History, identity and artistic expression merge in three exhibitions — one open now, two others this summer — at the Chrysler Museum of Art. From Hampton Roads to halfway around the world, these shows invite visitors to consider how personal challenges shape their sense of self and vice versa, how contemporary Indigenous artists are breaking artistic stereotypes and how national identity is inextricably linked to photographic portrayals.
JJJJJerome Ellis: Contradictions
Through November 2
The work of JJJJJerome Ellis is a testament to how a limitation can become an invitation. Homegrown but globally known, Ellis is a Columbia-educated Grenadian-Jamaican-American musician, videographer, poet and 2015 Fulbright Fellow. And he is a person who stutters.
Chelsea Pierce, Chrysler’s modern and contemporary curator, said rather than considering his glottal block an obstacle, he has chosen to “lean into possibility.”
She explains that his condition, which is manifested as a lapse or pause, is normally pathologized. However, Ellis considers his speech an invitation for listeners to slow down and attend to his words with keen intention. While this largely runs counter to society’s admiration for speed and efficiency, this Hampton Roads-based artist rewards his audiences with the gift of extended time.
With a bachelor of arts in music theory and ethnomusicology, Ellis has performed at the Tate Modern in London,the High Line in New York and in the Whitney Biennial survey. Pierce experienced his work at the International Center for Photography in New York, prior to featuring two of his pieces in The Box at the Chrysler.
“transCRIPted,” 2020
Ellis transcribes the broken, stuttered word of a poetry performance at the New York Poetry Project in real time on Zoom. His participation was the result of an act of resistance to accepted norms, namely, a two-minute time limit allotted to each participant. Though it was intended to be an equalizer for participants, it was exclusionary to someone with dysfluency. Rather than accept the limit, Ellis presented a case for more time, which he was granted.
“Impediment is Information,” 2021
Celebrating Juneteenth is a music video poem inspired by an 18th-century Jamaican newspaper advertisement to recapture a fugitive enslaved man described as having “an impediment in his speech.” Through his approach to anagrammatic poetry—different readers reciting the words of the ad in a different order —Ellis seeks to establish new meaning by calling out the pathologizing of Blackness, such as through drapetomania, a pseudo-scientific illness said to explain why enslaved people ran away, and the abnormalizing of stuttered speech.
Clearly Indigenous: Native Visions Reimagined in Glass
June 13-September 14
The term “Indigenous art” may bring to mind pottery, traditional materials and ceremonial garments. “Clearly Indigenous,” curated by Letitia Chambers of Santa Fe and Cathy Short of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation in Oklahoma, seeks to reappraise this limited understanding. Though not intended to be an exhaustive survey, the show’s 120 objects represent a variety of voices and themes that characterize Indigenous artists working today, from narratives about family, myth and connection to nature to contemporary issues that affect tribal societies. Working in blown, cast, fused and stained glass, the 29 featured Native American artists, two Australian Aboriginal artists, and two Māori artists are joined by Dale Chihuly. While his name is synonymous with the American Studio Glass movement, he is included because he trained some of the exhibiting artists at Pilchuck, the world-renowned school of glass he cofounded in Washington state.
Constructing Mexico: Photography and National Identity
August 7-November 20
Curated by the Chrysler’s Mark Castro, who specializes in the artistic traditions of Latin America, “Constructing Mexico” invites viewers to reflect on Mexico’s national identity and the role photography has played in shaping that identity.
“Photography frames people through the gaze of someone else,” Pierce said. The selfie notwithstanding.
In the exhibition, the photographers, a significant number of whom were French and American working between the late 1800s and 1994, intentionally or inadvertently shaped perceptions by capturing and preserving their perspectives on everyday people and places, cultural heritage, and the emergence of modernity, especially railroads.
The images, culled from Chrysler’s collection and local collectors, problematize the issue of national identity, which Pierce says is always in flux and constructed in somewhat arbitrary ways.
