Artist: Kevin Beasley
Location: Whitney Museum of American Art
Dates: December 15, 2018 – March 10, 2019
A View of a Landscape dives deeper into the era of King Cotton and how its production has shaped a very historical time for Black people in the American South. Located on the 8th floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art, this Kevin Beasley exhibit is centered around a vintage cotton gin, a mixer that echoes its sounds, and 3 elaborate, large-scale slab sculptures made with cotton.
How Sweet, The Sound
It’s hard to miss the cotton gin from Maplesville, Alabama, in the back room, and it’s even harder not to hear it. Beasley acquired the machine from eBay, and he was especially excited about the fact that it operated from 1940 – 1973 through historical events in American history, such as the Vietnam War, World War II, and the civil rights movement.
Beasley is well-known for incorporating sound into his exhibitions. This time around, he attached a microphone to a mixer to amplify the eerie screeching sound of the cotton gin motor that lingers and echoes through the air.
The Acquisition
The Acquisition is my favorite slab sculpture in A View of a Landscape. Its bright red hues are captivating, and the embedded objects represent a timeline of Beasley’s personal evolution: from a small farm in Virginia to a big-time artist in New York City. The slab features everything from a raw cotton picked from Virginia and a pair of overalls, to a Samick SM-122 sound mixer, an Acer laptop, and a hoodie.
The Reunion
A row of dark du-rags surrounded by twigs, pinecones, and needles picked from the Beasley family land in Virginia make up The Reunion. The Beasley family still holds annual family reunions on the land to this very day.
Campus
In the 1830s, James Pennington became the first Black student to ever attend Yale University – the New Haven, Connecticut, Ivy League institution that both Kevin Beasley and the inventor of the cotton gin, Eli Whitney, attended. During his studies, Pennington was prohibited from speaking, asking questions, and even earning an official degree from the university.
Campus reflects how the racially turbulent past of this country can still live and breathe in the fabric of traditional institutions that have once benefited from the country’s deep racial divide. This can be seen through the clever combination of incorporating Beasley’s Yale sweatshirt with three Blackface clown masks watching over scattered documents on the transatlantic slave trade.
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