Good vs. evil
Self-taught artist tackles slavery and segregation
Something happens in certain self-taught and folk art that can make you reassess all the divisions of quality that typically separate the art world.
Hidden within crude technique and melodramatic gestures is a glimmer of something sublime.
Jim Crow: The Paintings of Johnnie Lee Gray, on view at the Atlanta History Center, shows how surprising insights can emerge from unexpected places. The 35 paintings in the exhibition contain their share of suffering in keeping with the show’s segregation theme. Gray documents the abysmal lot of the Vietnam grunt, the Southern child, the black field hand, all of whom inhabit a world divided by race.
But Jim Crow is not, like its subject matter, so easily categorized.
In addition to Big Issues like segregation and slavery, Gray tackled humble themes as well: the air-conditioned paradise of an emerald green movie palace, or a pickup basketball game set against a Creamsicle orange sky that captures the bittersweet glow of a fleeting summer twilight.
Raised by South Carolina sharecroppers, Gray was born poor and stayed that way. Like other self-taught artists, he often painted on scavenged materials like discarded plywood and used house paints. Until he died of lung cancer in 2000, Gray worked as a carpenter and handyman to support himself and his artistic pursuits.
Despite a certain technical crudeness that looks cartoonish, Gray’s paintings manage to blend social critique, humor, optimism and a strong desire to commemorate African-American achievement with work that is infused with energy and movement.
“The Working Class” is a splendid example of how Gray could coalesce a hard-scrabble world and a sense of optimism. The work mixes bitter realism with intoxicating beauty as it shows African-Americans laboring in an orchard, but in wild, juicy colors that make the fruit glow like fireflies against the green fields. Gray repeatedly used rolling hills and winding roads disappearing into the distance to lead the eye on metaphorical journeys. He seemed to factor in an escape hatch from scenes of unceasing labor and heartbreak for both himself and for the people he painted.
Gray could also appraise historical change and “progress” with a degree of cynicism. In one series of three paintings, Gray documents a fictitious Southern street corner as it is transformed over time, shifting from the uneasy calm of segregation, to civil rights violence, to inner-city decline. As the porno theaters, homeless people and hookers testify, calm has returned but the tumult hasn’t left the area unscathed. Legal equality may have been gained, Gray suggests, but huge economic gaps persist.
Gray worked on his most historically and socially comprehensive painting, “A Crowd of Witnesses,” for three years. The painting is divided into highly narrative spheres of action, as if Gray was anxious to compress as much information as possible into the work. In the foreground of the painting is a spectrum of vice: drug pushers, whores, drunks and corrupt preachers. And high above, like angels offering benevolent appraisal of human folly, is a Mt. Rushmore of “witnesses”: Harriet Tubman, John F. Kennedy, Sojourner Truth, even Bill Clinton, looking down from heaven on the motley earth below.
The lesson about good and evil is melodramatic and overstated, but it’s also captivating in the manner of pulp magazine covers and religious art for the sincerity with which it divides the world into angelic good and abject bad, and its earnest desire to see the good come out on top.
A more cynical man might allow evil to hold sway in his worldview, but Gray’s charm is how he refuses, despite a million reasons, to feel defeated and ornery about the ugly human race. Never candy-coating the grim reality of 20th-century servitude and segregation, Johnnie Gray instead conveyed how some dreams die hard and how determination could endure despite every hardship.