Material Memory Through the Georgetown Art Galleries

The Georgetown University Art Galleries, tucked away in the Walsh building on South Campus, host semester-long exhibitions in their two gallery spaces. This fall, the flagship Maria & Alberto de la Cruz Art Gallery displays recent work of McArthur Binion in Notes on Form (Intimate Structures), and the Lucille M. & Richard F. X. Spagnuolo Gallery displays Lorraine O’Grady’s Miscegenated Family Album (1980/1994). Binion’s work brings personal touches to abstract art while interrogating the D.C. Black abstract artwork canon, while O’Grady’s work explores the interactions among two family stories separated by several millennia.

MCARTHUR BINION: NOTES ON FORM (INTIMATE STRUCTURES)

Binion’s exhibited work is assuredly situated within the artistic tradition of abstraction, yet it challenges traditional notions of abstract art by injecting personhood into a genre that erases the author.

The substrate of many of the works in Binion’s “DNA” print and painting series is nineteen years of biographical information from Binion’s life, including photocopies of Binion's contact information, birth certificate, and images of his childhood home. In assembling these collages, Binion paints over these personal documents with oil paint, creating grids of thick monochrome lines which obscure the specific information each entry or document works to transmit. Still, the inclusion of these annotated biographical texts are an illustrative example of his personal injection.

Interestingly, not all the people and places of Binion’s life are hidden behind paint. Accompanied next to one painting in this series, “DNA Study: Mini: Nine, 2014,” is Binion’s still-intact address book, displayed in full light. While the adjacent paintings may disguise Binion’s story behind meticulous grids, the address book is, as Binion said in an interview with prominent art critic Franklin Sirmans, “the loves, the hates, everything I am.”

A story still emerges in these paintings, behind the obfuscation. Across the series, viewers can find the names of Black poets, critics, musicians, and painters—including Al Loving, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Olu Dara, and Stanley Crouch.

The exhibit makes strategic use of placement as a mode of storytelling, too—all four displayed works of the “DNA” series are immediately visible upon entering via the Walsh lobby.

The three displayed installments of the “9 Shapes” series, though, are viewable together from that same entrance on the left wall. In this series, Binion experiments with color and form in three works with different abstract shapes, which together collide to create what roughly resembles a carrot—the “root” vegetable that calls back to the agricultural setting of Binion’s childhood in Macon, Mississippi.

The “root” is an example of what Binion calls the “under-conscious” layer, a metaphor for the deeply personal elements and materials that formulate Binion’s work. In each piece in the exhibition, underneath the impersonality of the overlying grids, shapes, and colors rises this “under-conscious”—exemplifying the rejection of personless abstraction that Binion’s work ultimately achieves.

Finally, by displaying Binion’s work, the gallery’s Chief Curator Jaynelle Hazard also situates Binion’s work within the larger D.C. Black abstraction movement. In particular, works like “All About Stella” (2010) and “Four Movements of Sunlight: Three” (2014), share “visual kinship” and emphasize the “optical experience of paint on canvas” similar to that of artists of the mid-20th century Washington Color School, specifically the Black artists Alma Thomas and Sam Gilliam.

Photo Credits: Vivian Marie Doering

LORRAINE O'GRADY: MISCEGENATED FAMILY ALBUM (1980/1994)

Late conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady’s Miscegenated Family Album, displayed in the gallery opposite the Binion exhibit, is a series of diptychs. Each diptych—that is, a pair of artworks intended to be exhibited side-by-side—displays a portrait of a member of O’Grady’s family alongside a member of the family of Nefertiti, a famous queen of Ancient Egypt. The two families, existing over three millennia apart, draw striking physical similarities—something O’Grady cited as the impetus to begin her work on the series after her 1963 trip to Egypt.

Critic Mira Dayal wrote in Artforum that O’Grady uses the family album as a “storytelling device.” Viewers trace the connections between the families—real and imagined parallels—yet are “always aware of a certain misalignment or incompleteness.” Still, each portrait isolates its subject, creating a sense of disjointment not typical in a “family album.” This disconnection obscures the “family” behind each portrait, but strengthens the imagined parallels among each diptych—between O’Grady and Nefertiti’s sister Mutnedjmet in the “Sisters” series, or between O’Grady’s older sister Devonia and Nefertiti in “Progress of Queens.”

Through these diptychs, O’Grady compares her troubled relationship with her older sister Devonia with that of Mutnedjmet and her older sister Nefertiti. These comparisons also call back to a history of Egyptology as a racist endeavor, and recenter Egyptian art as an aesthetic tradition embedded within the larger history of “African” art and the African diaspora.

The portraits also refer to the “miscegenated” in the exhibit’s title. The Latin “mis-” and “genus” refer to mixing and race, respectively—calling most obviously back to the illegality of mixed-race marriage in the U.S. until 1967. The term, in the context of the exhibit, also suggests a kind of ongoing examination of “dissimilars and similars” across the families, with perceived differences in class and temporality, and perceived mixing and sameness through physical resemblance and a focus on the relationship between mother, sister, and child.

Both the Binion and O’Grady exhibitions explore ideas of personal and family memory through artistic form, and each is on display until Sunday, Dec. 7. Both are accessible via the Walsh lobby on 36th St. NW.

Rating: INDY

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Ted Bergman is a junior in the College majoring in Anthropology and Political Economy. He is Managing Editor of the INDY.