Roots and the Abstract Truth from 1961 is a classic jazz album by Oliver Nelson.
A composer and saxophonist from St. Louis, Missouri.
Much American culture comes from the South and finds its origin in racial slavery.
An abstract version of this painful truth found expression
through blues music and the culture of improvisation in jazz.
The works here are arguably an equivalent of jazz in visual art.
They share a language of improvisation and abstraction.
The use of tree roots in southern black rule art can be traced back to African traditions
where the route carries spiritual significance.
The Southern yard is a space for gathering, for making and
remembrance.
It's a site of creativity and resistance. It's both a domestic place and a part of the landscape.
The yard emerged as a crucial sanctuary and
expressive space through yard shows
yard art creators developed new languages
and forms involving specific uses of materials.
There are also common objects, images and symbols in many of the yards
including painted tyres, used shoes, roots and chairs.
The murder of the 14 year old African American boy Emmett Till
in 1955 galvanised protests and inspired a number of important civil rights songs.
Musicologist Professor Calvin Forbes from Chicago
has created a playlist for this exhibition.
Strange Fruit like Billie Holiday begins the selection.
We were really community photographers...
community filmmakers doing this for
the people so that's the reason why a
lot of people haven't heard of us
hadn't heard of me and what I did.
We wanted to make available our skills for community people
if they needed photographs for flyers, posters, if they were running for office
and they wanted pictures and then we wanted to
have a couple of films available for
them to show others for organising purposes.
Walking as protest
shifted consciousness and was a turning point in the civil rights movement,
galvanising national and international public support.
Photographers documented this process of bringing about change.
Many of the artists in this exhibition
were part of the civil rights movement in Alabama as participants or as witnesses.
A pilgrimage of black and
white citizens from across the United States
travelled to the south to register
voters, to march and to bear witness through photography.
Gee's Bend is a small community located
on a former plantation in Alabama.
It lies on a spit of land surrounded by the Alabama River.
This deeply rural community
became known for their unique
handmade quilts made by women for their own use.
The abstract compositions of
these quilts contain historical echoes
of African textiles combined with
observations of the southern landscape.
Like blues music and yard art, they're acts of improvisation.
In this room we explore the connections
and continuities between the work shown
in the previous galleries and artists who were born in and then left the South.
They continue to reference Southern history and culture in their art both through
subject matter and the expressive languages they use.
The multiple narratives and languages within both
music and visual cultures of the South
are reimagined and reinterpreted through
succeeding generations of artists.
How do you solve a problem like hyper
invisibility in as much as there are abort
and lingering effects of the centuries
that the U.S. was a legally sanctioned
slave trade and slavery nation.
One of the most acute is the ongoing attempt to
deny that black folk were even human, let
alone equal to the whites and yet within
black expressive culture in response to
hyper invisibility has been to go darker
in plain sight to become even dark to
themselves.
