Discussion examines role of art in Black identity
25th June 2018 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
In commemoration of the annual Juneteenth holiday, Newcomb Art Museum at Tulane University last Tuesday hosted roughly 100 people for a vital discussion about the intersection of art, image and historical reckoning.
The program – entitled “Uncommon Exchanges” and co-sponsored by A Studio in the Woods, the ByWater Institute at Tulane and the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South – paired Tulane professor Dr. Laura R. Adderley and Brandan “BMike” Odums, a young local artist who focuses his work on enlivening public spaces, to discuss the importance and meaning of history, heritage and representation in art, particularly in terms of slavery and emancipation in the United States.
Although the Juneteenth holiday specifically marks the day the message of freedom reached Texas – June 19, 1865, more than two years after President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation – communities across the United States recognize and celebrate the hallowed day.
Odums, who uses visual art and filmmaking that helps transform the public spaces and viewers’ minds, said he centers on “seeing images from the past like a camera” to produce his work, adding that “how we see the past informs how we interpret the past.”
Odums said that because he grew up in a military family that moved across the world a lot, he had trouble making an identity for himself. He used art and images to aid him in seeing who he was and where he belonged on the continuum of history.
“History was a way for me to connect with faces that looked like me,” Odums said.
“That became my comic book, it became my Black Panther,” he added, referencing both the Blank Panther Party movement of the 1960s and 70s, as well as the famous Marvel comics character who was the central character in a recent blockbuster movie.
He added that art and the images of Black heritage provided him both stability and fortitude as he grew, almost like a cultural and spiritual anchor.
“It was my constant in the midst of all these changes,” he said. “It was that strength that connected me to” his place.
Odums said he hopes that African Americans who view his art will also connect with it in an organic, familiar manner because it’s also their history.
“[Black viewers] don’t need me tell them what they see” in his work. “There’s something intuitive and cognitive.”
He added that he wants his work to challenge everyone who sees it to explore and confront the tragedy and legacy of slavery.
“My intention is to beautify public spaces, but also help people beautify themselves,” he said. “The artist’s job is to pierce that [personal] bubble and remind people that not everyone has always had access to that space.”
Adderley, an associate professor of African Diaspora History at Tulane, agreed with Odums, saying that “Black kids see [images of slavery] and intuitively know it’s bad. There’s a way in which African-American children, all across the Americas, are aware innately” of the historical significance.
Adderley says that when she teaches her classes, she tries “to jar students out of their complacency… If history doesn’t upset you and disturb your comfort zone and sense of ease about the world,” she added, the message isn’t getting across.
Adderley, whose research and writing has focused on the 19th-century Transatlantic slave trade and its effects of the multinational Black diaspora, said she recently has been greatly impacted by artwork from artists in Haiti, especially their representations of Haitian slavery, the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804, and the devastating, continuing effects slavery had on the island nation.
Tying the Haitian slave rebellion in with Juneteenth in the United States, Adderley said artists in Haiti have done a better job of capturing and relaying their history than people in the United States have.
“Where the Haitian artists have succeeded,” she said, “we historians have failed.”
She said that in her classes at Tulane, in New Orleans and beyond, that failure has resulted in generations who “don’t understand the huge effect slavery had on Western culture.” Whether it’s the fear of facing our country’s wrongs or just an overall apathy, “we in the United States are still struggling with what [slavery’s legacy] is.”
Odums’ high-profile work includes his debut solo show in 2016 at the #StudioBe warehouse, and #ProjectBe, a series of graffiti murals of iconic African-American civil rights leaders at the Florida Avenue housing complex in the 9th Ward. He also turned an abandoned five-story West Bank apartment into the largest street art gathering in the South, with more than 30,000 visitors and a slew of national attention.
He listed a wide range of influences, from Emory Douglas, an artist, illustrator, journalist and minister of culture for the Black Panther Party to rapper/freestyler Has-Lo and his series of albums called “Pens & Pixels.”
Odums said he especially enjoys creating graffiti and marking works because, if they’re done well, they both reflect, incorporate and merge with the surrounding communities and public spaces. That, he said, “gives me a sense of artistic ownership of what is happening [in New Orleans] at the time. What I love about [marking] on the street and in public becomes part of the process. At its best, it’s a collaboration with that space, with that city, with that neighborhood, with that street.”
Such a symbiosis became even more crucial after Hurricane Katrina, an event that fired his imagination and desire to uplift the community with art, resulting partially in #ProjectBe.
Linking back to slavery, Juneteenth, Jim Crow and other events, Odums said the challenge is to find yourself in a history that has for centuries demeaned and demonized different cultures – and to strive to rise above the tragedy.
“For so long, our identity has been tied to oppression, and how we take ownership of that oppression,” he said. “How do we do that with our art? ”He added, “It does add value to who you are.”
In addition to his street art, Odums’ film work has appeared on MTV, VH1 and BET, and he has been recognized by the White House and Complex.com, Odums founded and currently directs 2-Cent Entertainment LLC, a New Orleans-based youth education effort producing mixed media artwork and hosting community workshops that discuss pop culture, social awareness and the overlap between the two concepts.
The agency has given tens of thousands of books to local youth, and the group’s media arts camp just started its fourth year.
Last week’s discussion was moderated by Dr. Denise Frazier, an instructor at several local colleges and universities who received a master’s and doctorate in Latin American Studies at Tulane. Frazier, who serves as the assistant director for the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, has focused her research on politics and culture in Cuba and Brazil and the way those subjects align with hip hop and other modern musical styles.
Frazier closed the discussion by quoting a poignant passage from “Juneteenth,” a novel by influential, legendary writer Ralph Ellison.
This article originally published in the June 25, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
