Checking ID

The vogue for identity politics in academia and its trickle down to the culture at large has made many of us aware of how dramatically reality can be filtered through the circumstance of being female, gay, poor, Hispanic, Southern or Asian. A group whose representation has been one of the most vocally and visibly debated are African Americans, whose identities are peeled off like a layer of skin, repackaged, reformulated and handed back to them by Hollywood, Madison Avenue, the music industry, the arts — everyone has a say in what black “is.” Is it something physical or culturally imposed? This is one of the compelling issues at the heart of the ambitious traveling exhibition currently on view at the Georgia State Gallery, Looking Forward, Looking Black, a show that addresses how black identity has looked across historical divides.

Possibly the best aspect of the show is its elasticity. Looking Black has work from artists you’d expect — hot young thing Kara Walker and old-school artists like Carrie Mae Weems — as well as amateur photography, folk art and early portraiture from less expected sources.

A small, but advantageously used sampling of work from an artist who’s been more often aligned with the folk school than thought of in terms of race, the show features the magical, spare paintings of slave-turned-artist Bill Traylor. The ghostly, spectral-primitive figures that characterize Traylor’s work seem more portentous and haunting in light of Looking Forward’s themes.

Traylor’s brutal scenes of dogs with bared teeth and diminutive men wielding raised clubs take on a new light in the context of Looking Forward. Such images, perhaps, speak to Traylor’s experiences as a black man; the comparable brutality of the artist’s former enslavement and his homelessness in the later years of his life expressed in these angry figures. Traylor’s work, placed beside these more politically overt works, makes one consider something beyond the often condescending and racist view of the sweet, uneducated old-timer whittling away his retirement days.

Another interesting inclusion in this eclectic show are a pair of hand-colored photographs, circa 1925, of rigidly-posed, neatly dressed African Americans captured against an American flag, the shade of their clothes and background filled in with soft blues and eggshells. These plain, anonymous, very ordinary snapshots, however, reverberate, much like the work of Harlem photographer James VanDerZee. These images supplant the images of “black” that fill history books and newsreels of lynchings, Montgomery water hoses and slaves in the cotton fields, which have often limited the representation of African Americans to images of struggle and violence, forgetting the dinners, the trips to the fair, the birth of new babies, the ordinary existences which have also historically constituted black identity.

The one show of randy wit in Forward is a piquant social protest — a Madison Avenue-meets-blaxploitation laugh-out-loud Cibachrome by Renee Cox of two foxy babes and one buff daddy busting out of corporate slavery. The three super vixen superheroes are throwing off the chains of Uncle Ben- and Aunt Jemima-box servitude that haunt their backs as they speed toward a TM-free future. With its sexy, fierce humor, Cox’s image cuts through the rigid solemnity of some of the other work.

Cox’s work is also transgressive for its celebratory view of black women as powerful and sexy and for looking toward the future, as opposed to the majority of works which, in striving to comment upon the various assaults on black womanhood, make it an often abject, desolate, woeful thing. If there is a ghost in Looking Forward’s machine it is that stolen and dismembered icon of black consciousness: the female body. Robert Colescott’s rage-infused paintings depict black women as wary, suspicious sex objects with apprehensive expressions regarding the white men and women who watch them with hungry leers. The reduction of black womanhood to sex or service dominates other artists’ works, too. Beverly McIver paints fat, angry, whiplash strokes depicting herself as a wild-haired, blackface clown suckling white babies or supplicating herself to a white man. The work suggests a grotesque spin on sad clown kitsch, this time infused with racial politics and Cindy Sherman-esque self-hatred.

Some of the works in Looking Forward are lesser ones in the artists’ canons, like the Kara Walker piece of a little girl who has set herself on fire, releasing a plume of smoke with a black woman’s face and a graveyard hidden within its outline. Neutered and cryptic, the work makes one long for Walker’s far more vicious, volatile stuff with sub-textual story lines of rape, murder and torture hidden in our cultural storybook. The same applies to Michael Ray Charles, a satirist wielding a sharpened ax. The sole Charles image in the show, an absurdly grinning black face wearing a crown of flowers, is a reference to degrading racist imagery. But Charles’ usual work is the stuff that starts cries of censorship and furious debate — there is the sense in Looking that the work has been toned down, the less provocative works chosen for this traveling show.

Maybe controversy and provocation aren’t the best way to get a message across maybe audiences are more receptive to work that doesn’t threaten or goad. But the messages of Looking Black feel so clear-cut in their assertion of black degradation and suffering one longs for the angry spark, the vicious wit that would disarm the history and allow for a more empowered future.

Looking Forward, Looking Black runs through Oct. 2 at the Georgia State University School of Art and Design Galleries, corner of Peachtree Center Avenue and Gilmer Street. 404-651-2257. Mon.-Fri. 10 a.m.-6 p.m.