Icons, Archetypes, and Portraits: From the Mythic to the Everyday features artwork by artists from around the globe utilizing a wide array of media from painting, photography, sculpture, printmaking, ceramics, and textiles. The exhibition poses a fundamental question: how does a work of art conjure presence of a human subject? While portraiture often accomplishes this task by presenting a faithful visual likeness of a subject, other artworks in this exhibition approach this question more obliquely by invoking presence through materials associated with the subject—such as hair, bone, jewelry, or articles of clothing. Some artworks imbue their subjects with a sense of otherworldliness, elevating them to a quasi-divine status as icons. Additional examples show how artists deploy archetypes to examine their subject’s role in society, history, or as protagonists in a cultural narrative or sacred legend. Historically, representing the human subject in art has been closely allied to power and influence: from ancient gods and rulers, to monarchs, saints, wealthy patrons or titans of industry. Many of the contemporary works featured here dismantle this legacy and present icons, archetypes, and portraits of people traditionally overlooked or misrepresented in the history of art.
All works from this exhibition are drawn from the permanent collection of the North Dakota Museum of Art or are promised gifts to the Museum. Anchoring one portion of the exhibition is a monumental work by internationally acclaimed artist María Magdalena Compos-Pons who had one of her first museum solo exhibitions in the United States at the North Dakota Museum of Art in 2002. Her piece titled The Seven Powers pays homage to her African ancestors who worked on a sugar plantation in Cuba. This work also invokes an important facet of the artist’s spiritual genealogy as the reference to “Seven Powers” alludes to the West African Yoruba belief in spirit guides, a concept carried to the Caribbean by slaves and fused with aspects of Catholicism and Santeria spiritual practice. Other artists such as Adebunmi Gbadebo are more forensic in recognizing her ancestors; in works such as True Blue Triptych and In Memory of K. Smalls died 19??, she uses rice, soil, and raw cotton from the land in which they worked as enslaved people. Santa Clara Pueblo artist Rose B. Simpson’s work Ancestor invokes the power of witnessing, explaining that the ancestors are powerful witnesses of past and present who remind us that one is part of a larger community.
Untitled (Looking Out of Igloo) by Inuit artist Shuvinai Ashoona also focuses on community past and present. Her carefully rendered color drawings often portray everyday settings and events in her village of Kinngait (formerly Cape Dorset), located in present-day Canada’s Nunavut territory. Artist Alfred Conteh, on the other hand, portrays members from his community in Atlanta including neighbors, elders, workers, and children like the young girl shown in Pearl. Kandy Lopez’s portrait Mecca hits closer to home as she captures her daughter in a striking pose using yarn and fabric to suggest a powerful inner life of a young girl. Robert Pruitt pays tribute to his close friend and confidant Natasha who had originally posed in his apartment, yet in House and Home Pruitt places her in a historic setting of the White House Green Room thereby recontextualizing her in a scene filled with symbols and mythologies of power, possibility and agency.
Several works in the exhibition use the lens of the mythical or divine to portray a familiar subject like a family member. Cara Romero’s captivating photograph of her daughter Crickett Tiger, for example, presents her dressed in the regalia of the first peoples of California on a sacred coastal site of the Chemehuevi tribe. Standing in the water with waves crashing at Crickett’s feet, the portrait is a powerful remembrance of the mythos of the tribe’s Great Ocean Woman (Hutsipamamow). Similarly, Beekeeper by Shanna Strauss depicts her grandmother as an enthroned beekeeper, a figure that is revered in Tanzanian culture as a guardian of ancestral memory who shares stories and songs; many stories recount revolutionary women who defied German colonizers. The term “spiritual metadata” has been coined in recent years to describe intangible forms of information that are transferred between generations. Rather than tangible archival evidence, this knowledge is conveyed through color, sound, or vibration. Leonardo Benzant’s colorful abstract totemic figures Afrosupernatural: Entities and Archetypes, for example, do not refer to specific beings or people, rather they conjure magical archetypes broadly based on African spiritual traditions.
Some self-portraits featured in the exhibition become personifications that manifest particular psychological states. Andrea Bower’s Eco Grief Deforestation Series (Old Growth Stump 4) invites viewers to consider “eco-grief” not only as sorrow for the loss of nature, but also for environmental injustices such as the indiscriminate felling of historic trees aged 1,000 years or more. In this instance, visualizing grief takes the form of an archetypal female figure, which also happens to be a self-portrait of the artist-activist who witnessed this devastation first-hand. Sami Tsang’s ceramic self-portrait visualizes a deeply personal crisis from her student years characterized by a “feeling of being broken yet still enduring as a young woman.” Kiriakos Tompolidis’ self-portrait, on the other hand, captures the ambiguous state of straddling two national identities. Born in Germany to a family who came from Greece as guest workers brought in to help rebuild post-war Germany, the artist grapples with his family’s fluctuating status between citizen and guest. His deeply textured and patterned self-portrait reflects symbols of home and homeland.
The portraits of Burkinabe photographer Sanlé Sory take on a documentary and celebratory tone. He began his practice as a photographer the same year that Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta) obtained its independence. His portraits of an exuberant youth culture of a newly freed nation capture playfulness and confidence. Mali Djeli, for instance, portrays two young ‘Djeli’ (or “griots,” West African storytellers and musicians). The portrait perfectly encapsulates the cultural crosscurrents of the time between African and Western societies. One figure wears western garb straddling a ghetto blaster across his lap, the other strikes a parallel gesture holding a traditional African stringed musical instrument and dons a West African robe. Don Getsug’s photographs also follow a documentary impulse, yet his portraits focus on an entirely different group of people. After President Johnson declared War on Poverty, Getsug worked with a friend from the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to document some of the poorest counties in the United States: Appalachia, Rio Grande Valley, and Mississippi and Arkansas Delta that includes the work Appalachian Father and Son. Minnesota-born photographer Alec Soth’s photographs of subjects stand out for their humanizing quality; every person photographed is presented with dignity without the patina of flattery. Patrick, Palm Sunday. Baton Rouge, Louisiana is one of the best-known portraits from Soth’s series Sleeping by the Mississippi.
Artists Include:
Oluwatobi Adewumi
Shuvinai Ashoona
Moridja Kitenge Banza
Leonardo Benzant
Andrea Bowers
María Magdalena Campos-Pons
Alfred Conteh
Kim Dacres
Uday Dhar
L’Merchie Frazier
Adebunmi Gbadebo
Don Getsug
Luis Gonzalez-Palma
Lavaughan Jenkins
Mario Joyce
Kandy G Lopez
Sara Maniero
Robert Pruitt
Deborah Roberts
Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson
Cara Romero
Simone Elizabeth Saunders
Rose B. Simpson
Sanlé Sory
Alec Soth
Stan Squirewell
Shanna Strauss
Gio Swaby
Sami Tsang
Kiriakos Tompolidis
Yvonne Wells