Art - The Portland Phoenix - The Portland Phoenix

Past Transgressions — ICA's 'Confabulations of Millennia' screws with age-old obsessions

Confabulations of Millenia explores the tensions stirred up when contemporary artists utilize visual techniques and motifs from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Curated by the artist Richard Saja, whose Historically Inaccurate series is also featured, the 19 artists in the exhibition all engage with established materials and styles — such as French toile, Rococo porcelain, or classical portraiture — while making fiercely current work. In this process of bending the old to say something about the present, a critique of western art history simmers, as the narratives associated with these material practices are complicated by their malleability.

Many of Saja’s works on view are exquisite embroidered interventions into French toile fabric. Playing against the anonymity produced by toile’s monotone, dense, repetitive print, Saja embellishes individual figures within the textile’s bucolic scenes, pulling out new stories which feel playfully subversive and queer. The questions they conjure generate a voyeuristic enjoyment: are these untold memories coming to light? Fabrications? Private fantasies? The work doesn’t push for answers here, but succeeds just by interrupting the material’s historical purpose and sense of a singular record.

Also confounding any notion of history as complete or comprehensive is Kehinde Wiley’s Penitent Mary Magdalene. Epitomizing the artist’s commitment to “quote historical sources and position young, black men within the field of power,” Wiley’s portrait features a young urban black man as the subject of saintly glorification. The work’s adherence to the tropes of traditional Christian painting create fertile juxtaposition, calling out the homogeneity in the history of western portraiture while also reverberating with current dialogues surrounding race, privilege and representation. Prestigious depictions of the black body continue to be history-changing, a truth crystallized by Wiley’s recent selection by Barack Obama to paint the former president’s official portrait, interrupting an all-white line of American Presidents in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

Other artists are less pointed or specific in their historical commentary, but instead revel in material mastery. Douglas Goldberg renders the lustrous folds and gathers of drapery in stone. With a skill reminiscent of the perfectionism that preoccupied Renaissance and Baroque sculptors, Goldberg’s works depict an object concealed under cloth. Their titles name the hidden item — Microphone, Picture Hanging Screws, Nightlight — all articles of our present time. These sculptures wobble between centuries, their expert fabrication a throwback to our most romantic notions of “art” and “genius”; their subject matter a survey of the modern mundane.

Likewise, Livia Marin’s Nomad Pattern Series shuttles between the traditional and the irreverent in its craftsmanship. Glazed ceramic white teacups, each upended and cracked, spill out their familiar blue patterns, a trick to the eye that delights and engages. The patterns feel both classic and ubiquitous, the kinds of prints that were once painstakingly painted by hand and then later mass-produced on cheap plastics. Instead of a heavy-handed commentary on globalization, the works call you to linger on their gorgeousness, and mine your memory for where you have seen these before.

Erin Riley’s textile works are all intimate self-portraits, operating in high contrast to the historical function of tapestries as objects for public view. Riley’s tapestries give us glimpses of her semi-nude tattooed body in the midst of personal grooming, shaving a leg or pulling a nipple hair. It is a private, key-hole view of a woman before she is prepared for public encounter, constructed on a large scale, filling up the wall.

There is much to mine in Confabulations of Millenia, each work containing both surface delights and more embedded questions about the art historical canon’s construction. The potency of specific visual traditions is inescapable, but their meanings are anything but finite.

Confabulations of Millennia, mixed media group exhibition | Through December 8 | ICA at MECA, 522 Congress St., Portland | Wed-Sun 11 am-5 pm; Thu 11 am-7 pm | www.meca.edu

poetry natemarshall

Nate Marshall is an award-winning writer and educator from the South Side of Chicago. Marshall’s been writing and teaching poetry for the past 15 years and boasts an impressive breadth of work with pieces appearing in POETRY Magazine, Indiana Review, The New Republic, and many other publications. He’s the editor of the BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, a sprawling anthology featuring over 75 writers exploring the various nuances of hip-hop culture and the influencers within it.

A rapper himself, Marshall released his first album, Grown, in 2015, with his group the Daily Lyrical Product. That same year, he debuted Wild Hundreds, a collection of original poetry titled after his home neighborhood in Chicago, which serves as an intimate exploration of what life is really like on those streets as a black man.

The first of three appearances in Maine this weekend, Marshall will be reading passages from Wild Hundreds at the SPACE Gallery Wednesday, November 29. The book's a love letter of sorts to the city of Chicago, but also an exposition of pain. Marshall says to think of his work as both a celebration of survival and a revelation of suffering under a system that violently undermines the value of black lives.

Below is a transcript of our conversation with Marshall (edited for space and clarity), in which we discussed what it means to challenge poetry’s canon, hip-hop's intersection with poetry, and how they both can be used as a tool in the fight for social justice.

Wild Hundreds seems to have a strong focus on injustice and police brutality. Was that a conscious decision?

I don’t know if it was ever really a particular decision. My writing takes up the questions that also shape my life. Being a black person in America, I have been privy to that experience. But I’ve also gone to a lot of well regarded white institutions and been a part of those structures as well. So I’ve been able to see a multitude of experiences. The big question I ask in my writing is how. How did this happen? How did we get here?

As a lifelong resident, I’m sure you have a deep understanding of Chicago. What aspects of that city do you think are missing in the mainstream discourse?

Chicago gets leveraged as a rhetorical tool in national conversations, largely around race, policing, and violence. In the contemporary moment, consider what Trump has said about Chicago.

Like how he referred to the city as "a disaster"?

Yeah. What he means is crazy black people who are dangerous and need to be controlled in the most violent ways possible. That leaves out a lot about the city. A ton of things get left out of the conversation around Chicago. Like Chicago is a city that is a third Latino. There are more folks of Mexican origin there than in most other major cities. There is also an incredibly vibrant art and cultural community in Chicago that people really don’t talk about. If they do, they exceptionalize it down to a few figures, like Chance the Rapper.

You wrote one line in the poem “When I Say Chicago” that stuck out to me, “it’s a town in love by its own blood.” What did you mean by that?

Chicago has an incredibly rich tradition of political movements, but also violent political suppression by police and government operatives. It’s the city where on the night Martin Luther King died, the Mayor put police on the streets with shoot-to-kill orders in black neighborhoods. It’s the city where Fred Hampton [a civil rights activist and member of the Black Panther Party] was murdered in his bed by the police next to his pregnant partner. It’s the city that kept labor activists incarcerated on very flimsy charges during the Haymarket Affair over a hundred years ago. That legacy of oppression is as deep there as it is anywhere. It’s the home of radical and progressive movements, but there are also equal forces there trying to maintain the status quo.

You also write a lot about the things in Chicago that you love. Are there any dominant emotions that drive your poetry?

Wild Hundreds is a book that’s really rooted in love. But when I say love, I don’t mean infatuation or some shallow notion that a person, place or thing is perfect. That’s not the sort of love I practice. What I mean is a deep critical engagement with the city; a willingness to call out the places where it falls short. But also a desire to celebrate it for the things that it does well.

How valuable do you think poetry is in achieving that? Say as a political tool in the fight for social justice?

I’m from the school that thinks that all art has a political side to it. To write poems only about the aesthetic beauty of flowers during a time where black people are being killed with impunity is a political decision.

And the same goes for hip-hop I imagine?

The work of hip-hop is political work. As a young person, hip-hop was one of the first things that brought me into my politics and social justice. I think that it continues to shape and reshape the way that I consider it. Ultimately for me, hip-hop is an art form rooted in the conditions and the internal and external lives of poor people, black people and other people of color.

BreakBeats Poets seems well placed between of art and politics. You’ve described it as a collection that expands the definition of what a poet is and who a poem is for. Could you tell me more about what it means for you to expand that definition?

When we were putting together BreakBeat Poets we were thinking about the notion of the canon. What are the masterworks and the classics that we teach and uphold as the greatest genre achievements? For much of America’s history, the canon has been dominated by rich dead white dudes. So we wanted to challenge the idea of what it means to be a poet. Here’s a collection of works that we’re placing in the argument of what is “the canon.” Folks that were not represented at all 40 years ago. If you look at the representation of people in the Breakbeat Poets, there’s an abundance of voices of color, queer and trans voices, native voices, immigrant voices, etc.

Given that much of your work is centered around amplifying marginalized voices, do you ever expect white people in your audience to interpret your work differently than black people?

I don’t think so, but I can’t say for sure. I’ve seen the engagement is sometimes different. Certain poems that I share will make people of color really connect with me, and they’ll feel very seen by that. While white folks will sometimes be shocked by things that come up in my poems. There’s not a right or wrong response. The way you experience a poem is personal, but I do hope that those moments when part of the response is shock, because an idea feels far away or surprisingly close, that people will take a step back and question why they feel that way.

What are some contemporary works of art or literature that you’d recommend to your students?

I enjoy the work of the novelist Jesmyn Ward, a novelist just won the National Book Award for Sing, Unburied, Sing. I'd also say the writer Fatimah Asghar, who’s a friend of mine and a Pakistani-American poet and TV writer. Her first book is coming out next year and she’s a super exciting voice. And there’s a great poetry anthology I just picked up called Subject to Change. It’s a collection of work from five gender non-conforming poets alongside interviews with them. I like that form because you don’t often get to hear poets speak about their work and those particular issues.

Social justice reading with poet Nate Marshall | Wed, Nov 29, 6:30 pm at SPACE Gallery, 538 Congress St., Portland | Thurs, Nov 30, 7:30 pm at Bates College, 2 Andrews Rd, Lewiston | Fri, Dec 1, noon at Bowdoin College, 255 Maine St., Brunswick