traveler, perhaps the artist, and keep him from his destination. A road curves off to infinity, away from the slightest hint of a village or city, as if of its own accord.

Yet Dunkley did come home, after travels to Panama, Costa Rica, and goodness knows where else. He opened a barbershop, while making art on the side in the decade before his death, in 1947, at fifty-five. The museum's roughly thirty paintings and a dozen sculptures are more than half his known work. The sculpture alone, in stone and polished wood, stands for his nation with its people and animals between celebration and mourning. An acrobat rests and a woman on horseback rears, but they cannot remove the weariness of Old Joe. Animals abound in paintings, too, and a woman on a dark cliff is Feeding the Fishes—but a dog lies helpless in another road, a crab has the scale of a sea monster, and a horse is about to throw its most accomplished rider.

Is the sculpture closer to totems or to Modernism, like that of Kathe Kollwitz in Germany, and what of the paintings? Dunkley may be a "primitive," but blackness could make anyone an outsider in America, and he was also among Jamaica's best-known artists. A vase in his rare foray into bright color has a yellow right out of Vincent van Gogh. The acrobat could pass for a dancer by Edgar Degas. As a traveler, he was necessarily cosmopolitan, and who knows what art he may have seen along the way? He was self-taught, but he could well have taught himself out of spare copies of Life magazine destined for his barbershop.

He was also political, taking fierce pleasure in his country's demands for independence. He portrays its future leader feeding the flock, in the form of actual sheep. He did not take kindly either to the United States when it leased a military base from Great Britain, not even during World War II. President Roosevelt in an awkward portrait might be anxious, commanding, or sneering. Dunkley gets better and quirkier, though, when he returns to nature, with nothing at all like the view out his shop window. Perhaps he had to exclude that view, in his longings for home.

It is a home filled with spider's webs and ghosts, like the tall white figures that compose a Mountain's Edge. Mixed media give his oils a crusty texture, while the glow of highlights against pungent greens places them in moonlight, even by day. The moon itself appears often, its yellow orb all but identical to foreground stones and hedges. In the show's title painting, a man on a mule riding toward the picture plane could be going to market or returning home—seeking both kinds of sustenance in the space of the artist and viewer. Will he ever find them, and will that leave only emptiness behind him? He, too, is between not just night and day, but also death and life.

From coffins to castles

As Paa Joe surely relished, it is not at all far from a castle or fort to a coffin. Even in fairy tales, the master of a castle must come to death, and not even the stoutest of forts can provide protection. Then, too, a coffin is itself built to last for eternity—and all three forms of architecture are matters of craft and design. This is, after all, the American Folk Art Museum, where native traditions and self-taught artists merit attention for their art. Joe's painted wood fills a room there. His country commissioned the models in 2004 and 2005, to commemorate a sad and terrifying history.

The castles and forts served the Gold Coast of West Africa as "Gates of No Return." More than six million Africans passed through them, on their way to slavery in the Americas. (The sordid connection to the Afro-Caribbean diaspora of Myrlande Constant or Kathia St. Hilaire must explain what the art of Accra is doing at a museum of American art.) The models reach roughly to one's waist, so that the room rises to the dimensions of a city, but still far too small to enter. Even empty, their towers and courtyards look like prisons. One cannot imagine anyone finding a way in or a way out.

Not that they are altogether grim, no more than the art of Frédéric Bruly Bouabré in the Ivory Coast, but then for Joe neither is death. Born in 1947 as Joseph Ashong, he became a maker of figurative coffins, often in the sleek shape of animals. Known in Ghana as abebuu adekai, they have taken on new life since a dam brought greater wealth and made the tradition accessible to more than a few. They still suggest both playfulness and extravagance, and Joe has also made decorative palanquins—litters with poles carried on the shoulders of men. (The museum does not so much as mention them.) They serve to transport royalty to someplace kinder than death.

The show does not disrupt the fortifications for examples of Joe's craft, except in photographs and on film. There, too, he is playful and extravagant. Engaging the camera, he insists that the camera operator needs a coffin in the shape of one, so that survivors will know his or her line of work. Holding up a hammer, he thinks that might make a decent coffin, too, perhaps for him. He may not be altogether joking. He does not address the viewer, but I hate to imagine what he might suggest for me or you.

Stocky, confident, and smiling, he breaks the film's fourth wall, and the sculpture does much the same to bridge the distance between past and present. One can walk freely around and between models to size up their features. Like the coffins, they, too, start to look almost friendly. In photos of the forts and castles, gates appear dark and ominous, the walls worn and weary. The models come clean, with their fresh coat of paint. Some stick to light colors, while simulated stonework could pass for flower petals.

Still, they are faithful to the originals, in a fitting act of remembrance. One fort served for a while as a seat of government, and the commission goes with plans to convert it to a museum. The show holds only about half the work, but enough to compete quite well with miniature cities of Bodys Isek Kingelez, also from Africa, at MoMA. By comparison, Joe's are less modern but a lot less fanciful. Can they balance the demands for remembering and pride in the artistry and an independent Ghana? Coffins, too, offer no return.

Sharing secrets

The family matriarch, seen only through cramped interiors with aging photos. A woman in her nineties at a lunch counter, facing without seeing a little girl. A young woman facing the shore, not often able to see the water or the sky. Secrets passed between generations. One cannot share their secrets, but one can still imagine entering their lives. With "Race, Myth, Art, and Justice" at CCCADI, photography is all about sharing secrets.

It is less obviously about race, myth, art, and justice, although racism here is an open secret, much as for Jamel Shabazz in the boroughs of New York City. They say that the personal is the political, but one might do better to turn that phrase around so that the political is the personal. As one might expect from the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, the twelve contributors (each with wall text from a different writer) have wide-ranging roots, from Guyana to the Netherlands, although memory is itself at issue, and most were born in the United States. For Zoraida Lopez-Diago, who calls the tribute to a matriarch Daughters of Kronos, memory has already become myth. The black woman at a lunch counter, from Ming Smith of the Kamoinge Workshop and Ming Smith in Harlem, can only evoke the civil rights era. And young men with their hands raised from Radcliffe Roye, one with a hoodie under his jacket and one in prison garb, play out against Black Lives Matter in America today.

Race here can be a matter of pride, as for those mothers whispering to daughters from Adama Delphine Fawundu. More often, though, diaspora comes with a sense of loss and, as with Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, art as a way to return. As Deborah Jack titles the woman by the shore, What Is the Value of Water If It Can't Quench Our Thirst? The actual title adds, "for . . .," leaving the thirst more real but the loss all the more distant and enigmatic. The loss is personal, too, for Jonathan Gardenhire, whose photocollage of portraits, possessions, and musical scores as A Mighty Fortress pays tribute to a gay composer who died of AIDS. Roye's young men, also including one with a target on his chest, are just playing a part, but they are at personal risk all the same.

Gender is at issue as much as race, most of all in black men. They break the waves, from Stan Squirewell, mixing sensuality with fear—covering their faces with their hands and turning away. Smith does pair the lunch counter with a little girl in fishnet stockings, but she, too, is just playing around. At issue, too, is the status of the medium, thanks not solely to video. Squirewell silhouettes his figures against a white field, while Smith breaks with black and white just long enough to give the girl blond hair. Faisal Abdu'Allah prints his large Last Supper on tapestry.

Kwesi Abbensetts overlays faces with geometric patterns as masks, although the curators claim that race is a construct for others as well. Terry Boddie mixes media, too, with prison bars morphing into a bar code, as testimony to the prison industry. (They play out against a blue field not so very far from Peter Halley and his prison paintings.) He also adds silhouettes from the slave trade. Politics makes an appearance after all. Ditto with Deborah Willis, who finds sculpted blackamoors even in an Italian villa, like an extension of American lawn jockeys into art history.

Still, the show turns on the space between the elusive and the personal, even at its most political. John E. Dowell, Jr., savages American finance and its history with an overlay of cotton fields (also a motif for Roye) on Wall Street and in nearby Trinity Church. But are they a blast from America's dark past, an infestation in the present, or a pathway to heaven? Abdu'Allah's Last Supper takes its religious fervor more seriously without so much as a nod to Leonardo da Vinci, but once again crossing continents. His figures draw on his family's Pentecostal past but in Islamic dress. And not one of them is engaged in betrayal.

jhaber@haberarts.com

John Dunkley and Paa Joe ran at the American Folk Art Museum through February 24, 2019, "Race, Myth, Art, and Justice" at CCCADI through June 15.