The first time artist Scott Schuldt looked at the words of Ben Klassen, founder of the white supremacist World Church of the Creator and a believer in race-based eugenics, he could hardly stomach what he was reading. Vitriol sprawled across the page, glorifying 20th-century lynchings and the barbecue-like gatherings of white townspeople who came out to watch.
Instead of putting them out of his mind, he formulated a response piece, turning to his beadwork and his research with a compulsion to respond to those awful words.
Unbound, a traditional mourning sampler depicting the hanging body of Laura Nelson, who was lynched by a white mob in 1911, is the answer to that.
Jarring in its juxtapositions of bright, domestic beadwork, soft black fabric, a hand-embroidered alphabet at the top, and Nelson’s violently limp form in the center, the work has a double effect: It hits hard, and then burns slowly, a long-festering wound of a piece.
Along with close to 50 works by 37 other artists, Unbound is part of “Speaking Volumes: Transforming Hate,” a traveling exhibition now at the University of New Haven’s Seton Gallery. The show will be up through mid-December, when it travels to New York.
Courtesy of the exhibition
Unbound.
The premise for “Speaking Volumes,” curated in 2008 by the Holter Museum of Art’s Katie Knight, and again for site-specificity in 2015 by Laura Marsh at the Seton Gallery, began in Helena, Montana, 11 years ago, when a defecting member of Klassen’s Creativity Movement, so-called for its belief that “the white man is the noblest creation in nature’s realm,” bought 4,000 volumes of the “White Man’s Bible” and partner texts, all espousing anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, and anti-people-of-color ideologies, out of publication and donated them to the Montana Human Rights Network. Working with the Network, the Holter put out a call for artists to respond to the texts, creating works that put them in conversation with systems of racism and injustice in the 21st century. Thirty-eight responded forcefully. The exhibition has been traveling across the country, taking on a slightly different life with each audience it meets, ever since.
For artists like Schuldt, participating in the exhibition felt not only natural, but necessary. “I went through a lot of mourning, working on Unbound,” he said, estimating the work took him between 160 and 200 hours to complete. “You’re sewing and you’re staring at this person, this life, the whole time. To be able to lynch a human being — you’ve reached a point when a person’s not a person [to you] anymore.
“How we can still have a political party of stupidity and ignorance today,” he added, is deeply upsetting to him.
Lucy Gellman Photo
The Cooling Table.
True to Schuldt’s outrage, the show is as affecting as it is effective. Pieces like Miguel Gillen’s mixed media The Cooling Table (pictured above) an Ikea-style table topped with decorated cookies, all of which spell out the word Hate, gives the viewer an immediate and uneasy sense that hate begins at home, in seemingly innocuous ways — until you swallow it whole. Or Nick Cave’s Profiling, a dartboard with a map of the United States hanging down from one end and a squat, race-hate-fueled depiction of a black man at the top, his body enveloped by darts. What’s the target? the piece seems to ask. And what would be the perfect score? Or Kristin Casaletto’s CondemNation series, in which gently colored, whimsical illustrations cover and muddle the pages of Klassen’s texts. A seeming play on the Chagall Bible, or James Ensor‘s unmistakable carnivalesques, the delicacy of the forms are immediately at odds with the text lurking beneath them.
While several of the works respond in large, theoretical, and tongue-in-cheek terms, others cut straight to the literal heart — and face — of contemporary hate.
Courtesy of the exhibition
There is, for instance, a portrait of Timothy McVeigh that haunts on first sight — and second, and third, and thirtieth. As photographer Robbe McClaren captures the bomber’s slouching, too-large shadow on a dimly lit wall, McVeigh looks out at the audience, smirking at the viewer with no sense of remorse. The conceptual-historical clash is nauseating: Here is a terrorist depicted in the conventions of 20th-century portraiture, challenging every eye — and lens — that dares to meet his.
“I felt like I had to wash my hands after hanging it,” Marsh said.
For her, that discomfort is an unequivocally good thing. “I think the show is strong … with its theme of fighting white supremacy,” she said. “It shows us that change happens really slowly.”
Standing beside Schuldt, she looked around the gallery, her domain, transformed for the show into something that decried hate in 50 different ways. On one end, Jim Riswold’s The Hitlermobile gleamed back, rendering Hitler no more than a child’s toy in the style of Antoine D’Agata. On another, Lei Curtis’ Superior, an enormous rat trap using one of Klassen’s books as the bait, stared back. Schuldt pointed to it.
“It just ensnares you,” he said, “like that.”
this is a must-see show in my opinion
beautifully curated by laura marsh
works representing many artists
an important show at any time
but this particular time makes it all the more relevant and powerful
seton gallery is a little-know space at university of new haven which is becoming more central to the new haven arts scene
spread the word!!