The Brooklyn Rail

“Looking out at those / Open plains / Nothing on either side / And your heart / Syncs up / With other animals / Until there’s one beat.” These words, excerpted from artist and poet Pamela Sneed’s poem, “Speaking Tongue,” are scrawled on the wall of Dashwood Projects alongside the paintings that make up her current exhibition. The show takes its name from the poem and features a body of work the artist made this year, following a life-altering trip to Kenya, where she spent several weeks and which included a safari at the Maasai Mara National Reserve. That experience, those savannahs, their wildlife all conjured for Sneed an expanded sense of freedom, which she articulates through the works and words presently on view.

The small watercolor and ink works on paper, all dated 2024, allow for the viewer’s own free-flowing thought that the artist’s words imply. Sneed has committed impressions from her time in Kenya in loose compositions that suggest concrete subjects without relinquishing their open-endedness to didacticism. The animals she witnessed on Kenya’s plains, particularly giraffes, are economically but sumptuously evoked. A painting like Giraffe Abstract 1 is representative. Here, a herd of the lofty beasts are elicited, their heads and horns supported by the swoop of neck only insinuated by a thin wash of black paint. Dots of white freckle these forms, which are painted over a background of dusty rose. Sneed’s use of color both here and throughout the show is canny, simulating the tonal richness of the grasslands as well as the special characteristic of their light. The sensation of what it may be like to watch the willowy, graceful majesty of a cluster of these animals crossing the landscape is palpable.

Many of the paintings put forth a visual syncopation, linking them with the artist’s poetry. In Ostrich 1, a swirl of black marks spiral across an expanse of a blue-green wash; the forms may invoke the bird for which the painting is so named, but for this writer, the marks themselves also brought to mind a punctuational element—the commas, parentheses, and quotation marks that confer rhythm to a string of words. Keguro’s garden, hanging beside Ostrich 1 and so in direct conversation, also possesses a definitive cadence of visual iambs of their own distinction. A wash of verdant green is ensconced by thicker, deeper brushstrokes of canary, brick, and peacock. The potent combination of color causes the eye to dance and skip across the page to its nearly audible tempo.

The unity of Sneed’s paintings and words coalesces into an overarching sense of freedom—the freedom she alludes to in the lines of “Speaking Tongue.” Of course, though freedom is touted as a fundamental, inalienable right, it rarely comes unencumbered by political entanglement, especially when considering the history of Black personhood. Sneed, conscious of this, folds more pointed critiques of freedom into several of her paintings. Near the front of the gallery hangs Uprising, featuring a phalanx of Black protesters marching together, a raised fist—the symbol of Black power—displayed prominently among the signage they carry. The scene is inspired by a student protest Sneed observed during her time in Kenya, but the imagery translates fluidly to the political landscape of the United States, where similar demonstrations are both embedded in our collective history and are still part of our restive present. Elsewhere, a portrait of John Amos, the actor who portrayed the runaway Kunta Kinte in the 1977 miniseries Roots (a saga about an enslaved family in America that was a cultural touchstone of the 1970s) hints at some of the more troubling hindrances of aspirations towards freedom. Perhaps most poignantly, a small diptych, African Woman on Moped, depicts an abstracted figure on her bike, paired with another set of lines from “Speaking Tongue”: “I started to / Remember a certain / Kind of Freedom / Roaring inside myself.” The self-determination of these words translates to Sneed’s works on paper, and underscores the sense of liberty that pervades this thought provoking show.