ANNA POMPER

Both of these works, Puryear’s and Ligon’s prints, create a sensation of weight, and carry an impression of the act of pressing down a print, and the painstaking process of creating these pieces. The weight reminds me of Rhobert in Cane, which Puryear illustrates in his work. The Rhobert chapter illustrates the pressure and fraughtness of life when life is constantly being threatened by white supremacy and racism. In Cane, Toomer writes “Rhobert wears a house, like a monstrous diver’s helmet, on his head. His legs are banty-bowed and shaky because as a child he had rickets. He is way down…he is sinking as a diver would sink in mud should the water be drawn off.” (40). The imagery in this section is deeply reminiscent of a print as Rhobert’s body is imprinted on the mud, and the water like ink, is drawn off. It is a print of hardship and of the difficulty of living.

The processes and materials of Puryear’s piece are invested with deep meaning. Puryear uses the process of print in relief. This process requires an emphasis on negative space and this can be read symbolically as a focus on the importance of safe space. The materials of the art are very intentional- the use of sugar and wood deliberately  recall the horror of slavery and the triangular trade. These are not pieces to be viewed or discussed idly at any level of analysis.

In particular, Ligon’s piece seeks to displace the idle or “comfortable” viewing so common to museum spaces. The piece could be read as a condemnation of the whiteness, racism and white background of the “museum”. Ligon places the text, bold and black typeface against a white canvas, reading “I do not always feel colored” (repeated) and then “I feel most colored against a sharp white background” (repeated). As the text repeats the white background is made more opaque. Perhaps the text is subverting the whiteness of the background, perhaps the sharpness of the white background is bleeding the letters. To contextualize this argument- this piece created to be shown and placed in museums, which have an appropriative, violent history. Museums have a history stealing from other cultures and then examining these works to put them in a sterile, voyeuristic room, often for the sole purpose of being viewed by predominantly white audience. Museums cultivate these collections, claiming these artworks as “artifacts”, stripping them of their artistry and creating reductive and racist disciplines like “primitivism”, which allow them to glean techniques from the artworks while claiming them to be inferior. This history has been condemned in art before, through works such as I. M. Pei’s pyramid in front of the Louvre, a reminder of the theft of countless works of art. The pyramid, a burial mound, is also a stark reminder of the violence perpetrated by western colonial powers. It is this artistic tradition that we must consider when we view Ligon’s artwork. The museum, is the “sharp white background” his work refers to. His subversive piece is a condemnation of the very museums in which it is shown.

Ligon’s social commentary extends to the world outside the museum. In his piece, Ligon uses the word “colored”, a word created by white people to segregate and discriminate, and “whiteness” a word created by white people to segregate and discriminate. He’s taking these words and condemning the broader “white background”, a world in which whiteness is constructed as a “default”, and anything else is othered. The danger of being Black and of standing out in this default white background is emphasized by the sharpness of the background- this construct of whiteness is a violent construct that threatens Black life. The fatigue of living with fear of this violence can be sensed in the exhaustive repetition of the words (fatigue is also inherent in the weightiness of printing mentioned in the first paragraph).

Relief from the exhaustion and fear perpetrated by the white supremacist background can be glimpsed in Ligon’s work through his celebration of Black artists and writers. By quoting Zora Neale Hurston in the piece, Ligon is celebrating black community and safe spaces of being, while simultaneously showing that this community is always in danger from white supremacy and racism, a danger evident in the bleeding letters.

Ligon continues this celebration of black community and artistry while showing that it is in peril by referencing other black writers. The obfuscation of the letters against the white background is perhaps also reminiscent of the society’s refusal of subjecthood discussed in Fanon’s Black Faces White Masks, and in Baldwin’s Invisible Man (which Ligon explicitly quotes in another piece), where the protagonist becomes “invisible”, when his subjecthood, or personhood, is ignored by a white supremacist society. As the protagonist in Invisible Man finds his identity and personhood is erased in the eyes of society, so too are the words on Ligon’s work, until they become almost invisible. The resistance to this invisibility is in the dialogue and community of black writers and artists, in referencing their work and their names, in ensuring that they are neither othered against the sharp white background or rendered invisible, that they are rather celebrated, the importance of their words and messages imprinted upon the minds of the audience.