Giants is an exhibition of large-scale works painted (or made) by African-American, African, and African diaspora artists. The art is part of a collection amassed by the pop singer Alicia Keyes and her husband, the hiphop DJ, Swizz Beatz. The art is bright, figurative, and, generally, celebratory -- although there are some sour notes (pertaining to racism and mass incarceration), this is a happy show intended to be uplifting and positive. The notion of "giants" refers to precursors who have shown us the way and from whose shoulders we see the future. But "giants" also refers to the scale of these works, most of which are huge. There is something refreshingly retrograde, even reactionary, about an art show that posits that the work is beneficial and inspirational. This isn't a subtle show -- it's colorful and straightforward and so overtly explicit that it all seems just a little big superficial and, perhaps, even slightly dull.
Right off the bat, the gallery-goer is confronted with two heroically sized panels showing dirt bike riders soaring into space. In the next room, a big triptych called "A Puzzled Revolution" comments in the famous "phantom punch" by which Muhammed Ali felled Sonny Liston in 1965. The famous photograph of Ali triumphant with his fist raised has been used as cut out shape -- within this form, the artist has repainted various motifs from classical art: there is an image of the Virgin Mary sheltering within the grotto-like silhouette of the victorious boxer, a bright picture of a Black man at the battle of Bunker Hill, and fragments from "Watson and the Shark", the famous American painting by John Singleton Copley. It's baffling, but impressive on the basis of size and palette. (The artist is Titus Kaphar working in 2021). Also in that room are two semi-sculptural works by Nick Cave; these are lush floral arrays of delicate iridescent fibers -- one called "Tondo" is an abyss of colorful fur, an oblong six feet tall hung on the wall; the other is a figure also bristling with a mass of iridescent threads seemingly carrying a shield of the same bright fabric over upper torso and face -- the sculpture is supposed to have something to do with George Floyd's murder. (This Nick Cave is an African-American artist born in 1959 in Fulton, Missouri and not the Australian rock-and-roller.) The center piece in the show is an enormous mural by Maleka Mokgozi presented in a dark galley. The mural is lit is such a way so that it seems to glow within as if it were translucent and pasted on a light-box. The painting, about 12 feet tall and 140 feet long, shows interiors in Botswana with a couple frieze-frames outdoors -- some kids posing in school uniforms and people working in the bright yellow sun to plant small trees. It's prosaic and the pictures aren't particularly compelling but the size and ambition of the thing is impressive, various figures (all of them lifesize) suspiciously peering out of the rooms and corridors in which they are posed: we have a man in khakis sprawled on a bed, various officials, military men, an oligarch in a room full of expensive-looking art. This work was commissioned for the LA Fowler Museum and made in 2018. Almost all of the objects on display are portraits or images of people -- for instance, three huge photographs (inkjet prints), one of a man making gang gesture with a child cowering at his hip and, then, two naked girls in Soweto, South Africa. There are abouts 30 small painted landscapes, conventional-looking pictures showing Jamaica, but the scale of the installation (as opposed to the individual components) is also very large -- covering a high, long wall. A lifesize stainless steel arm reaches out to restrain a stainless steel billy club, also gripped by a shiny, mirror-like fist. There's an interesting Basquiat, a meditation on Langston Hughes that is uncharacteristically sober for this artist. The last room in the show contains many photographs in 3 x 4 foot format by St. Paul native, Gordon Parks. A portrait of Keyes and Beatz in which the handsome couple stand forth against supernal darkness makes them look like renaissance royalty, Medici collectors and patrons of the arts.
Visitors to Giants are disgorged into a gallery featuring massive totempole-like sculptures made in New Ireland (Papua New Guinea). The large wooden figures are cryptic and menacing; a male and female couple are jointed at the genitals and look vaguely like enormous worms or caterpillars. A so-called Malangan (ancestor) figure stands eight foot tall with goggled eyes (a bit like a frog wearing horn-rimmed glasses or the Zapotec rain god Cocijo) and has a conical rain cap made from huge tropical leaves. What makes these figures remarkable (and they seem somehow pendant to the over-sized pop art portraits in the Giants show) is the remarkable subtlety of the vegetable pigments with which they are painted- the delicate washes of color are transparent so that the beautifully textured wood from which these figures are hewn is clearly visible as well.
A few galleries away there is a relatively small show featuring works by the Dakota (Sioux) artist Mary Sully. These are remarkable works and well-worth very close study. Sully, whose real name was Susan Deloria was born in 1896 on the Standing Rock Reservation straddling the border between North and South Dakota. Her family was prominent then and remains prominent now -- her brother was a very influential Episcopalian pastor on the Reservation and she is lineal descendant from the English-American portrait painter Thomas Sully; his son was the notorious Alfred Sully, a ferocious Indian fighter (he put severed heads on posts to frighten the Sioux); Alfred Sully was also a gifted water-color painter and married a Yankton Sioux woman in the midst of his genocidal campaigns. (Alfred Sully's granddaughter, Mary Sully, the artist celebrated in this show, was known as "Soldier Woman" in Lakota based on her grandfather's exploits.) Mary Sully's nephew was Vine Deloria the father of Vine Deloria Jr. the author of Custer Died for your Sins and God is Red. This lineage illustrates the extraordinary complexity of Indian-White relations on the frontier. Mary Sully seems to have been self-taught and her work is highly original. She made 200 or more pictures that she called "Personality Prints". The images each consist of three stacked painting -- they are made with highlights of white paint, watercolors, gouache, pastel crayons, and colored pencil. Each grouping of pictures features a vaguely figurative image at the top (about 18 inches by 18 images). The figurative image is, then, analyzed into a schematic abstract picture, generally showing mirror symmetry that embodies pictorial motifs in the painting above. The lowest picture in the three-tier registry translates the middle frame (which is abstract) into a Dakota Sioux pattern seemingly representing a pattern that might be woven into a quilt or blanket. The top picture shows faces, clothing, gestures; the middle painting is an abstract and symmetrical variation on forms above it while the third picture (at the bottom) is completely abstract, a simple geometric pattern that seems to represent traditional Dakota textile craft. The colors are subtle, extremely refined and elegant. Deloria's subjects are the ballerina Pawlowa, Shirley Temple (reflected by a mosaic of cherubic dimpled kewpie-doll faces), the opera singer Lawrence Tibbet, Easter, Indian religion, Episcopal religion, Fred Astaire, Zeigfield (sic) of the Ziegfield follies, and, rather bizarrely, The Children of Divorce. The trio pictures are theme and variations and have a jazzy, improvised look although on inspection the drawing is very precise -- some of the pictures look like "ledger book" art from the late 19th century. The closest correlate to academic fine art is Marsden Hartley's "portraits" of his homosexual lover, Karl von Freyburg who was killed in World War One -- gorgeous abstractions ("Portraits of a German Officer") built from stylized horse and rider motifs, military ribbons and military regalia. Sully lived in New York during the twenties and thirties and made these pictures generally before 1940. I have never heard of her and was immensely impressed by this small, but vibrant show.
LaFontaine's animal parables are the subject of another small exhibit. The short parables are printed on the wall. Painted china and ceramics illustrate the stories which involve dogs, foxes, and oysters. Two dogs see a dead mule floating in the middle of a lake. The dogs can't get to the mule and so they resolve to drink up all the water so that they can feast on the carcass. They drink and drink and succeed in lowering the water table to some degree, but, then, their guts burst and they perish. BE SMART it says on one wall, BE HUMBLE on another wall, DISTRUST THE POWERFUL is inscribed on the third wall. Near the entrance to the galleries, ten Hokusai prints of flowers with insects are arranged along a wall facing a 4 x 3 foot canvas by Claude Monet, a scribble of colorful chrysanthemums. The Hokusai prints were made in 1833-1834 and they show tree frogs crouching among the blossoms, a horsefly and a big bulbous-eyed dragon fly; a grasshopper sits on a stem supporting a bright flare of flower. This is also a wonderful small show.
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