Where Art Never Dies

Avalon Grover 04/18/2023

LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and an internationally renowned institution, currently presents the Afro-Atlantic Histories Exhibition which I had the pleasure of visiting on April 7, 2023. The exhibit features art pieces from contemporary and historical artists depicting experiences and emotions from the transatlantic slave trade, their welcome, or non-welcome, to new countries, the struggles they faced as a community, and the incredible misrepresentation of the Black Diaspora. The museum places the pieces in dialogue and juxtaposition to illustrate evolving perspectives over time in the perspective of the global African diaspora with artists from the Caribbean, Europe, and the Americas. The works reexamine history from the last four centuries of enslavement, struggle, racism, and resilience as well as works to counteract the narrative white European artists have set through their art. After spending time looking at the many artworks in the exhibition, one stood out to me because of its uniqueness and creative use of natural materials: Jaime Lauriano’s Portuguese Stones no.2 2017. The whole exhibit, while impactful and important, is successful in many ways but one. The Portrait section does not align with the exhibit’s goal of changing one’s perspective of history because of its lack of context. Others, such as the Everyday Lives section, are very successful in their portrayal of the struggles and reality of the Black Diaspora. In this essay, I will analyze both the layout and the success of the exhibit; then, I will focus on the Portuguese Stones no.2 piece to examine its efficiency and impact in relation to the goal of LACMA’s Afro-Atlantic Histories exhibit. 

While the content of the exhibit is very important, so is its layout and the curators’ choice in placement. At first glance, the exhibit is placed in the very back of the building, separating it from the other two exhibits focusing on modern abstractions and conversations through clay which I find very interesting because the most socially impactful and exciting is hidden in the back rather than front and center. However, once entering into the sectioned off Afro-Atlantic Histories exhibit, it becomes evident that the exhibit takes up a significant amount of space. Almost half of the room is dedicated to the act of education and acknowledging the transatlantic slave trade and the struggles of the Black Diaspora, yet some would argue not enough, especially in comparison to the exhibit’s original self. In his LA Times article How LACMA’s stripped-down exhibition of Afro-Atlantic art falls short, Christopher Knight, award winning LA Times art critic, explains that the exhibition’s original in São Paulo had over 100 pieces but was radically downsized to around 450 with its arrival to the National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He describes it as a “shadow of its former self” (Knight). The exhibit contains six sections within itself: Everyday Lives, Enslavements & Emancipations, Resistance & activism, Maps & Margins, Portraits, Rites & Rhythms. In the first section, the pieces depict images of daily life in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas from the past four centuries, reflecting “moments of labor and leisure” in Black community and “detailing realities of racial inequalities and state violence” (LACMA). The Enslavements & Emancipations section displays art works incorporated with historical images of slavery all from contemporary artists. The third section, Resistance & Activism, presents pieces of persistence and protest. Maps & Margins includes pieces illustrating the early crossing and passages between Africa and the Americas and “how artists have represented and reinterpreted the histories shaped within” (LACMA). The Portraits section contains both traditional and abstract portraits of Black people that evoke poise, power, and individuality rather than the degradation, submission, and objectification portraits of Black people had historically acted as. The last section, Rites & Rhythms, includes pieces depicting the various types of music and dance from the Caribbean to Brazil to the US as music, festivities, and carnival were central to the culture and identity of Black history. 

Looking at the exhibition as a whole, the museum includes many impactful and beautiful works such as Emanuel Araújo’s O’Navajo (The Ship) 2007, Rosana Paulina’s The Performance of Structures 2017, and Jaime Lauriano’s Portuguese Stones no.2, all of which are incredibly complex, abstract, and meaningful pieces. However, one section of the exhibit is unsuccessful in its approach to reexamine history and provide individuality to the Black community: Portraits. This section presents multiple traditionally painted portraits as well as abstracted portraits with geometric patterns reminiscent of Picasso’s work, also featured at LACMA. It claims also to reestablish the power and presence of Black people by displaying these Afro-Atlantic portraits. Yet, many of the paintings lacked context beyond a title, year, and artist. Rarely was there information about the subjects in the paintings explaining their life or accomplishments. In this way, the exhibit fails to display the individuality it claims to repurpose and instead shows the audience an array of images with a potential to be powerful, but no definite follow through. The viewers go from picture to picture looking as portraits with no stories. Others, however, would argue otherwise. Chad Scott’s article ‘Afro-Atlantic Histories’ Comes To Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Forbes magazine features Rita Gonzalez, Curator and Department Head of Contemporary Art at LACMA. In the article, she states “‘…the ambition is to showcase. A series of nuanced conversations amongst artworks, historical facts and diverse models of representation’” (Scott). While this may be true, the dialogue fails to be established with merely images of black subjects in the same stature as white subjects and no background history, validating the power the exhibit claims it does. On the wall description, the Portraits section states it presents “leaders, heroes, and ordinary individuals; nudes and fashion plates; invented subjects and the artists themselves” (LACMA) in the pieces it displays. One obvious observation from my time at the exhibit was that this section’s pieces contained less information about the works than any other section.  

Generally, the sections maintain the same goal of educating newcomers, reexamining the history of the Afro-Atlantic slave trade, and creating cohesion among artists both geographically and in their artistic mediums. Throughout the exhibit, viewers are exposed to a combination of photographs, oil paintings, collages, sculptures of various materials, murals, textiles, neon signs, installation pieces, portraiture, and videography. The range covers both historical and contemporary pieces with abstract art placed next to traditional pieces. In other words, the diversity in art forms is incredibly vast. Furthermore, the geographical scope of the exhibit stretches from parts of Europe to the Caribbean, the United States, and to various parts of Latin America with the artists’ origins spread across the regions where transatlantic slave trade was at its peak. The concept is similar to the basis of our AHIS 128 class in that both our lessons and the exhibit cover the geographically bases for Latin American art, however the Afro-Atlantic Histories exhibition extends much further into parts of Africa and the US as well. It also focuses on the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade and its effect on society since its existence while our class focuses on the history of colonial impact and Latin American art as a whole. For many visitors, the exhibit was a success. One of the more popular pieces is Aaron Douglas’ Into Bondage oil on canvas from 1936. In his Forbes article, Scott describes it as “a singular bit of genius” and “make[s] attending the show worthwhile all by itself” (Scott). While the portraits section disappointed, the rest of the exhibit succeeded. 

One piece successful in placement, context, and exhibition is the Portuguese Stones no.2 by Jaime Lauriano. Meant to resemble a floor mat typically placed below the front door of a home, the artwork is the second in a series of ‘unwelcome mats’ that reference to the places in Africa “from which the highest numbers of enslaved people were shipped to Brazil” (LACMA). Lauriana, born in Brazil 1985, cleverly incorporates the names of these places, such as the Gold Coast and Mozambique, into the mats using cement, an iron box, and stones from Portuguese, thus paying homage to the medium’s location, her heritage, and the slave trade’s destination. On these mats, the words are clear: Costa Da Mina, or the Gold Coast in Portugal, a place of high activity in the transatlantic slave trade, making the act its most valued market. The contemporary artist’s use of eternal and stoic mediums, the stones and cement, implores the understanding that, although the history of African slave labor may be walked over by thousands, it will never be forgotten. It is set in stone. Each stone is used to create a puzzle reminiscent of a mosaic encased in concrete with the only words pictured refers to the name of the stones’ origin. The concept of creating the piece in the form of a floor mat and its placement on the floor rather than on the wall is also very intentional because the typical use of a floormat is to be walked on and our human nature tempts us to look over it without question or hesitation. Instead, the artist forces the viewer to physically look down at the floor and wonder why the word is written there in stones. This piece is incredibly powerful and speaks entirely in dialogue with the other exhibits in the Everyday Lives section. Another piece in a film medium features multiple black subjects speaking to a camera and instructing their black audience how to stay safe and avoid racist confrontation by changing everyday actions such as not leaving their home after nightfall or remain entirely submissive to the police force. The fear remains embedded in the community which is reflected in the stones embedded in Lauriano’s art. The sentiment reflects the entire exhibition. In this way, this section of the exhibit is entirely successful in establishing a relationship between two nearly unrelated artists and art works to convey the message of the entire exhibition: Africa is everywhere, and the history of slaves will never be forgotten. 

For the past few months, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, LACMA, has presented the Afro-Atlantic Histories exhibition, charting the transatlantic slave trade and its destructive impact in the African diaspora. The exhibit places art from Europe, Africa, and the Americas from the past four centuries in dialogue with each other to achieve a reexamination of the history of enslavement, as well as struggle and resilience of the Black community. To do so, it is sectioned into six parts: Everyday Lives, Enslavements & Emancipations, Resistance & activism, Maps & Margins, Portraits, and Rites & Rhythms, each of which follows the same goal but focuses on the different categories of life impacted by the transatlantic slave trade. The museum displays art in various mediums, such as paintings, neon signs, installations, videography, and photography, providing viewers with a wide and diverse range of pieces to look at and learn about. While the exhibit features many impactful works, one section in particular disappointed more than the rest: Portraits. The sector was unsuccessful in actively and effectively educating its audience on the importance of its Black subjects by providing little to no context about the pieces or their history. The objective of the exhibit is to provide a new perspective for historical and modern art by telling stories of enslavement and resilience. By not contextualizing the portraits, this section failed to establish the subjects of the portraits as powerful, influential, or important. Instead, they were left to be merely faces on a wall. In this essay, I focused on the Portuguese Stones no.2 by Jaime Lauriano, a Brazilian artist, and her subtle yet effective jab at the places where the slave trade was most active and literally sets the names in stone, essentially stating that this history will never be forgotten. The piece was most impactful for me because of its ability to force viewers to take a new perspective by physically looking down at it and its placement next to the works around it, allowing it to work in dialogue with the others perfectly. Generally, the Afro-Atlantic Histories exhibit succeeds in reexamining the history of the transatlantic slave trade through the art that others have made expressing their struggles, resilience, and perspectives.