Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Christine Miller, Rachel Elizabeth Jones, Sam Hiura, and Nia-Amina Minor pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast.
Nordic Utopia?: African Americans in the 20th Century
National Nordic Museum, Seattle, WA
March 23 to July 21, 2024
Nordic Utopia? African Americans in the 20th century is a comprehensive exhibition at the National Nordic Museum about the little known history of Black performers, writers, and visual artists in Northern Europe. Rarely do exhibitions illuminate the presence and contribution of U.S. born Black folks abroad and when they do, the focus largely falls on France.
Curated by Dr. Ethelene Whitmire and Leslie Anne Anderson (Chief Curator of the Nordic Museum), Nordic Utopia? was organized with the clear intention to shed light on the people who sought “new possibilities, inspiration, and environments in the Nordic countries as an alternative to Paris.”
The exhibition highlights artists whose legacies have been neglected and whose work is often missing from museums, galleries, and history. The vivid and deeply moving paintings of William Henry Johnson, Clifford Johnson, Herbert Gentry, Walter Williams, Ronald Burns, and Howard Smith are on view across two large rooms. This work alone is exceptional and speaks to the creative journey these artists experienced while abroad.
I imagine seeing them together is particularly rare. The artwork is accompanied by archival photos and films that provide a look into the intimate lives of Black performing artists in Nordic regions. In a documentary and corresponding magazine article Anne Wiggins Brown, the singer who took on the legendary role of Bess in George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, describes the performance that brought her to Europe and the life she made in Norway. A true highlight of the exhibit is the documentary Dancing Prophet which focuses on Doug Crutchfield, a dancer who performed and taught in Copenhagen, Denmark, and Sweden for 24 years. For anyone interested in local art history, it is moving to learn that before Crutchfield left the U.S. he studied for three years with Seattle’s own luminary Syvilla Fort at her New York studio.
The question mark in the exhibition’s title encourages us to marvel at the creative fulfillment Black artists may have found abroad while simultaneously interrogating the myth of utopia often perpetuated about Nordic countries. Rather than offer a romanticized narrative about Europe, Nordic Utopia? allows the lives and contributions of these Black figures to speak for themselves.
Bonus: Visit the museum May 1–4 and 8–11 to see Dialogue, an original performance choreographed by Donald Byrd performed by Spectrum Dance Theater. Byrd’s piece recognizes the important exchanges that occur when Black people and Black cultural traditions make their way abroad. Performances will take place in the Osberg Great Hall.
Reflection: What gifts are bestowed upon us when we celebrate overlooked legacies?
La Vaughn Belle: A History of Unruly Returns
National Nordic Museum, Seattle, WA
January 13 to July 21, 2024
“…as daughters and sons of the dispersion, we are but many fragments – Danish, British, Yoruba, Akwamu, Kalinago, Taino – we are pieces of patterns and peoples that we may no longer recognize or acknowledge.” — La Vaughn Belle
As soon as I walked into La Vaughn Belle’s A History of Unruly Returns I was immersed in a calm that was quiet and unsettling. Like the moments after a storm, there is a stillness in the room as shades of blue brushed across multiple surfaces pull you into a slower pace and ask you to pay attention and listen. In the supporting wall text we learn that these large scale blue and white paintings depict the designs etched on ceramics circulated from Northern Europe to the Caribbean as part of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.
The series We live in the fragments refer to shards commonly known as chaney, a word combining china and money, specifically found in the soil and beaches of St Croix. In another work called chaney plate series, Belle’s collaboration with the Royal Copenhagen, a Danish manufacturing company that has designed porcelain products since 1775, the artist enacts the delicate craft to interrogate a painful legacy through a powerful visual poetic.
A History of Unruly Returns is Belle’s first solo exhibition in the Pacific Northwest and serves as an important reminder to never overlook the mundane. Imbued with memory, this collection unearths fragmented colonial legacies that may be woven into everyday life. From the pieces of ceramic that Belle describes as “detritus, broken down into the soil, just like the traded bodies,” to the archival photography Belle distorts as a way to subvert the colonial gaze, afterlives of slavery and colonization shape our understanding of the contemporary world.
Reflection: What afterlives of slavery and colonization can be witnessed in your everyday life? How do we return to the unremembered?
Aramis Hamer: Once Upon A Spacetime
ARTE NOIR, Seattle, WA
January 17 to May 5, 2024
With Once Upon a Spacetime, artist Aramis Hamer asks viewers to reflect for a moment on their personal divinity: “If you truly saw the Divinity that lives in your eyes, how would your story change?” The responses to this question fill ARTE NOIR, a Black arts space in Seattle’s historic Central District Neighborhood, resonate across the transcendent and ethereal paintings on view.
In Once Upon a Spacetime, Hamer has a clear ability to imagine Black femininity outside the bounds of this earthly plane while also celebrating the ways Black people have cultivated cultural identity across generations. Some of her figures wear bamboo earrings with cornrows that extend into galaxies while others don locks that seem to comfort and envelop. A painter and muralist, Hamer’s work is otherworldly yet familiar.
In Mary’s Lambs, the nursery rhyme takes on new dimensions as lambs of all sizes stare back at the viewer positioned as protective entities so that Mary might enjoy her peace. These large scale paintings feel like portals into new worlds evoking the sonic landscapes of artists like Erykah Badu and Alice Coltrane. Walking through the gallery I couldn’t help but think of a message Sun Ra drops on a group of teenagers in the film Space Is the Place (1974). Sun Ra says, “I do not come to you as a reality, I come to you as the myth because that is what black people are: myths. I came from a dream that the black man dreamed long ago. I’m actually a presence sent to you by your ancestors.”
On view at Arte Noir until May 5th, Hamer invites us on a cosmic journey to pull the veil aside, remember our ancestral dreams, and practice imagining outside of this space and time.
Reflection: How might you practice imagining another world, another dimension?