High Art at the McKenna Museum
The George & Leah McKenna Museum, All images courtesy of the McKenna Museum of African American Art.
On a balmy February day in an old Central City house, Andrea Stricker sends off a tour group with a proclamation: “We are unapologetically and unapologizingly black!” And for good reason—when you’re trying to rewrite over 200 years of misunderstood and neglected African-American artistic history, there’s no time to hesitate.
Stricker and Kim Coleman run the George and Leah McKenna Museum of African American Art, New Orleans’ only museum dedicated to the visual art of the black diaspora in America. In an uninsulated brick home built in 1859 to house slaves, the museum displays two centuries’ worth of art drawn from founders Dr. Dwight McKenna and Beverly McKenna’s private collection, placing the works of recognized masters alongside younger and lesser-known figures.Simply putting these works in conversation with each other is a bold act. Art museums across the country mostly pay lip service to the long legacy of African-American contributions to fine arts. Arecent study of 30 prominent American museums found that only 7.7 percent of exhibitions from 2008 to 2018 were of works by African-American artists. In turn, those works tended to be by the same handful of major names, like Basquiat, Mark Bradford, and Kerry James Marshall. The mainstream art world has effectively portrayed these stars as isolated exceptions to an otherwise white cultural practice, neglecting a tradition of African-American visual art as old as the country itself.
The McKenna Museum, by collecting the works of African-American artists throughout history under one roof, demonstrates that they form a distinct and ongoing lineage—a singular canon of black art driven by diverse experiences and visions. Ranging from muted landscapes to mixed-media meditations on police violence, these pieces are exhibited as both aesthetic objects and windows onto black life in America. Dr. McKenna, New Orleans’ first black coroner, told the local radio station WWNO in 2017 that he wanted the museum to be a “testimony to how black excellence has survived despite all the obstacles thrown in our way.”
Appropriately, the first gallery you visit upon entering the museum is the “War Room.” The centerpiece is a dramatic portrayal of soldiers raising an American flag in victory during WWII. Its painter, William Edouard Scott, helped pioneer the early 20th-century “New Negro Movement,” which eschewed sympathy-inducing depictions of black poverty for inspiring images of success, particularly by black men in uniform. As Coleman points out, the pride and empowerment felt by black soldiers fighting in WWII—as well as their higher chance of becoming targets of white violence back home—became an early spark for the civil rights movement. “Let colored Americans adopt a double VV for a double victory,”wrote one soldier in 1942. “The first V for our enemies from without, the second V for our enemies from within.”
Scott was mentored early in his career by Henry O. Tanner, whose works are found in the “Masters” gallery alongside his contemporaries Hale Woodruff and Edward Bannister. These three painters, some of the first internationally-acclaimed African-American artists, struggled to make names for themselves among the turn-of-the-century White cultural elite. All three took inspiration from French artistic movements; Both Woodruff and Tanner traveled to Paris to study, and Tanner, finding a refuge from American racism, ended up living the rest of his life there. Hale Woodruff would become famous for his Cubism and Tanner for his biblical scenes, but the trio’s pieces here are gentle, impressionist landscapes, a stark contrast to the hostility and racism they faced in their careers.
Their artistic descendants would choose to reflect their political struggles more directly. Among the most striking examples are recent portraits by Louisiana painter Vitus Shell, who paints stone-faced young men over black-and-white scenes of protest and police violence stripped from newspapers. In one, a speech bubble appears over the subject’s head, reading, “I AM A MAN.”
Another Louisiana artist, the cubist Jack Jordan, explores the troubles of childrearing in “Two Views of Lady Liberty.” As the name suggests, two Statues of Liberty sprout from a single base: the first the one we know, and the second holding a baby. Underneath, a young man basked in light gives a speech to an unseen crowd. In Coleman’s eyes, the painting shows the difference between “who Lady Liberty is and who she should be,” between a government that simply gives hope and and one that truly provides resources for the next generation to thrive.
One gem is found in the fairly-unknown works of late New Orleans native Roy Ferdinand, who Coleman calls the “Goya of the ghetto.” Using pens, pencils, and watercolors, the self-taught Ferdinand fashioned himself as a visual journalist of the city’s underworld. He committed to only depicting scenes of crime and violence he witnessed, took part in, or read about in the Times-Picayune. The pastel colors and skewed proportions accentuate the bleakness of his world.
The museum does not neglect the joy of New Orleans life, however, particularly its homegrown music and dance. (Coleman reminds us, “Everything you love about New Orleans is because of black people.”) In the “Musical Culture” room, two paintings of second line parades embody the collection’s diversity of styles and perspectives. The first, by the Netherlands-based American artist Tim Hinton, is a stunning, photorealistic snapshot of a band member performing under an unforgiving sun, the shade from his blue and silver cap rendering his face pure black. Coleman jokes that the work, easily mistakable for a photo, is Hinton “flexing his style.”
Directly across is a smaller, more abstract work by local artist J. Renee. Using a Senegambian glass painting technique, she gathers together a vibrant collage of images and materials: musicians, water, newspaper clippings, sheet music, pieces of fabric. To Coleman, it’s a record of the moment that second line bands returned to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and reclaimed their neighborhoods by honoring the musical legacy of their ancestors. (The building itself bears this tragic history; McKenna told WWNO that he was actually inside the museum during Hurricane Katrina and had just finished bringing down paintings from the second floor for safekeeping when the roof collapsed.)
Marie Laveau Invoking the Spirit of Love, Ulrick Jean-Pierre
It is perhaps the Voodoo room, featuring a wealth of works by the Haitian painter Ulrick Jean-Pierre, that best embodies how visual art can reanimate neglected history. The connections between Jean-Pierre’s native island nation and his current home of New Orleans are clear: A painting of babydoll dancers with yellow dresses and parasols sits adjacent to one of the Haitian street procession, rara, while a portrait of the Haitian Maroon revolutionary Francois Mackandal bringing his followers into trance rests next to one of New Orleans Voodoo icon Marie Laveaux making gris-gris from the sweat of a young drummer. These works connect the dots of black diasporic culture and, in a way, embody the very mission of the museum: to bring out the shared roots of individuals and communities once displaced and divided.
Beyond any one particular artist, the key takeaway from the McKenna Museum is the necessity of context. Visiting any mainstream art museum will mean laying your eyes on painting after painting of Jesus on the cross, of Greek gods fighting, and of rural villagers feasting, and each in a baffling array of styles: Italian Renaissance, Northern Renaissance, Romantic, Neo-Raphaelite, Impressionist, and the list goes on. You forget about most of paintings just minutes after leaving the museum, but you must take them in to truly see how great a work like Leonardo da Vinci’s “Virgin of the Rocks” can be.
In the same way, not every work in the McKenna Museum will strike every visitor as a masterpiece. That isn’t the point. Just as there is no one way to paint the crucifixion, there is no one way to represent the infinite complexity of any racial group’s experience in America. Behind a $110-million Basquiat painting are thousands of equally valid works by lesser-known black artists, each with their own story to tell. To overlook these and seek out only the accepted “greats” is to remain ignorant of the true depth of both. As long as traditional museums rely on the occasional Kerry James Marshall exhibition to pull the weight of “African-American visual art” as a whole, we will need institutions like the McKenna Museum to safeguard the full tradition.
That being said, throughout my whirlwind tour of the McKenna’s works, one question kept circling in my head: Why did it take until 2008 for New Orleans—a city with boundless pride for its local culture—to get a museum devoted to African-American visual art? Coleman pointed out that a few similar museums existed for short periods, but they didn’t last long. “It’s a shame that New Orleans doesn’t have more,” she said, inviting competition. “The more the merrier!” Of course, it’s not just the Crescent City; there is only a handful of museums in the United States dedicated to the fine arts of the African diaspora. Outside of these independent efforts, the true depth of this tradition remains misrepresented and undervalued.
To teach this legacy is to forge a sense of belonging. Nations establish museums in part to showcase their artistic achievements, to prove to the world that their painters and sculptors can rival that of any other people. This is exactly what Dr. McKenna intended when he founded the museum, telling WWNO that he wanted to give African-American youth “a sense of what their history is in America—that we belong here, that we have a history here.” Part of that history lives in the brushstrokes of the old masters and young innovators of the McKenna Museum, and it will be shared without apologies.“Unless we speak our own narrative,” said Coleman, “it’s never going to be told correctly.”
Treme Baby Dolls, Ulrck Jean-Pierre
