Narratives of the great migration and the Harlem renaissance have dominated conversations around African American art in the 20th century, but a new exhibition, Souls Grown Deep Like the Rivers, which opens at the Royal Academy in London this week, invites us to consider the cultural contribution of artists from the American south. Communities that remained there in the aftermath of the civil war continued to be exposed to extremes of racial violence, segregation and the hardship of economic exclusion.
The psychic scars of that collective trauma run deep through many of the works in the show. Alabama native Thornton Dial’s Blue Skies: The Birds That Didn’t Learn How to Fly, for example, where cloth rags hang limp from a rubber-coated copper wire, paints a picture of abjection, while Mary T Smith’s We All Want a Jobe, created in the early 1980s during her retirement in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, positions a line of blurred faces beside the desperate, scrawled text of the title to create a tableau haunted by otherness. In Keeping a Record of It (Harmful Music), Lonnie Holley, also a native of Birmingham, Alabama, positions an animal skull in the centre of a salvaged record player, gripped as though by a pincer in the record player’s arm while Ronald Lockett’s Oklahoma, made in 1995 in response to the Oklahoma City bombing, pieces together sheets of metal, tin, wire and nails on wood to conjure the horror of murderous white supremacy.
