Weaving, Pulping, and Recovery

John Haber
in New York City

Making Knowing: Craft in Art

Samuel Levi Jones and Suzanne Jackson

"Making Knowing" has more varied quilts than many a Bed Bath & Beyond, but I wish it had room for one more. It might have opened with Robert Rauschenberg's Bed, smeared with paint and hung on the wall.

If that bed looks like a crime scene, it all but single-handedly brought a violent end to ideals of art from Native American weavings through Abstract Expressionism. In tracing "craft in art," tapestry, and ceramics since the 1950s, it would have begun with an artist who could not be bothered to make his bed, much less lie in it. He merely found it and refused to tidy it up. The show has its provocations all the same, but with just enough reverence not to draw blood. And those lessons are not lost on Samuel Levi Jones, who makes them the story of a painter and an African American male. All along, too, Suzanne Jackson makes acrylic sheets and fluid paint into the materials of private voices and African American self-assertion.

Make your bed

Weavings and hangings are everywhere these days, as are ceramics. They accord with challenges to the distinction between fine art and "women's work," folk art, or contemporary African art, African photography, "New Photography 2023" in Lagos, and African American tradition. And the Whitney has an eye to them all. As Faith Ringgold puts it in her tapestried landscape, "I have two handicaps" as a black woman on the threshold of a museum. The show reaches back to Anni Albers, who directed the weaving workshop at the Bauhaus well before her passage to America, and tilts even more to women with each successive room. It has a record number of Native Americans as well, including Emmy Whitehorse, Marie Watt, Shan Goshorn, and Jeffrey Gibson—who look back to Navajo and Mohawk blankets and to weaver baskets and totems.

How dare I ask for another dead white male in Robert Rauschenberg? In fact, "Making Knowing" has him up front, with a painting that looks every bit as bloodied as his "combine painting" in MoMA and nearly as much like a bedspread. The Whitney just focuses instead on its holdings, just as with older classics a floor below. It finds successors to Rauschenberg in Pop Art from Claes Oldenburg—and to Rauschenberg as a gay artist in beads from Arch Connelly, rhinestones from Lucas Samaras, and the AIDS crisis. If he makes a mockery of domesticity, recent acquisitions include a full-scale kitchen by Liza Lou with a pie ready for the oven, dirty dishes ready for cleaning, Cap'n Crunch ready to create cavities, and glitter on every surface.

The curators, Jennie Goldstein and Elisabeth Sherman with Ambika Trasi, walk the walk when it comes to race and gender. Yet the show amounts less to rediscoveries than to recontextualizing. It frames half a century of anti-art and assemblage as design, even when the artists flaunt their lack of craft, as with Addie Wagenknecht and Christopher Myers today. Rauschenberg's canvas hangs between Ruth Asawa and Agnes Martin, with not a thread in sight. Did Asawa find inspiration for her wire sculpture in egg carriers, and are Martin's delicate lines interwoven? Call them forced connections or found miracles, but always call them art.

Howardena Pindell works in punched paper, while Alan Shields subordinates small beads to a wide-open mural. Oldenburg may not belong at all. Still, the play on furniture by Yayoi Kusama or Richard Artschwager looks different in light of the theme of domesticity, and black felt by Robert Morris or tangled rope by Eva Hesse looks different amid so much yarn and string. They also look more physical than ever. Kim MacConnel seems mostly interested in old TV sets, but she does transfer their outlines to fabric. Charles LeDray packs some two thousand tiny porcelain objects.

Will art or context win out? You can keep asking as Miriam Schapiro picks up "pattern and decoration" and Elaine Reichek lays her Minimalism in silver and gold on needlepoint. Betty Woodman hangs her vase on the wall, and Mary Frank makes her broken swimmer from red clay or, Frank's latest work, on stone. Mike Kelley draws on thrift stores for an overgrown child's handmade dolls. Ann Wilson has a quilt, although in oil on canvas, while fabric by Sheila Hicks could pass for a ski mask. Kiki Smith may care more for witchcraft than craft fairs, but she has her quilt, too.

Ree Morton set out all those themes and more back in 1976, with ladders, baskets, flowers—and such words as settings, objects, symbols, and signs of love. A last room discards chronology for more ceramics, just in case earlier rooms had buried it in thread. Most revealing of all, though, is a room for recent art. You get to see what the museum is thinking right now, and it does not have all that much to do with politics after all. Recent acquisitions include a black girl by Simone Leigh at her largest, but also the spareness of tailor's patterns by Erica Baum. You may leave wanting a lot less cuteness, but you may also take more care the next morning with an unmade bed.

Laying down the law

Fabric, then, is no longer just "woman's work," even as women like Dawn Williams Boyd have propelled it into art. Samuel Levi Jones, for one, takes it seriously indeed. Like Katarina Riesing, Altoon Sultan, and so many today, he treats tapestry as painting, with stripes and chevrons that trace its lineage to at once abstraction and quilting. He even calls one work his Quilt of Reality. He leaves thread visible or unraveling. He reduces other materials to pulping, like cotton for Joe Zucker without the balls.

Then again, is he taking his craft apart or claiming it as his own? He alludes to masculinity when he incorporates leather. One might or might not recognize the remains of footballs. Paint smears can look like blood stains, not so far from Rauschenberg's combine bed by Rauschenberg or unstretched canvas for Sam Gilliam. Should women, from Schapiro to Suzanne Goldenberg and Julia Bland today, feel excluded after all? Men have a habit, they might complain, of asserting themselves.

Still, taking things apart is a contribution to history, too—and the show comes just as another gallery displays pioneering painting as weaving by Anni Albers. Jones calls his materials "deconstructed," and he is demanding, in the show's title work, a "Mass Awakening." As an African American, he can look back to Mary Lee Bendolph and Gee's Bend quilts. He can also take things personally. People get beat up pretty hard playing football, and he converts two pipes and a curved metal sheet into a tackling dummy without the padding. He must know well the expectations for young black males, and he played the sport in school himself.

Besides, nothing here is quite the art or object lesson that it seems. What look like cotton wads are pulped law books—his subject at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2015. The leather could pass for a fashion statement and Giant, the tackling dummy, for abstract sculpture or a commercial A-frame. The works closest to bedspreads are dismembered print portfolios on canvas. That could be a disappointing end for a budding artist, and Jones does not say whether the portfolios are his. History, too, has a way of burying lived experience, maybe especially black experience, in its layers.

For him, as for women, it is also the experience of exclusion, much as Lisa Alvarado uses hangings to represent deportations. African Americans can become sports heroes, but they do not so often write law books. Jones speaks of his subjects and materials, too, as "forms of atrocity." One might draw back from that. Getting to know the work can take on a trajectory from a no longer trending art form to something meaningful and then to pat answers. Still, not everything is half so dark or easy, only starting with its vibrant color.

He calls one pulp painting Positive Vibration, and it is still positive and still vibrating. One can feel the energy as he tears into things and puts them back together. Elements cut across the grid, like the slashing brushwork itself. So far at least, the one sculpture is an outlier, and it depends on the leather and fabric that it is missing for context. The work thrives on its place between two and three dimensions, between stereotypes and their denial, and between assemblage and unraveling. For now, it is laying down the law.

Fluid dynamics

When Suzanne Jackson calls a work Silencing Tides, Voices Listening, you must strain to hear the voices, but you can hardly help wanting to listen in. Everything about her art is as fluid as the tides and as prone to turn against itself. She pours her latest colors onto clear acrylic sheets, where they run into one another and across one another. It can be hard to know where any of them begin or end. In earlier work, she handles paint much like watercolor, whatever the medium. It soaks into canvas, like oil into burlap for Paul Gauguin.

Jackson's imagery is just as elusive. On acrylic, it seems too unsettled for abstraction, but nothing obvious appears apart from actual seeds, shells, bells, string, and netting. One can only wonder at their history. On canvas, one can make out faces or bodies, often men paired with women. Their flesh tones, too, may owe something to Gauguin, and she calls a painting from the early 1980s El Paradiso, like his vision of Tahiti as an earthly paradise. She is, though, claiming Western art and African American flesh as not a white man's property, but as her own.

She says that she draws for imagery on family and friends. She may imagine them in dialogue with her, with those "voices listening." She may hope to arrest their fluid motion long enough to hear them. Acrylic paintings include geometric signs and symbols, much like the mysticism of Hilma af Klint a century ago, as a kind of private language. Earlier faces share canvas with flora, birds, and abstract passages, so that they never quite meet. Who can say where their stories, too, begin and end?

At seventy-five, Jackson has had plenty of time to collect voices and memories. She studied in San Francisco, with its notoriously inward-turning art scene. She moved in 1967 to Echo Park, near Los Angeles, where she continued her studies under Charles White. She briefly had her own gallery, Gallery 32, for such people of color as David Hammons, Senga Nengudi, and Betye Saar. It also featured Emory Douglas, minister of culture for the Black Panthers, and she still sees herself as an activist. This is not, though, self-evidently political art, and it has given up on paradise.

Her life has been fluid, too, but has settled down. She is having her first New York solo show, but she knows the city with its constant voices and its grid like her netting. She worked here, in Philly, and at Yale for a while before moving to Georgia more than twenty years ago. Her materials have become translucent, but the work remains hard and physical. Her acrylic hangs apart from the wall, with jagged edges, like unstretched canvas or stage sets. She in fact started out in dance, theater, and performance.

Earlier canvases get physical, too, sometimes as tondos or hung like diamonds, so that there is no taking their shape for granted. Here they come much as a backdrop for recent work. (She just had a fuller retrospective at the Telfair Museum in Savannah, Georgia.) In one painting, the oceans have taken over entirely, with black, gray, and varied colors merging into a deep blue, reflecting her command of color. The symbolism can get frustrating—much as younger artists in these days of "anything goes" may throw whatever they have on canvas to see what sticks. Yet the voices kept swimming in and out of consciousness well after I left the gallery.

jhaber@haberarts.com

"Making Knowing" ran at The Whitney Museum of American Art through February 2021, Samuel Levi Jones at Galerie Lelong through October 12, 2019, and Suzanne Jackson at Ortuzar Projects through January 25, 2020.