Wanted Down South

John Haber
in New York City

A Movement in Every Direction: The Great Migration

William Christenberry and RaMell Ross

WANTED. The word must have struck fear in a black man's heart, although it did not take a police investigation to set off a lynching. It might take no more than a word to trigger police violence today.

Mark Bradford repeats the word again and again across sixty panels, in full caps. It burns through the black and yellow of his painting, itself seemingly on its way to smoke and ashes. It looks so faceless and unnerving that one may never read the text below, but its history demands attention, and (surprise) this is no wanted poster. It opens an ad seeking five hundred families "(farmers preferred)," to settle a "negro colony" in New Mexico, without fear of Jim Crow. A 1913 publication of the NAACP was making its contribution to freedom and to a literal mass movement. So now does "A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration" at the Brooklyn Museum.

William Christenberry owed so much to Hale County, Alabama, in his life and in his art. He sketched its flora, in his spare but eccentric ink line, and photographed its deep red earth. Over the course of thirty years, he returned to a single one-story building on the edge of a forest, caught in his lens and in the ravages of time. RaMell Ross, too feels the county's pull, so much so that he paid a heavy price to get there. His 2018 film, Hale County This Morning, documents his obsession as well. Both artists had their own great migration south.

Ross is black and his inspiration white. He made his journey to freedom the hard way, in a box. Now their work appears together in the galleries, as "Desire Paths"—and not always easy to tell apart. Ross curated the exhibition along with Christenberry's family, as a self-portrait and a portrait of the artist he so admired. Urban planners speak of "desire lines," the paths that people choose regardless of where architects literally pave the way. Here in New York, one can see the brown shortcuts through the grass all over Central Park. These two artists did not need anyone's greater wisdom to rein in their desires.

A burning issue

The text of the ad unfolds in real time, but the exhibition unfolds in half a dozen moments at once. Mark Bradford shares his scale and burning color with Abstract Expressionism, his fears and anger with Black Lives Matter, and the work's sheer presence with much contemporary art. The Great Migration itself, the museum argues, continued for decades, with a second wave from 1930 through the Civil Rights era. Brooklyn's black population increased nearly thirty-fold in sixty years. A Harlem newsstand, its photo blown up on the entrance wall in pixilated red, would look familiar any time from the Harlem Renaissance to yesterday morning. Video by Steffani Jemison captures a cell phone set to TikTok.

The curators, Ryan N. Dennis of the Mississippi Museum of Art and Jessica Bell Brown of the Baltimore Museum of Art with Brooklyn's Kimberli Gant, are serious about that movement in every direction, just as Bradford points southwest. The Great Migration, they insist, brought people not just to Chicago and New York, but to the Pacific Northwest and, of all places, the South as well. Wall maps tell another story. The first wave, from 1910 to 1930, ran much where you think, and movement within the South had a direction, too. Its arrows point from Jackson and Montgomery to Houston, New Orleans, and Jacksonville—to anywhere but Mississippi and Alabama. These days pundits like Charles Blow advocate resettling the South to turn it into blue states, but good luck with that.

Still, the show has a point about legacies, in the plural. It invites just twelve artists to relate history to what they know, and it accords them space for large work. Each contributes a single painting, sculpture, video, or installation, give or take added documentation. Just nine years ago, the Studio Museum in Harlem had a show on much the same theme, as "Imagination and the American South," where the collective imagination ran pretty wild. Brooklyn stays more focused, up close, and personal. Here the Great Migration is still great and still in motion, and the South is still burning.

For all twelve, the Great Migration is a burning issue to this day. It is also their story, the story of whom they remember and whom they came to be. Their art is a family gathering, in living color. For Robert Pruitt in Houston, it could almost be a parade. Dressed for so many parts in so many parties, his relatives could never have stood side by side in one place, but they fit comfortably within the shallow space of a painting. Jamea Richmond-Edwards in Detroit sets a still larger gathering across three panels.

This could be a collective portrait of black America, stereotypes intact but vulnerable to change. As Larry W. Cook puts it in his title, Let My Testimony Sit Next to Yours. At least two artists, Allison Janae Hamilton and Theaster Gates, include video of a jazz quartet. Gates, who showed at the New Museum the sheer breath of his inheritance, also throws in shelves of pickles. A slab of wood, somewhere between a painting and a shop sign, announces Pickl'd Jesus. Much of it rests in a recreation of his uncle's wood trailer.

When others picture their inheritance, they think first of women. For Akea Brionne, An Ode to (You)'All celebrates four different mother figures. They appear in rhinestone-studded textiles, like the glitter of Myrlande Constant (not in the show) in Haiti, but in black and white. Other group portraits, like Pruitt's, lean young, and Zoë Charlton subordinates her cast to Florida's waters. It could almost be a children's book, but life size. Yet they, too, are thinking of a collective you.

Mirroring blackness

Some can keep themselves out of it, but it cannot be easy. Some, too, are no more than cloying. I have a cell phone, but I know better than to share it with you. I am also white, but I know better, I hope, than to mistake the latest dance video for African American history. Like Bradford, though, the best look beyond themselves without losing their roots. They also feel the fire.

For some, the burning seems all but incidental, but it can still be telling. Even Brionne's tapestries have their rough edges. Richmond-Edwards finds room for a sea serpent in her family comedy. Hamilton's three-channel video includes the jazz quartet, but also little girls in front of a plain wood house. They might be dancing to the music or their own inner voices in poverty. Gates might just as soon find Jesus and get pickled.

Bradford, though, is on to something. The Great Migration made promises that America could not keep, and wanted does not always mean loved. Surely family, if not Richmond-Edwards herself, can remember the 1967 Detroit riots. Just as crucial, migration came at a cost, separating family members, with those who left mired in guilt and isolation—and those who did not left behind. Cook and Carrie Mae Weems are still grappling with loss and recovery to this today. They also tell much the same story.

Both had a grandfather or father who narrowly escaped a lynching by vanishing. For all Cook and his family knew, the man had abandoned them. For all Weems and hers knew, the man was left for dead. And then he reappeared, reaching out across space and time as an act of recovery and atonement. Photos by Cook picture wetlands that speak of isolation but also of home. The older man's handwritten correspondence with his son is more poignant still. Weems asks to see her ancestor's reflection in framed black mirrors, overprinted with stars—and then on video he speaks at last for himself, from behind a magnificent stage curtain.

The concave mirrors grow larger at the center of the row, as if swelling with pride and fear. The curtain is bright red, mere theater but still burning. Both have their polish, but it runs up against experience. Leslie Hewitt implies something similar with abstract sculpture in glass and wood, to honor southern craft. I find it less successful, but its placement in several of the exhibition's rooms does announce a legacy. That leaves one last artist who all but refuses to look back.

Like Weems, Torkwase Dyson works with mirrored surfaces in black. Four large trapezoidal prisms rest on the floor, like compass points. Steel beams connect north and south, east and west, sharply angled as they rise, cross, and fall. They refer to that movement in every direction, real or not. For me, though, they stand for something else again in their neo-Minimalism of mass, light, and space. The Great Migration, they say, was a mirror onto blackness.

Hail Hale

To be sure, RaMell Ross went to Alabama on the cheap, for freight charges to be exact. It took him fifty-nine hours, shut up in a plain wood shipping container. In a photo it looks downright spacious, and he looks comfortable enough, but the crate itself serves as a corrective in the gallery. Stamped Return, it was his point of no return. Still, he made himself at home, working all the while on his Black Dictionary. His handwritten terms, just bordering on sense, all begin with black and receive pointed definitions.

What drew him to Alabama for his Great Migration in reverse? Was it the story of a slave who shipped himself north, to freedom, in much the same box? Or was it William Christenberry? Ross paints with the older man's red earth, on a blond wood panel much like the box. His photograph of a black man at rest, seen from behind and behind a barrier, has the exact same size as Christenberry's of a five cents store, abandoned and overgrown. A white steeple in sculptural variations could almost have stood atop that red building. Ross's painting and sculpture approach African American abstraction, but then the county's earth and simple structures are his church.

What, then, drew them together, in what might easily an odd couple? Christenberry was white, born and raised in Hale County, in Tuscaloosa, who died at age eighty in 2016, in Washington, D.C. Ross, just forty, is black and now teaches at Brown, at a comfortable distance from the Deep South. Both, though, keep asking who speaks for America. Christenberry's photos are all but devoid of people, but both depict a way of life. Ross photographs a child squeezed between an auto body and tire, sheepish but happy. He calls the print Man, but then the child is the father of man.

It is a way of life caught up in poverty and racism, but more comic and vulnerable than brutal or tragic. Among his long-term projects, Christenberry collected Ku Klux Klan memorabilia. Packed into a shed, they look like toys for hopelessly messy, overgrown children. Ross must have found a kindred spirit in both an imagined childhood and the artist's unflinching eye. He must have admired, too, the modest means and castoffs. Christenberry, who has also appeared alongside Beverly Buchanan in Brooklyn and in "After Nature" at the New Museum, has a reputation for early color photography, like Stephen Shore and William Eggleston, but has entered museums just as much for nearly flat assemblage.

They say the shortest way around is the longest way home, and Christenberry had to learn that it was safe to go back. A turning point came in 1971, when he met James Agee and Walker Evans, who had collaborated on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. For a photographer, Walker Evans must have been at least a bit intimidating, but their meeting was also an inspiration. You may not remember that the book is set in Hale County rather than the Dust Bowl. I tend to run its subjects together with those of Dorothea Lange in California. It looks back, though, to a Depression Era South that Christenberry had known himself as a small child.

He is always looking back, while confronting such realities head on. Most often, he views the red building face on, closely cropped—although a few outliers see it from just enough distance to reveal a white annex. In the gallery, the shots line up in rows across a wall, like factories and water towers for Bernd and Hilla Becher. For Christenberry, technology and banality are not the sole legacy of the twentieth century. For Ross, they are an African American legacy as well. Just think outside the box.

jhaber@haberarts.com

"A Movement in Every Direction" ran at the Brooklyn Museum through June 15, 2015, William Christenberry and RaMell Ross at Pace through February 25.