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Conjuring the Aural Past with Whitfield Lovell

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Whitfield Lovell, After an Afternoon, 2008. Radios with sound, 59 x 72 x 11 in. Courtesy DC Moore Gallery © Whitfield Lovell and DC Moore Gallery, New York

In After an Afternoon, Whitfield Lovell omits the human figure, instead conjuring the aural past with sounds emanating from 37 vintage radios, some with stopped clocks and all stacked to approximately human height. The radios play three tracks: Billie Holiday singing “Yesterdays” and “Strange Fruit,” a Walter Winchell WWII news broadcast, and an excerpt from the 1940s radio program The Beulah Show. The Beulah Show aired on the radio from the late 1940s into the early 1950s, when it was adapted for television. It was the first sitcom to feature an African American as the main character, though it was continually criticized for contributing to negative racial stereotypes. Marlin Hurt, a white man, originally provided the voice of the main character Beulah (along with other characters) until his death in 1946, when Hattie McDaniel took over the role. The recording used here features the voice of Amanda Randolph, who voiced Beulah from 1953–1954.

After an Afternoon conveys overlapping narratives from the privacy of the home to the turmoil of the warfront, drawing on the connection between sound and memory to evoke the racial climate of a pre-civil rights era.

Whitfield Lovell: The Kin Series and Related Works is on view through Jan. 8, 2017.

The Sweet Scent of Magnolia

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Whitfield Lovell, Kin VII (Scent of Magnolia), 2008. Conté on paper,silk flower wreath, 30 x 22 ½ x 3 in. Collection of Julia J. Norrell © Whitfield Lovell and DC Moore Gallery, New York

The subtitle of Whitfield Lovell‘s Kin VII draws an immediate connection to “Strange Fruit,” a protest poem about lynching made famous by singer Billie Holiday in 1939. The startling pairing of a male figure with a red and pink bouquet of silk flowers is reminiscent of the song’s ironic contrast of the sweet scent of magnolias with the smell of burnin’ flesh. And yet, as with all his work, the artist seeks to open up many possible meanings depending on the perspective of the viewer.

As scholar Kevin Quashie has written, “Are these flowers from his room, a private and unusual explosion of color? The flowers he gave to a date or the ones he brought to a funeral? A sign of his desire to visit all the world’s spectacular gardens? . . . [Or] a more ominous reading—his killed body marked by a wreath . . . we can wonder if he loved pink and purple tones, without ignoring the possibility of racist violence. Whatever the story, the flowers are a surprise that interrupt the dominant narratives that might be ascribed to the profile of a black man of that age.”

Strange Fruit
Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swingin’ in the Southern breeze
Strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant South
The bulgin’ eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolias sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burnin’ flesh

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop
–original poem by Abel Meeropol, 1937

Whitfield Lovell: The Kin Series and Related Works is on view through Jan. 8, 2017.