Grounded Series

Two large unstretched canvases address the importance of and complex relationships of my family and myself to cotton.  They use dirt from the plantation grounds as pigment, referencing Alabama artist Jimmy Lee Sudduth’s work.  His work documented the African American culture of his rural community, and I was inspired to anchor my own memories and reflections of my white Southern roots in its earth pigment.   The first painting I made in the series, Codex: Map of my Childhood, provides the context for the entire show with its placement of Klein in its surrounding area, showing the ubiquity of cotton. The second, Self Portrait in Cotton 1, uses the same materials but emphasizes concept over representation and suggests an unconscious dream state reflection of my family association with slavery. These works were originally shown in the Choked on Cotton exhibit at the Community Artists’ Collective in Houston. Three other canvases are also in this series (see the Walk Humbly exhibit at the MMFA).

Codex: Map of my childhood

Codex: Map of my childhood was inspired by the 2019 exhibit Mapping Memory: Space and History in 16th Century Mexico at the Blanton Museum in Austin.  These Mapas de las Relaciones Geográficas were created by indigenous artists in the late 16th century for Spain and incorporate an amalgamation of imagery and symbols from their culture and from the colonizers .  As in many of the mapas, footprints mark my own transit in the 1950s around the community landmarks of memory.   Others would have represented this time and space differently..

Codex: Map of my childhood documents my childhood summer life that revolved around two proximate former plantation houses, a small vernacular rural frame home on one of these places, the swimming hole, and the church.  The antebellum structures were in disrepair, and one would later be torn down and the other preserved.   The resulting 4 x 6’ canvas reflects the mapmaking tradition of Mapas, representing a history and interpretation of the space I traversed six decades ago.  The brown pigment is dirt from my childhood friend’s cotton field.  Cotton forms a sea around the buildings, crossing the highways, just as I saw it in 2018.  

Self Portrait in Cotton 1

Self-portrait in Cotton 1 begins my examination of my own life in relationship to cotton.  I placed myself on top of a cotton field.  As with a dream, this image, upon reflection, brought several interpretations for deeper consideration. I was held up by cotton.  Perhaps it was the foundation of my generational memory; perhaps it was a funeral pyre; or it was my lying on the shoulders of the people enslaved by my family who worked these fields.  This work invites other interpretations from those whose ancestors toiled in the fields, from those who farm cotton today, and from others who have no relationship with the cotton economy.  Similar in size to Codex, it also includes dirt from both Klein and the cotton field as the earth.

A video of a contemporary cotton harvest sits on an iPad between Self-Portrait in Cotton 1 and Cotton Economy 1. I filmed it while standing inside an antebellum cemetery behind the (now demolished) antebellum house on the place next to Klein. This juxtaposition says so much about the history of cotton in the county: slavery to sharecropping to large scale farming.