TALES OF LOHR: "WHERE DID YOUR CHRIST COME FROM?" AT 937 LIBERTY
On Wavy Wednesday's latest art exhibition; plus, "This Week in Warhol" can't Cannes
At a casual glance, the work of Pittsburgh-based multimedia artist Kamara Townes, aka Wavy Wednesday, could be perceived as a bringer of joy. The colors are Day-Glo vibrant, the figures cartoonishly curvy, the imagery accented with Pop appropriations of Disney characters, comic-book aesthetic tropes, and advertising mascots. But there is a clue to be found in the persistent lack of pupils in the eyes of Wednesday’s figures: Things are amiss in the fantasy lands through which we channel our cultural perceptions and presentations of race, femininity, sexual expression, and the tangled thoroughfares where those notions come together. Wednesday’s solo exhibition “Where Did Your Christ Come From?,” on view now at Pittsburgh’s 937 Liberty gallery, appropriates the visual language of our most ostensibly friendly, least confrontational popular media to engage in a classic, dug-in, occasionally quite vicious exercise in the affliction of the comfortable. In the process, she provokes necessary contemplation, while being honest enough to offer no single clear-cut solution to the conundrums with which her work grapples.
The exhibition borrows its title from a quote from the legendary 19th century Black feminist advocate Sojourner Truth, and this deployment of the language of such a revered figure of activist antiquity might mistakenly prompt one to believe Wednesday will be coming at the subjects she explores from a familiar, paradoxically soothing anti-racist angle. But through simple choices of iconography, language, and juxtaposition, Wednesday simply refuses to make it easy. Several of the pieces on view are particularly caustic about the role of white women in perpetuating the racist, patriarchal systems that hold down those who should ostensibly be their allies. “Savior” complicates its old-school Klan imagery by building its cartoon-phone-and-crucifix composition around a vintage photo of Klanswomen, the “fruit of Southern womanhood” fully on board with their overt oppression of Black women as it serves as a convenient beard for their own implicit second-class status. Wednesday further excoriates the photo’s subjects via a quote from queer Black feminist writer Audre Lorde (“The Master’s tools will never dismantle the Master’s house”) that also appears in “Doing the Work,” in which a blonde white woman, being rescued by a mighty-looking Black woman superhero, shows her appreciation to her protector with a beaming “Thanks, n*****.” It is impossible to look at this latter canvas without considering the knowledge that the majority of White women voters, in both 2016 and 2020, cast their presidential election ballots for Donald Trump, and that the American left heaped praise, in the wake of the ‘20 election, on the Black women who voted in the actual best interests of those same white “sisters.”
Wednesday’s artwork never downplays the threats Black women face from all quarters, and seems particularly attuned to dangers that might lie in wait at the hands of men. One of her most straightforward pieces, “I Can’t Swim Anyway,” finds a Barbie-esque lifeguard cautioning observers that “There’s pee in the dating pool!” against an electric-blue sky scored with the upside-down exhortation to “PROTECT BLACK WOMEN.” (This piece is particularly sobering in the wake of the recent gruesome death and dismemberment of Sade Robinson, a 19-year-old Black woman from the Milwaukee area; Maxwell Anderson, a 33-year-old white man Robinson met on a dating app, has been charged with her murder.) The ostensible swept-off-her-feet scenario of “Him” is pointedly belied by the slashing stilettos of the upended femme-presenting figure in the piece, not to mention the looming face and grasping hands of the image’s masculine figure. Wednesday also offers an amusing tables-turning of sorts via her large canvas “Boys,” which, with its disembodied diverse Black men’s heads and prominent picked-at price tag, could represent a magazine hustling masculine partners just as nakedly (literally and figuratively) as contemporary media peddles notions of Black female hypersexuality, or a package straight-up selling Black men for the kind of bracingly low value at which our society has far too often held such individuals.
In other pieces, Wednesday borrows a page from scabrous underground cartoonist R. Crumb, bending perceptions and imagery commonly foregrounded in racist contexts to her own ends. This tactic is most brutally evidenced in the screenprint “Ghetto Hoochie Barbie,” a cut-out paper doll sheet depicting a Black woman side by side with “hood-coded” clip-on clothing and hairstyles, so you can get the titular character ready to “go do bald-headed hoe shit with her homegirls.” “BAPS (Kameron Greasing My Scalp)” superimposes images of Black women engaging in their culture’s complex hairstyling routines over Wednesday’s renditions of Disney princesses Cinderella and Snow White. These paragons of the pliant white beauty ideal are presented in blackface, the minstrel-show-derived cosmetic convention used for generations of popular entertainment to both turn white performers into demeaning caricatures and to obscure the range of natural hues seen on the visages of Black performers. Wednesday grinds her viewers’ noses in this bigoted B.S. just as Crumb’s most inflammatory cartoons have always done, but blessedly without Crumb’s problematic position of cultural privilege.
Wednesday’s work makes the complex, difficult-to-dispute argument that in a system predicated on racial and gendered hierarchies, there are perilously few if any truly safe spaces. “Welcome to Los Angeles” frames another Barbied-out Black woman, this one an airplane passenger, staring down what could represent the travel detritus found in the expensive-looking handbag in the seat next to her, or the trashed promises of a city that many Blacks sought out during the Great Migration, but which far too often presented just more of the dream deferment to which too many have been forced to become accustomed. Higher learning comes in for a shellacking in “White and Wonderful,” an autobiographical piece in which Wednesday calls out the racism present in the West Virginia University arts program (this exhibition is part of the artist’s fulfillment of her MFA degree); on the canvas, two Barbie and Ken lookalikes smile obliviously at a wall sign detailing the discrimination and prejudice Wednesday has faced as a student, while half-deflated Mylar balloon letters dominating the right side of the canvas spell out “S.O.S.”
Wednesday frequently draws on imagery associated with childhood, yet another time of life that, as anyone familiar with Trayvon Martin or Tamir Rice’s stories can readily attest, offers Black youth no surcease from their struggles. “A Clown and Her Dolly” presents a red-nosed, treated-manicured figure clutching a similarly clown-nosed doll, a manipulation of the deathless right-wing talking point of Black babies having babies. In “Gifts,” more balloons mark a canvas on which a little Black girl looks into the mouth of a gaping gift box that seemingly holds a big bunch of nothing. Even the typically welcoming animated favorites of youth seem potentially forbidding in Wednesday’s conception, as is readily apparent in the exhibition’s titular canvas, featuring ostensibly proud Black women being stalked and scaled by an army of pupil-less Smurfettes.
The manic nature of many of Wednesday’s images here makes plain that“Where Did Your Christ Comes From?” indeed presents a collapse into insanity as a not entirely unreasonable potential response to all that awaits those who commit the cultural sins of being women, being Black, or both. But a plunge into madness is not the only option Wednesday’s work seems to offer its viewers. “Curing and Healing,” with its bubbly pink high heels strung across a rope ascending to the heavens, suggests that feminism and its conceits can serve as a tool of exaltation for those strong enough to wield it as such. The multi-paneled “Rage” presents a blunter, more self-explanatory response, the image’s split-in-two, shrieking head pierced by both a bloody sword and enigmatic fish-bone graphics. The third approach is offered by the exhibition’s sole sculpture, an untitled pile of giant, wood-carved-and-glittered construction nails, three of them wreathed in shocking pink paint. Wavy Wednesday lives and creates in a world and a country that has, in recent years, visibly amplified the scope and reach of its open hostility towards people of her gender and color. This piece, and the entire, thought-provoking, eye-arresting exhibition in which it resides, are testament to the sheer, edifice-upending potential of persistence with passion and purpose. One imagines that just a few of these powerful pink nails, hammered into the just the right spots on the social framework, could raise all of us, but only all of us, to heights of which we could scarcely dare to dream. Unless, that is, those other nails seem intent on bringing the whole rotten mess down on our heads.
Wavy Wednesday’s “Where Did Your Christ Come From?” is on view at 937 Liberty gallery in downtown Pittsburgh now through June 2. For hours and more information on the exhibition, visit the official website of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.
THIS WEEK IN WARHOL
APRIL 27, 1967
The 20th annual edition of the Cannes Film Festival, the highest-profile and arguably most prestigious of all film fests worldwide, opens on the French Riviera. The year’s lineup includes several notable films, including Michelangelo Antonioni’s stylishly influential Blow-Up, which goes on to win the Palme D’Or; Robert Bresson’s moody coming-of-age tale Mouchette; and the comedy You’re a Big Boy Now, the first major studio directorial effort from Francis Ford Coppola. The festival is also presenting, for the sixth time, its International Critics’ Week series, a lineup of select out-of-competition films from the cutting edge of contemporary independent filmmaking. It is this sidebar screening program for which Andy Warhol, along with a contingent of Factory regulars, is traveling to the south of France. The filmmaker has been invited to screen his commercial-breakthrough three-hour avant-garde feature Chelsea Girls for the Cannes crowd.
Joining Warhol at Cannes are Chelsea Girls featured players Eric Emerson, International Velvet, and Velvet Underground vocalist Nico; longtime-but-wavering Warhol assistant Gerard Malanga, who also appears in Chelsea Girls; film producer and former advertising executive Lester Persky; burgeoning filmmaker Paul Morrissey, on the cusp of assuming the principal creative role in the production of Andy Warhol-“presented” cinema; model and illustrator David Croland, still several years away from becoming photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s first serious same-sex partner; and Rodney La Rod, a burly, markedly intimidating piece of rough trade with whom Warhol is currently enjoying a combative-bordering-on-abusive relationship.
Warhol is ready to bask in both the glamour of Cannes’s celebrity-drenched beachside backdrop and the prestige of showing his biggest popular cinematic success at the world’s top festival showcase. Unfortunately, the film is ultimately denied an official presentation even within the out-of-competition Critic’s Week. The festival has already courted some controversy for the main-slate exhibition of Joseph Strick’s adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which features some of the same profane language that has previously gotten the novel banned and prosecuted for obscenity. Rumblings have begun over similar potentially challenging content in Chelsea Girls; in particular, Morrissey notes that whispers are flying that the film features several seconds of unobstructed male nudity. (Several segments do feature male performers, including Emerson, in various states of undress, but there is no genuinely explicit content such as the unsimulated sex shown in Warhol’s Blue Movie, filmed the following year.) Critic’s Choice programmer Louis Marquerelle waffles on this issue for some time, even at one point making a formal announcement that the film will indeed be presented (albeit without an official screening date). Finally, Marquerelle errs on the side of caution, opting not to grant Chelsea Girls an official screening. This is, according to Morrissey, the first time a formally invited film has been denied an official exhibition.
While the film never plays any level of Cannes, Warhol and his entourage still manage to make good use of their European odyssey. The film is screened away from the festival, at several Parisian venues, include the Cinematheque. One of these screenings is attended by avant-garde film star and previous Warhol player Taylor Mead, who has emigrated to Europe three years prior in search of more progressive artistic challenges. His experience of The Chelsea Girls, and the puritanical outrage he witnesses the film provoke in its French audience, convinces Mead that it is time to return to America, which he feels, based on the evidence of this film, has reclaimed its position as producers of the true cinematic future. Mead goes on to star in several Warhol films following his return, including The Nude Restaurant and Lonesome Cowboys, the latter of which co-stars Emerson.
From France, Warhol’s crew moves on to Rome and later London. Warhol cites as the trip’s most memorable moment an encounter in the latter city with Paul McCartney, La Rod leaping into the music legend’s lap “the second he met him.” London is also where another Chelsea Girls screening takes place, this one at the home of Robert Fraser, a British art dealer who has represented Warhol’s work in Europe. After their travels, Emerson remains on at Fraser’s home for a time, and Croland and International Velvet return to Paris, while Warhol and the remainder of his coterie head back to New York.
Don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss another FREE arts and music newsletter, and join us back here on Thursday 4/25 for the latest Tales of Lohr!