Keith Morris Washington at Kenkeleba House

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Keith Morris Washington is a painter who has been exhibiting since about 1990, mostly in the Boston area. The work shown here is part of the series "Within Our Gates: Site and Memory in the American Landscape" (1999-2005). The 12 paintings, oil and acrylic on linen, some horizontal, some vertical, are mostly about 6 by 8 feet, though some are a bit smaller. Washington builds his realist landscapes from countless distinct wavering brushstrokes.

The paintings all represent specific places in America indicated in their titles. The scenes are summery, with a sense of inner strength that more delicately rendered landscapes can lack. What is strange about them is that certain rectangular areas--one in each painting--are rendered in a brighter tonality than the surrounding areas of slightly grayer hue.

Initially the paintings seem rewarding and pleasant with their immediate esthetic appeal. They make obvious and skillful reference to 19th-century tradition--particularly to Luminist and Hudson River School landscape modes. Then you read the extended wall labels that accompany each painting, and at once, everything changes. Your hair stands on end. It seems that each of these landscapes portrays an actual place in America where a black man was lynched. The meaning of the brief descriptions in the titles changes startlingly: confronted by George Armwood: Front Lawn of Judge R. Duer's Home; Princess Ann, Maryland, you wonder whether the inner rectangle demarcated in the painting marks the exact spot of the crime. It also suddenly leaps out that each identifying label starts with a man's name, like: Raynard Johnson: Pecan Tree; Parent's Front Lawn; Kokomo, Mississippi. Or: Cooksey Dallas: Train Viaduct; Johnson City, Tennessee. Each painting is accompanied by a photocopy of a news story describing the incident, such as "Clinton, S.C., July 5--A Negro truck driver who had come to blows with a white truck driver was found dead today."

As you learn the history underlying the paintings, your cognitive faculty jumps into action alongside your esthetic sense. And once you know what each site is, an ethical sense also comes into play. These cognitive and ethical faculties will not let you alone to bask in the esthetic presence. An inner dissonance among the faculties is laid bare--a theme which has been basic to Conceptual art. Thus, though it looks back to the 19th-century, Barbizon-influenced African-American painter Edward Mitchell Bannister (1828-1901), who painted local scenes where terrible events took place, Washington's work seems to be a form of conceptual painting, as involved with posing philosophical questions as it is with the violent legacy of American racism.

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