Introduction

Whitfield Lovell’s tableau pieces and full room installations evoke the dress, physiognomic bearing, material presence, and humanity of African Americans.

A collector of anonymous photographs and domestic artifacts, Lovell’s masterful, life-size charcoal renderings of African-American figures on wood panels are based upon the early twentieth century professional studio photographs he has picked up at flea markets and antique stores. Lovell’s tableaux, which are emblematic and theatrical in nature, also incorporate everyday artifacts. His installations exercise a range of senses—including sight and texture, and in some cases, smell and sound.

Writer bell hooks has observed that: “the walls and walls of images [photographs] in southern black homes were sites of resistance . . . These walls were a space where, in the midst of segregation, the hardship of apartheid, dehumanization could be countered.” It is significant that Lovell’s source of imagery, dating from 1900-1940, reinforced—within the confines of the African American domestic sphere—the dignity of blacks during the era of Jim Crow (what Lovell refers to as the “gray area” between slavery and the Civil Rights Movement). The full-length presence of Lovell’s monochromatic almost ghostly two-dimensional figures, the formality of the subjects’ dress (a familiar convention of professional photography) and the way in which they physically occupy spaces articulated by furniture and personal belongings, quietly redresses the pronounced social, cultural and material invisibility of blacks during prolonged years of segregation.

With Lucy Lippard’s perceptive comment that history museum curators would do well to look at Lovell’s “unsentimentally evocative installations,” one is reminded of the paucity of exhibitions on the African American experience, notably at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Employing the democratic promise of the middle class studio photograph, African Americans displayed themselves before the camera and in their homes, as they wanted to be seen, not as others saw them. As such ephemeral displays of private images have not survived, Lovell’s tableaux and installations remind us not only of the historic and contextual importance of the photographs on which they are based, but they work to amplify the essence of the ordinary lives represented.

Whitfield Lovell’s recent one-person exhibitions include: That You Know Who We Are, Zora Neale Hurston National Museum of Fine Arts, Eatonville, FL (2003); Sanctuary: The Great Dismal Swamp, Contemporary Art Center of Virginia, Virginia Beach (2002); Embers, D.C. Moore Gallery, New York, NY (2002) and Boston University Art Gallery, MA (2001); Visitation: The Richmond Project, Hand Workshop Arts Center, Richmond, VA (2001); Portrayals, The Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY (2000); and Whispers From the Walls, University of North Texas Art Gallery, Denton (1999).

We thank the artist, and Bridget Moore and Heidi Lange at D.C. Moore Gallery, New York, NY, for their kind and generous assistance in curating this exhibition and in making available works for loan. Thanks are also extended to Professor of Art History, Boston University, Patricia Hills, for her campus visit and informative talk on Lovell’s work. At Kenyon, this exhibition and educational program are supported, in part, by Peter Rutkoff and the American Studies Department, and Chris Kennerly, Multicultural Affairs. Kenyon College work study students are also thanked for their helpful assistance with the installation of the exhibition.

-Dan Younger
Olin Gallery Director

Whitfield Lovell, Gown, oil stick and charcoal on
paper, 1992

Whitfield Lovell, Temptation, charcoal on wood,
found objects, 2000