Diversity's Deep History

John Haber
in New York City

David Alekhuogie, Remy Jungerman, and Guadalupe Maravilla

Not two years ago, David Alekhuogie traveled from LA to Nigeria, the land of his father. He wanted to understand his heritage as an artist and a son.

It taught him about wax prints, which spoke to him as a photographer dependent on a reproducible image to tell stories. It taught him about African cloth, which must have reminded him of his own practice of printing on canvas. It must also have reminded him of how stories can be lost almost as soon as he sets them down. With "Naïveté," he is out to remind others, including white Americans, of little they know. For Remy Jungerman, too, diversity has a deeper history than the art scene often allows. He finds in Suriname not just personal or family tradition, but also a source for abstract painting and a space between anthropology and art.

Guadalupe Maravilla grew up in the aftermath of earth-shattering events, and then he went through a few of his own. As a child he took Mayan pyramids as a playground, with the volcano that disrupted Mayan civilization in the fifth century not just ancient history. Its eruptions continued until the 1960s, earning it the nickname of Lighthouse to the World. Now it supplies the title to his exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, "Tierra Blanca Joven." Can it still hold out the promise of young white earth? Today the site of a lake, it suggests the prospects of renewal for a war-ravaged nation and an artist at risk of death.

The fabric of photography

Diversity in art has become an imperative, its very "Inheritance," but does it have to be about art as personal experience? If so, it would be a throwback to a more innocent age, and often it is. Such popular African American artists asKehinde Wiley, Amy Sherald, and Mickalene Thomas come awfully close to cheerleading—which is very much their appeal. Still, even Alex Da Corte on the Met roof looks beyond his birth in New Jersey and childish instincts to a version of Big Bird in Brazil, while David Hammons speaks up for a former meeting point on a Manhattan pier while, as so often, going missing himself. Like David Alekhuogie in photography, Remy Jungerman makes family history the chance to explore contemporary art. In the process, both bring their practices as artists closer to archaeology or anthropology, and Jungerman includes film by an anthropologist as well.

Plainly a show called "Naïveté" is not simply a confession, and its artist is not naïve. Alekhuogie is fond of cloth that might look more at home on tablecloths at a California cookout than in Africa. He is fond, too, of images that are not what they appear to be. Two men pose in white chef's jackets, one in a chef's hat as well. Their smiles show them at ease with one another, while their place in a clearing past tall, scraggly leaves shows their distance from the viewer and from home. With a title like Post Colonial Bush Breakfast "No Wahala," you have to wonder not just what but whom they are serving.

The black-and-white photograph hangs at a disturbing angle, its corners neatly touching a larger frame. If that were not enough, it appears perfectly upright online, where the outer frame is the one at an angle. And that frame contains a red patterned fabric. At least I think so, but Alekhuogie's approach to sculpture often takes place in staging a photograph, with the reality of brightly lit, crumpled fabric in his studio and its illusion in the gallery. Then, too, he may print his portraits on the very same fabric as a design. His three-part Portrait for George is at most an elusive reminder of his friend—and of Shuka cloth in George's homeland, Kenya.

It is vivid enough all the same. Pull_UP, from 2017, makes no bones about African American images of masculinity and their limits, while delighting in them. And then he reshuffles the torsos one year later, placing them within the hazy California of To Live and Die in LA with the ghostly colors of a photogram. He must like how the film of that name concerns the very model of a bad boy, but as white action hero. Pure Life places black males in an outdoor market, over three moments and from different points of view. Nothing here is pure, beyond living from day to day.

A white perspective emerges more fully in the show's principle series, A Reprise. The title could suggest that perspective or a reconsideration, but Alekhuogie is neither repeating the past nor, alternatively, pointing fingers. As ever, he speaks both of distance from his subject and affinities. Whites, he seems to say, may take seriously the search for an African American heritage, even as they know so little about race. The series looks back to 1935, when Walker Evans photographed African masks and other objects for a show at MoMA of (ouch) "African Negro Art." Sure enough, Evans set his photos against African fabrics.

Evans had a genuine concern for antiquities as art from a specific time and place, not as primitive specimens or as contributions to Cubism. Still, Alekhuogie takes modernity's measure by cropping the pages of the old catalogue, captions included. At a given moment, they might become totemic or illegible. One shiny figure looks like a character in a sci-fi epic or video game, but she casts a stubborn, jagged shadow. It reflects the eroding barriers today between fabric and painting, art and design, or art and fashion, while asserting the work of photography. It also asserts how hard it is to look behind the mask.

Art as archaeology

Why make abstract art? One might divide painters into the material and the spiritual by their answer. Some love the material presence of the stretcher, canvas, and paint, and they want to make it inescapable for you as well. Others set aside representation and narrative for something beyond words. You might think you know which to call Remy Jungerman when his show continues into the basement for a film titled Visiting Deities. Barnett Newman called a painting Vir Heroicus Sublimus, or man the sublime hero—but who needs earthly heroes, especially men, when you can live among the gods?

Think again. Jungerman could be the ultimate materialist, layering on a hard white surface of Kaolin clay and incising into it. The cuts reveal another layer still, of colored fabric. But then the filmmaker kept his beliefs to himself, too. Bonno Thoden van Velzen was still a graduate student in 1962, when he left the Netherlands for Suriname. He asked how religion for its native peoples could define or bridge their differences.

Jungerman takes his turn as an anthropologist, too. He calls a work Agida, after a drum used among the Maroons in Suriname in their music and rituals (like agita without the heartburn). He calls another Obeah, which encompasses justice, healing, and an entire way of life. The paintings could well be artifacts, with their parallel slits as ancient mappings or alphabets. Wall sculpture in painted wood acts as shelves for ceramics and goodness knows what else. They are the material presence of other lives.

In descending to view the film, one might be on a dig. Jungerman's interest, though, is neither scholarly nor abstract. Born in Suriname, he has Maroon ancestry on his mother's side. When he moved to the Netherlands to study art, he was reversing a typical history of colonialism, Latin American art, black Caribbean art, and the Afro-Caribbean diaspora.

He was recovering his roots, too, as a Dutch artist and a modernist. The relief sculpture has the primary colors and rhythms of Piet Mondrian—and nothing is more important to the younger artist than rhythm. He calls the show "Brilliant Corners," after an album by Thelonius Monk, the jazz pianist with a singularly jagged touch, and the cryptic alphabets may also suggest musical notation. No wonder Jungerman likes nothing about the Maroons more than its drumming. No wonder, too, that the fabric looks suspiciously like standard-issue plaid. So much for ancient spirits.

They look so standard issue that one could dismiss his themes as a conventional bow to politics and diversity. One might never know of them without the titles. Still, they are personal concerns, and anyway the paintings look just fine without them. Without the reference points, in fact, they might look more daring still—a rejoinder to the current fashion for blurring the lines between abstraction and representation. When it comes down to it, the division between the material and the spiritual is overrated. For both, the point of abstract art is to set aside routine stories in order to make you see.

Disease throwers and throw pillows

Guadalupe Maravilla did not need an active volcano to shatter his childhood. Born in 1986, he never knew El Salvador without civil war, and right-wing death squads made him an illegal exile in New York at age eight, like Muriel Hasbun years earlier in Washington. (He mapped his movements for "Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay" at the Whitney in 2018.) Against the odds, he managed a green card, citizenship, and an arts education at Hunter College, when something shattered his adult life as well. Cancer struck, and he sought out whatever treatment he could—in modern medicine, ancient arts, and his own. He calls his sculpture Disease Throwers, leaving open whether it spreads death or gathers it in order to throw it away.

An artist in need of healing, he brought a herbal garden, a gong, and a purifying fire to Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens in 2021. That show had the theme of "Monuments Now," but is his sculpture monumental? The child who clambered over pyramids must know the limits of the monumental. If anything, his work looks like scraps of a life best forgotten, with a sticky, grotty overgrowth that anyone would fear to touch. Yet it aspires to something regal. Maravilla opens with what might be royalty or the throne itself, and he tosses in a king- or queen-sized bed.

After the throne's resinous white and the bed's sinister black, color comes as a relief. Maravilla collaborates with a maker of retablos, the devotional paintings of Latin American art. (Historians still refer to Renaissance altarpieces as retables, from the French.) He himself supplies the imagery, which unfolds against a backdrop of that volcano. As it recedes into the distance, its slopes start to resemble a two-lane highway to nowhere. The actors, though, are fanciful and fun.

Text across the bottom of each painting fills in the background, including a troubled visit to his homeland as an adult. Paired with the images, it also brings them both closer to a comic book than to Christian dogma. The museum's supporting pillars bear still more cartoonish gestures. All is dangerous and all is in fun. It is also filled with music, linking the work that much more to folk tradition—like music on video set into the sculpture. Gilded circles occupy the head of the thrones, like halos behind an enthroned god, but they are gongs as well.

Will they ring out? Maravilla sure hopes so, but neither he nor the curator, Eugenie Tsai, will settle for earthly music. After all, who knows how much time he has left on earth? More to the point, the museum takes all too seriously his claims to transcendence and folk healing. The modest exhibition belongs to a series, "Mindscapes," on the theme of mental health, with other installments in Los Angeles, Berlin, and Japan. It does not, though, seem to take its subject in the least seriously. Off it goes to physical illness, political threats, ancestral cultures, and spiritualism.

It is also irresponsible. Mental illness is real and not an artifact of cultural hegemony, colonialism, or anything else. It is just as irresponsible to delegate an advanced stage of cancer to shamans—or to talk of civil war without mentioning that Ronald Reagan backed the death squads. An artist who can make such bright objects look dangerous has to know better. A "healing room" behind the exhibition offers "teen zines," throw pillows, and a book in which to leave your message. Take your time, but return on your way out to the art.

jhaber@haberarts.com

David Alekhuogie ran at Yancey Richardson through April 10, 2021, Remy Jungerman at Fridman through May 15. Guadalupe Maravilla ran at The Brooklyn Museum through September 18, 2022.