Goodman Gallery
26.04 - 17.06.2023
For those of us whose histories are interrupted, transformed, lost, and remade through the legacies of violence, slavery, and colonialism, home is often a loaded notion. Approaching the concept itself can be an exhausting exercise, one sprawling with desire or desperation. In Freedom is Going Home, Faith Ringgold and Hank Willis Thomas cultivate an intergenerational conversation that explores shared Black experiences, global Black politics, and ideas of home. Story and symbol work to facilitate the specific and the abstract, or imagined, connections between the Black American diaspora and South Africa.
Ringgold, a widely celebrated multidisciplinary artist from New York City best known for her multimedia quilt works and paintings, served as an inspiration for Thomas:
“Faith’s quilts, which are story quilts really, were some of the first artworks that I had an opportunity to engage with and to think about how art can be used to preserve memory, to open ideas, and create nostalgia, but also to be beautiful and carry the path forward.
When I think about the fact that she’s been working for over a half-century, I really am inspired that things that I’m making now or have made in the past might have even more potency, meaning, and relevance in the future.”
The second room of the exhibition puts this inspiration on display, where three of Thomas’s quilt works tell a story of Pan-African symbolism. These works are similar in scale to Ringgold’s quilts, and they are composed of various African flags. The pieces are bright, kaleidoscopic. The titles of the pieces borrow from excerpts of speeches from Pan-African leaders and thinkers, such as Haile Selassie’s Let us demand more of ourselves than we believe we possess or Thomas Sankara’s We must dare to invent the future.
Quilting is freedom-oriented in more ways than one. Quilting in the US has a long history as a craft of resistance and beauty. Many of those enslaved were trained to sew, and in sustained ingenuity, freedom maps were sewn into quilts and sent along with those escaping plantations in the South. As the craft continued to take shape through the eyes and hands of Black people, quilting became a form of remembering. Harriet Powers, born in Georgia in 1837, has become well known for her pictorial quilts that told stories of the bible and utilised appliqué techniques of West Africa. In Alabama, Gullah Geechee people have become known for their quilting as well, retelling folklore and stories about Black people flying home, a theme that runs through Black American storytelling as well as Caribbean folklore. Thomas and Ringgold enter into this tradition, drawing connections across the diaspora in the process.
One of the standout pieces in the show is Ringgold’s South African Love Story #2: Part I and II (diptych). The two quilts are large and striking. Amongst the dynamic colours of the quilt, there is a beige strip that runs above and below the centre patches and, once one approaches the piece, the handwritten text becomes legible. It is a love story set against the backdrop of the height of apartheid. The opening lines read:
It is said that people in love often grow to look alike. Batu is older than me by five years, but if not for that we could be twins. We have the same long lean body structure, slanting eyes, high cheekbones, and smooth black skin. We even wear our hair alike, close cut. Batu calls me Beauty, but he is the real beauty. His love for me is as strong as the muscles rippling under his satin skin.
The story weaves the lives of these two lovers as their paths cross and then diverge due to the forced migration imposed on dissenting South Africans at the time. In a time of protest, death, and political upheaval, Ringgold’s text brings you immediately into the intimate corners of the characters’ lives and minds. In doing so, Ringgold opens a door for cultural solidarity. Ringgold made the work in 1985, a time when numerous Black artists around the world, including the late Harry Belafonte, were using their voices to speak out against the apartheid government and make connections across injustices that are wielded against Black people globally. Excitingly, this is the first time this work, in its dedication and care to South Africa, is being exhibited in the country.
Adjacent to South African Love Story #2 is Thomas’s two metre tall bronze statue entitled Solidarity. Thomas, known for his large-scale, sculptural bronze work, depicts solidarity through a shoulder, extended arm and closed fist. Just outside the gallery, another two metre tall sculptural work of a widely-owned afro pick – complete with a peace sign in the middle and a closed fist as a handle – greets the viewer, titled All Power to the People. Both of these works are iconographic in the Black American context, referencing the Black power era. Perhaps, to a Black American viewer, these works can be welcoming, familiar, like home. However, to other Black viewers, these images may be less impactful, serving as another instance of Black American imagery taking up disproportionate space in discussions about freedom and our histories of struggle.
This show is most impactful when it makes use of intimacy and specificity, Ringgold’s Love Story being an example. Where there is some broader, more generalised symbolism, it is less effective in making relatable works, reaching out into an ambiguous symbolic arena that some of us can be fatigued by. The fatigue of symbolism is informed by the changelessness of symbols themselves, and feeling as though these frozen sentiments cannot always adapt to the current moment. The symbol of a closed fist, for example, can be deeply heartening, but it can also be ambiguous, and this can be a problem when ambiguity stands in place of truths or histories we’ve lost or that have been stolen.
Cape Town is a city that shares similar history to the US in terms of structures of segregation, violence and slavery, as well as Black meaning-making, reimagining, and culture-creating. The usage of these symbols as language for social justice is legible not only in South Africa but in the broader art world as well. While symbols themselves may not change in appearance, the reception to them absolutely can. An Afro comb (and further, Afro styled hair) in the US was (and still is) worn proudly and naturally to antagonise systems that dehumanised and degraded us, including the world of work, art, education, and public life. However, there is a de-antagonising process that happens over time and in the space of a gallery that makes symbols that once attracted violence to the body more approachable.
Overarching, Freedom is Going Home succeeds in inviting the viewer in with warmth and cause. There is a need for intergenerational conversations that reflect the richness of Black canons, and Ringgold and Thomas do this by thematically creating shelves to place their ideas of home upon (as well as what they imagine a larger home to be). Freedom implies a lack of burden, a lack of restraint, or, in the words of Nina Simone, “no fear.” For Ringgold and Thomas, our stories and symbols are gestures that can get us there.