A World in One Room - Whitfield Lovell art exhibition

Art in America, May, 2001 by Nancy Princenthal

This installation follows three others by Lovell that were firmly tied to their contexts. The first, in 1993, was at the Villa Val Lemme in Capriatta d'Orba, Italy--a lavish 19th-century residence built by an Italian slave trader who was active into the early 20th century, and who decorated the ceilings of his house with grotesque stereotypes of Africans. Working directly on the building's walls, Lovell drew a head, hands and naked female body. His second installation, at Project Row Houses in Houston (1995), and third, at the Fortlaleza de la Cabana, as sole U.S. representative at the 1997 Havana Biennial, similarly involved drawings made directly on the wall. It seems fitting that "Whispers from the Walls" is the first of his installations to travel, since it is, in large measure, about displacement. In fact it was impelled, in part, by a historical incident of violent removal: an African-American community in Denton (where this work originated) was leveled at the turn of the 19th century because it was deemed too close to a white women's college. The expression of absence and memory, which seems the emotional motivation of so much of Lovell's recent work--including the freestanding assemblages that were shown this past winter at DC Moore Gallery in New York--is supported, in "Whispers from the Walls," by the responsibility to a history of forcible disappearance.

At the same time that Lovell's work was on view at the Studio Museum, there was also an exhibition of a suite of woodcuts by Martin Puryear, made to illustrate a new deluxe edition of Jean Toomer's Cane. Toomer's landmark book, first published in 1923, describes the same period and place as does "Whispers from the Walls." And like Lovell's work, Toomer's is lush and elliptical, composed of unlike fragments (poetry, chant, narrative prose) and rich with the symbolism of home. A character named Rhobert, for instance, "wears a house, like a monstrous diver's helmet, on his head" and believes that "The dead house is stuffed. The stuffing is alive," because God blew his breath into it. Stifling and transcendent, at once a safeguard, tomb and spiritual refuge, Rhobert's house is close kin to the one Lovell has brought to life in "Whispers from the Walls."

"Whispers from the Walls" opened at the University of North Texas Art Gallery, Denton [Mar. 3-Apr. 6, 1999], before traveling to the Jones Center for Contemporary Art, Austin [Mar. M-May 7, 2000]; the Seattle Art Museum [June 8-July 16, 2000]; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York [Oct. 11-Nov. 11, 2000]; and the Robeson Art Gallery, Rutgers State University of New Jersey, Newark [Mar. 8-Apr. 5, 2001]. An exhibition by Whitfield Lovell appeared at DC Moore Gallery, New York [Oct. 18-Nov. 11, 2000]. A new body of work, titled "Portrayals," opened at the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, N.Y. [May 7-Aug. 20, 2000], and is currently on view at the Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, N.J. [Jan. 28-June 17]. It will travel this fall to the Tubman African-American Museum, Macon, Ga. [Sept. 21, 2001-Jan. 2, 2002].