The Dineen Hull Gallery combines archival documents from the Antebellum South with new works by African American artists from Northern New Jersey.
Some prominent companies have been behaving like Black History Month is no longer necessary. That’s the best indication that it’s needed more than ever. A good grasp on the evolving story of the encounter between people who trace their ancestry to Africa and those who trace their ancestry to Europe and elsewhere is essential to our understanding of our society. It is, as we all should know, not always an easy story to hear. Grappling with legacies of injustice and inequality may leave us with feelings of bitterness, culpability, and remorse. But if we don’t face up to the past — if we shut out the reminders — we’ll be left with nothing but dangerous distortions and convenient misrepresentations. Since many of those in power aren’t keen on honesty, it falls to artists, teachers, and storytellers to tell us things that our leaders won’t.
Archivists, too. Hudson County Community College has shown us before that they’ve got art and artifacts in reserve, and this in this strange winter of doubt and state-sponsored revisionist history, they’ve unsealed the vault and provided some written corroboration. Social science professor Dorothy Anderson has some heavy stuff to lay on us from the Linwood Pledger, Jr. Archive of Black History: contracts stipulating the terms of ownership of human beings, letters to and from plantation owners, and wills negotiating the transfer of slaves. Even by the standards of the antebellum South, the language is strained and guarded. On some level not so far from the surface, these people knew that they were doing something terribly wrong. They went ahead and did it anyway.
In “Pathways to Freedom: We Get to Tell the Story,” Anderson and HCCC present these papers in the Dineen Hull Gallery (71 Sip Ave.) alongside first edition copies of nineteenth century novels written by African American authors. Common to all of these documents is a current of anxiety — an unarticulated feeling that the system as it was couldn’t hold, and when it fell to pieces, it wouldn’t be pretty. One of these letters, an amazing screw-you note written with acidic politeness by a liberated slave to a dispossessed master who wanted him back, has been reprinted on the gallery wall. Like the novels, it’s imbued with a fierce pride coupled with a desperate hope that the writer’s children might sail closer to the sun of freedom than he did.
That same combination of struggle, pain, and defiance is visible in the work of the four contemporary African American artists whose sculptures and digital collage prints accompany the presentation of the quietly explosive material from the archive. Placing these pieces next to old contracts and pocket hardcovers makes them feel ancient. Jerome China, in particular, hardly ever wants to work with a piece of metal until time has had its way with it and oxidized some personality into its steel surfaces. His art looks as if it has been assembled from objects that have lain in a sharecropper’s field for decades, unearthed by a plow, and weathered, like the people who worked the land, by sun, wind, and strife.
In “Cutting to the Root of the Problem: The Death of White Supremacy,” China points an overturned farmer’s sickle toward severed lengths of chain, a bundle of rough-cut sticks, and a segment of an I-beam streaked with rust. The links are thin enough for a ghost to rattle; the cutting edge of the blade, though dulled by the passage of days, still looks like it could meet the challenge of the harvest. A force once bound could not be suppressed. After a clash of metal on metal, fought hand to hand, a spirit has slipped free of its fetters.
The links, and the implicit suggestion of battle, reappear in “You Must Be Out of Your Cotton-Picking Mind,” a barbed assembly of rakes, tines, and railroad spikes, dangerous as a swinging gate and stained the brass color of a found Lincoln penny. The padlocked chain that loosely holds these yard-forks together feels puny, inadequate to the task, dangling, forlorn in space as the spurs and saw-teeth glower behind it. Everything about the sculpture feels like rebellion. “Aftermath of a Little White Lie: Homage to Emmett Till,” a piece that feels indebted to the Newark street artist and visual insurgent Jerry Gant, is composed of five interlocking rail clips, each one twisted like an ampersand, welded to a rough steel post. Viewed from a certain angle, it looks like a human face registering surprise and outrage. Viewed from any angle, it speaks of work, sweat, heaviness, and consequence.
China’s sculptures are stationed on platforms in the middle of the gallery. Since they communicate action, active repression, and resistance, this feels appropriate. A slightly less combative (but no less caustic) critique hangs on the north wall. There, Heather Williams has hung one of her tribunals: a lineup of three-dimensional faces, rendered in terra-cotta, of observers who look like they’ve simply had it with us. One frowning woman serves us with scathing side-eye, while another, heavy-lidded, casts his eyes downward in exhaustion. Each is fiercely individual, but they give the expression that they’ve all gone through the same fire. Because it takes two to make an ancestor, she’s coupled them up and positioned them to express the “Power of Quiet Witness,” looking at us through the ages, watching out for their progeny as best as they can, and asking the rest of us to clean up our acts.
They’re directly across the room from Antoinette Ellis-Williams’s digital collages of newspaper headlines and images of people associated with the Civil Rights movement, including James Baldwin and Ruby Bridges. Ellis-Williams’s print alludes to “The Problem We All Live With,” Norman Rockwell’s intervention in the desegregation controversies in 1960s New Orleans. In Rockwell’s vision, the black girl walking to school is surrounded by guards. At Dineen Hull, the official protection is gone — but she’s with another girl just like her, and she’s under the spiritual supervision of Williams’s eternal ancestors, even if she doesn’t know it.
Though it might not seem so at first, this is an optimistic show. Ellis-Williams’s girls must face the buzzsaw of current events, but they’re going to make it to school. Heather Williams’s ancestors are exasperated and worn out from the responsibility of caring for countless embattled generations, but they’re secure in their righteousness of purpose, and they aren’t going to crack. China’s sculptures are combative, and sometimes brutal, but they’re a chronicle of a victory — not without immense cost, of course, and not without plenty of present peril, even as the chains have broken. The letters and wills from the Pledger archive, when read closely, contain within them the seeds of the destruction of an oppressive system.
Yet that system was, and is, absolutely real, and Bernard Jackson’s gripping bronze of an African man on his back, arrayed for the Middle Passage, is a reminder of a prolonged act of abominable systemic cruelty. Human beings actually did this to their fellows. Nothing can erase that, and we can never forget our capacity for injustice. History demands vigilance from us: we must watch ourselves, even when it’s uncomfortable or inconvenient. Jackson, who has crafted his figure with the care of a godfather, rests his tortured head on a folded flag. If his tormented subject can’t sleep, neither should we.
(The Benjamin J. Dineen III and Dennis C. Hull Gallery is on the 6th floor of the Hudson County Community College Gabert Library. It’s open from 11 a.m. until 4 p.m. every weekday, but you’ve got to contact curator Michelle Vitale to make an appointment. There’ll be an artist talk at 6:30 p.m. on February 27.)