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Voodoo Children
John Haberin New York City
Renée Stout, Myrlande Constant, and Haiti
Hope Is a Discipline and Tropical Frequencies
Renée Stout cherishes portraiture and politics. It is her portrait of black America as her America, rooted at once in Africa and Haiti. Like Myrlande Constant, she counts herself among voodoo's children, and they number the same hoodoo empath among their ancestors. Yet where Myrlande extends quilting and folk art, Stout puts her trust in warm feelings and cold facts. She is literally painting by numbers.
Erzulie has red eyes, not from fatigue, but from a fire within. You can see it in her whole being, self-composed and alert, but you may have to look again to see the color in her eyes. It is not a bright red, but an intense one. One may remember the entire portrait as monochrome, although her skin is an olive green, and the background hovers between blue, black, and green in its fine line and finer shading. 
But then Stout has her steady focus and steady reserve as well. No wonder she leaves her sitter's yeux rouge, or red eyes, untranslated in the work's title.
Erzulie, the title adds (in English), is an empath as well. But just where her sympathies lie is up to her and whatever lies within. What comes next? With "Hope Is a Discipline" and "Tropical Frequencies," the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council brings the cause to the Governors Island Arts Center. It encompasses political art and performance as well as recent Caribbean art. One can always hope.
The fire within
It may take an entire show to tease out her sympathies, but Renée Stout calls for time. She brings the same sympathy, attention, and detail to graphite on paper, for a smiling woman with an afro identified only as Agent. Elsewhere she retains the sense of a casual sketch, but for a certified expert in poisons, an explosive deactivator, and a situational linguist, whatever that means. Works look more like mug shots than portraits, apart from their dignity. No one here is crying, but they are crying to be heard. They might all be double agents.
Do they play out against headlines about terrorism and police violence? That might put Stout's actors on either side of killing, but either way black lives matter. A black child weighed down by what might be body armor bears high-powered weapons in low relief. The child looks dangerous all the same. Carved wood, knees bent forward, draws more on African art, but for something more confrontational. Others find their resources in love, mystery, ambergris, and cinnamon ("a partial list"), for Wall of the Forlorn, in memoriam even if alive.
Ulf Puder in the street-level space indulges in something more Romantic. His icebergs nod to Frederic Edwin Church and the Hudson River School, houses in a landscape to John Constable. Yet the German artist also feels the need to charge them with romantic fervor while bringing them into the present. A crisp light and marks of the spatula make the houses look more like cardboard models of late modern luxury, tumbling into one another and sloping on improbable platforms. One iceberg is collapsing, unless it is growing precipitously, and another is exploding. Indulgence or not, the conflicts in modern architecture can still play out today.
Stout, too, might be trying out her ways and means. While past work was largely photorealist, here she tries out a greater variety of subjects and styles, including acrylic and mixed media on panel. In the show's title work, "Navigating the Abyss," indecipherable math tops off an assortment of dials unable to decide on the technology or what to measure. Yet the sky still burns above a wasted garage or factory with a towering sunset or inferno. Collage places a window at the center of black earth, a stained white wall, and flowers for Storefront Church Georgia Avenue (In Memory of Charleston), with a glowing purple remnant within. A cage of twisted wire, suspended from above, holds an armored heart.
She is also trying out a divided heritage, from African to the Caribbean and to immigrant communities in the Southeast. Erzulie names a figure out of Haitian myth, and her eyes speak the French of hoodoo and voodoo traditions. Yet she also poses with African sculpture and a cartoon demon. Stout has turned to them all, she explains, for a greater spirituality. Still, Erzulie sports contemporary braids and informal dress, and she seems to have little interest in mysticism or healing. She, too, could be a double agent.
Stout belongs to a less exotic black America. Born in Kansas, she lives in the nation's capitol. Still, for all the power of healing, her characters include "hoodoo assassins." It allows her to speak of faith while confronting real dangers. A spore shares Escape Plan D with marks of the artist's practice in drips and lined paper, overlaid with a cryptic constellation of white and blue dots. As the subtitle says, it leaves you to connect the dots.
The spark of life
For Myrlande Constant, life and death alike are cause for celebration. Her paintings, textiles really, sparkle as light picks out their threads, sequins, and beads. Everyone within them has the spark of life, too, even when they are wide-eyed, wary, or dead. And that means one heck of a lot of people, in gatherings to the point of chaos. They emerge and disappear again as your eyes cross the scene, unpredictably, much like the glitter. Even with detailed wall labels for each one, you could not conceivably identify more than a few.
If that seems a bit much, they all fit comfortably within her culture's myths. (Constant is duly constant.) She is from Port-au-Prince, in Haiti, with its iwa spirits and voodoo rituals. It is an eclectic culture at that. That serpent entwining a tree in so lush a garden? It may derive from the one in Eden, but it presides over the origins of the world.
Does that make her a folk artist? Folk art is rarely without its stiffness and madness, and those wide black eyes are staring at you. These days outsider art has become the inside scoop, as has the "women's work" of tapestry as painting, and Constant, I hear, was a hit at the Venice Biennale, although she is new to New York galleries. She calls the work drapo, or flags (like drapeaux in French), and one can imagine it held aloft in a holiday parade. If the serpent you thought you knew has its temptations, so does art. A black man in a dark suit, red bowtie, and sunglasses could pass for a street hustler.
He is, though, a good guy, honest, if not so easy to pin down. Another painting has only skeletons, not as warnings but as comforting, even comic memories. And Constant seems incapable or mourning, in scenes so full of activity and platters of food that life itself is a perpetual picnic. People come dressed for a picnic, too, in summer clothes. So impoverished a nation is also an island, and she loves to surround it with shining waters and boats, not to mention tassels. Still, when the good guys are hustlers and death enters life, I should hate to sell her short.
Not that she is not entirely removed from this world, no more than Amalia Mesa-Bains and in Mexico, but she would just as soon wait for the next. I had encountered Erzulie just a week before thanks to Stout, who treats her as a sharp-eyed, independent modern woman. How strange to learn that she, too, is an iwa—and the spirit of femininity at that. For Constant, she becomes a model for the Virgin Mary, in an image borrowed from (of all things) a Polish church. She lives between colonized and colonizer and between past and present. Myths this eclectic insist on it.
Erzulie has the modest size of a Christian icon for private worship, but Constant is at her best on the scale of tapestries. The work here, all recent, includes her largest to date, where the glitter comes and goes and the crowd takes on a life of its own. Folk art often runs to stereotypes, and one could dismiss these right off the bat. One could grow tired of so little conflict and so much good cheer—a stark contrast from Dawn Williams Boyd in the same space just before. But then the points of light keep coming without losing their surprise. A spirit emerging from or consumed by fire still has time for a smoke.
Hope against hope
Hope springs eternal. Each year the Governors Island Arts Center does its level best to fill the summer doldrums, and one can always hope. At the top of stairs from the café, flags displays red roses and a message of "Yes," while a bedsheet beside them shows what I took for a dreamer. Who would dare disturb its sleep, even for art? But then, as the show's title has it, "Hope Is a Discipline." Bread and Puppet Theater, which made both works, has been at it for almost sixty years.
A display case tells its story. It began as a cross between activism and Off-Off-Broadway (or maybe Off-Off-Off Broadway) theater without ever quite ascending to the pantheon of performance art. Books and magazines speak of puppet making, but also justice and a dance of death for the victims of "Assistant Mass Murderer" Antony Blinkin, the secretary of state. I hardly know whether to call it dogmatism or discipline. And still Adama Delphine Fawundu, another contributor, can remember When the Spirits Dance. Twin tapestries drape onto the floor with pigments from Sierra Leone, herbs from Mali, "whispers" from Africa, and shells from Cuba, South Carolina, and Maine.
Africans, she insists "built this place," which must have taken discipline and persistence. Still, hope for the future can be hard to sustain. Maggie Wong sets out a drafting table, painted an acid red and with a red blanket trailing behind it. It could be her work table, for a work in progress, but newsprint has already filled it with devotion and anger. But then a bedsheet smeared with house paint sounds discomforting enough on its own. Who can ensure that those dreams will not be nightmares?
Hope may envision a future, but the entire show looks back, much like the display case. Suneil Sanzgiri sees his video trilogy as a conversation with his father. And it, too, is cautious when it comes to hope. Grainy footage shows a protest in India, but also seemingly purposeless walks through dim corridors and closed courtyards. A second video, an "experimental documentary" by Kyori Jeon, bears Flesh-Witness. Solitary standing figures could be proud or weary, even as others help their companions onto a platform and wave their banners to those who can see.
Hope may be more evident in a second show sharing the space. When "Tropical Frequencies" looks back, it sees a continuing tradition. It is hardly the first to focus on Caribbean art and the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, nor the most memorable. It does, though, have an insistent interplay between painting and assemblage. It becomes an interplay between African American faces and ephemera as well. Quiara Torres sets a portrait within a pearly lamp or cage, where one can feel the confinement and almost smell an unseen candle.
The portrait has its echoes in flat, earthy reds for a pregnant woman by Bony Ramirez—or a standing figure by Emily Manwaring, both with an overlay of shells. Still more shells hang from chains for Ramirez, along with coconuts. Are they relentlessly optimistic? The Kiss of Protection from Mosie Romney sure sounds reassuring, but Cheyenne Julien dots her figure with small red nails. I exited not by the main entrance, but back down those stairs toward the ferry, leaving the flowers and bedsheet behind. I might have abandoned all hope.
Renée Stout and Ulf Puder ran at Marc Straus through March 5, 2023, Myrlande Constant at Fort Gansevoort through March 11. "Hope Is a Discipline," and "Tropical Frequencies" ran at the Governors Island Arts Center through September 29, 2024.