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Masking Blackness
John Haberin New York City
Lonnie Holley and Kevin Beasley
For Lonnie Holley, African American faces always lie behind masks. They will, that is, unless they are the masks.
Holley's masks embody black power, as a positive or a negative. Critics have called them outsider art, but how often has the country not treated African Americans as outsiders? And then there are outsiders because they are no longer on the move but still looking back. Kevin Beasley visits a farm in Alabama, where an electric motor picked up after slavery left off. As the motor churns in silence, he and his masks sound off on their history. Back in the galleries, he then traces his personal and African American history to Virginia. 
Black power
Two of the sternest images from Lonnie Holley hang side by side, as twin faces. One has color-coded electric wires protruding from its mouth and stiffer wires connecting its nostrils and eyes. More electric equipment hangs below in place of a neck, no longer able to connect. From its features, it might be gaping or weeping. The other face has hardware unable to fill the gashes in place of eyes and bristles like seams where the doctor has created a monster. Both have scratches all over their thick shield of bald flesh.
So which is The Positive and which The Negative Mask of Power—and will black power ever course through their bodies again? For the record, the parts once able to supply electricity contribute to the positive mask, but electric current always runs between positive and negative, and neither mask looks empowering or protective. Still, neither looks all that threatening either or, equally, wallowing in its role as a victim. For Holley, African American history encompasses suffering and self-assertion, but it is not always easy to tell them apart. And that history lies in the scraps all around him, waiting for someone to pick it up.
Another sculpture looks both ways in its style, its attitude, and its construction. Here, too, nothing declares its race, apart from perhaps the breadth of its lips and the blackness of steel. The head is only slightly more obviously female, despite a curve outward at bottom and an edge that could stand for braided hair. It becomes more feminine, too, from its resemblance to portraits by Pablo Picasso. Its profile has an eye facing front, with planes set at right angles. It looks both ways, too, between Cubism and the American South.
Born in Alabama in 1950, Holley lives in Atlanta and has appeared in shows of "Négritude," black southern artists, and the Great Migration. The show at hand draws on the last fourteen years. No doubt he counts as an outsider in New York, and he has affinities with both folk art and Modernism. The badly hacked wood and obsessive collecting recall both styles as well. The assemblages have the coarse shocks and brittle humor of combine paintings by Robert Rauschenberg, but also younger black artists like Kara Walker or Willie Cole. They or Joseph Zito might have supplied the lawn jockey in a gas mask, holding a phone as if he or you were waiting for the call.
The doubling goes beyond obvious twins. The freestanding metal sculpture has its counterpart in a face on the wall weighed down by the trinkets of a lifetime, as Grandmama's Brain Was the Preserve Jar. One clothing mannequin has guns sticking into it from all sides, while another is chained to a weight resting on a chair. They might have lost their arms and legs to violence. Still, they could have chosen the remainder of their accessories as a substitute for fashion. They could even be fighting back.
Maybe the plainest allusion to history comes in the one departure from faces and bodies, but it, too, looks in more than one direction. Crosses nailed to a door may allude to the central place of churches in the black community and the civil rights movement. Yet they also recall homes boarded up and crosses set on fire. Holley's imagery can be too plain for its own good, but it lingers because of its refusal to tease apart the positive and the negative. As a title puts it, Hair Was My Glory and My Chain. And the chair is already sagging under that weight.
To study history
Some people go to Yale to study history. Kevin Beasley left Yale to find his history in the Deep South. For his MFA thesis in 2012, he purchased a century-old electric motor that by 1940 had enough left in it to power a cotton gin in Alabama for thirty-three more years. Worn and rusted, it still turns at the heart of "A View of the Landscape" at the Whitney. Beasley, who has appeared in shows of "Material Histories" and "Imagination and the American South," is still imagining African American history. An artist in "Storylines" at the Guggenheim in 2015, he is telling stories at that, in the first person.
His layered histories begin out front with three tall "slabs," as he calls them. Made of polyurethane, feathers, rags, and other remnants, they could pass for shards of concrete. They have elements of painting and collage, although Beasley prefers to call them sculpture in relief. Two slabs lean against the wall, where they take on greater weight, while the third is freestanding at right angles to the wall, so that one can ponder how to connect the images and objects on front and back. Behind the wall, lies the installation. Together they supply a time line of personal and American history.
The third slab embeds an old mixing board and a laptop, as evidence of Beasley's efforts to control the motor and to transform it into an installation. Sure enough, all three slabs are about his encounters, starting with their titles. The Reunion, Campus, and Acquisition all speak to a recent graduate looking back while pursuing his next step. One slab happens to hold his cap and gown, another his work clothes in a field of deep red. Exhibiting among emerging artists at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2013 and then in Morningside Park as part of that museum's "inHarlem" program, he made his mark fast. Each time, he has worked between sound art and material histories, and so he does again when it comes to the motor.
It runs continually by day in a soundproof case, surrounded by microphones. In a second dark room, to the other side of the shallow space of the slabs, its turning translates into a death rattle or dull roar. Beasley appears in performance now and then during its run, at a larger mixing board, manipulating its sound. The audio equipment in Acquisition starts to look primitive by comparison. It belongs to just one point in time among others, starting with the slave trade.
Those times include the invention of the cotton gin, by Eli Whitney in 1793—which, Beasley points out, increased the demand for slaves by 70 percent. They leap ahead to the motor, which might have altered black lives in untold ways had slavery not at last become history. They include, too, the decade of civil rights marches, and the curators, Christopher Y. Lew with Ambika Trasi, note that the motor ran on a farm just thirty miles from Selma, Alabama. And then come the artist's childhood in rural Virginia, his education, his discoveries, his rebuilding of the motor, and his performance. They skip right over the show's looming presence, slave labor itself. Beasley is thinking ahead, to the possibilities of African American art, but not without the challenges of memory, masks, and ghosts.
The road to history
A road trip with Beasley begins at dawn, but do not rest too much hope on a new day. His first new painting has the dimensions of a thick wall. It stands on its own in his gallery east of Chelsea—facing the window, as much a barrier as a welcome. As for the sun, it is not so much rising as exploding across a good half the canvas, consuming everything in its way. Its sheer force has shunted aside the frail curve of a two-lane highway, which still runs right into it. No wonder the road lies empty.
The sun has left the back of the painting in darkness, with nothing visible but the artist's layering and fragments of automobile tires. It has shattered the front of the painting's color into thick wads like cotton balls, held in place with a waxy resin, and Beasley does have the cotton trade in mind. He has come in search of his family history in northern Virginia, like Nina Katchadourian to the Morgan Library for hers. He might well be one of two figures standing to the side of the road, the one closest to the painting's center. Both have lost their heads in the explosion, but he has found another in the sun. As for his companion (or you), there are bound to be some casualties along the way.
If the sun has given the artist a swelled head, he has come off that installation at the Whitney and another journey into the Deep South. So what can he do for a follow-up, but to hit the road again? Converted into fabric, wax, and paint, his trips become personal and material histories. A year later, he asked others to join the search, with sculpture in Harlem's Morningside Park. He is still deciding whether to think of his landscapes as graveyards, monuments, or arenas for action. He calls his largest series, eight tall paintings on the gallery's back wall, his Fields, but he also refers to them as slabs.
The series might as well be abstract art, like two large murals. Still, Beasley cannot stop asking himself and the viewer to search for human histories. The slabs contain areas of color that just might become people, if only America agreed to remember. A mural in deep blues and shining blacks could be their passage to freedom or into night. Vertical forms interrupt the other mural as well, as collage elements. One contains a list of things that I (whoever that might be) cannot do—as if African Americans have passed smoothly from the brutality of slavery to the boredom of the Covid-19 lockdown without missing a beat.
The show does contain a few people, as sculpture, but they are faceless as well. Two cute little figures look like plush toys or children reduced to their clothing. The onesie on one has prison stripes, and the other wears a hoodie with web feet. A reclining figure looks like a hospital patient well beyond recovery, while a "sage" buries its head in the shocking green of a shroud. A walker has lost its patient for good, and the plastic tubes that might have helped him cram into an ice chest instead. This is no picnic.
The show is at its best in paint, where Beasley is less flippant and more material. That, too, may come at a cost—without the greater specificity of past work, like his ominous "cotton engine" at the Whitney. Blackness here seems to have more to do with the dark night of the soul than with race. For all I knew, that journey into the cotton trade might be a white's, with plantation owners among his ancestors and with a conscience. Still, that vagueness counts as reaching out, right in the midst of the explosion. As the brighter mural has it, Not All of Us See Each Other but We Are Here.
Lonnie Holley ran at James Fuentes through October 22, 2017, Kevin Beasley at The Whitney of American Art through March 10, 2019, and at Casey Kaplan through October 24, 2020