The Brooklyn Rail

We tend to forget that the English language was birthed by poets. From Chaucer to Phillis Wheatley, from Anne Bradstreet to Jupiter Hammon, from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper to Ralph Waldo Emerson, to Walt Whitman and Black Elk, from Audre Lorde to, yes, the indelible Jackie Collins, our so-called canon—curious in its exclusions—remains a relentless feast.

Yet for all the richness plated across so many pages, nowhere has language revealed its most hypnotic and commanding possibilities more fully than in the gilded days of Hollywood’s past. There was once such a thing as well-oiled speech—a period when the voice itself was treated as art: sculpted, strengthened, and trained; burnished across silver screens into that strange, tragically named invention we now call the Transatlantic accent. And though Hollywood, as a cultural entity, is all but dead now, its creativity cheapened and emptied out simply for profit—one sometimes wishes that in an era of senseless streaming, old engines of elegance might be revived. For is there anything more precious than life-giving language?

Luckily for us, Ricco/Maresca’s latest exhibition, American Vernacular: Art and Objects by Unknown Artists, offers a cinema of western perception. Not the Hollywood of glinting studio lots and immaculately trained voices, but a quieter, more atavistic approach. Thornton Dial’s drawings, on view in Ricco/Maresca’s Gallery Two as part of A Gift, a focused presentation revisiting his intimate works on paper from the late 1990s, manifest this most vividly. Though not included in American Vernacular, they heat the larger exhibition’s undercurrents of preservation and resistance. In Untitled (Two Hands Reaching) (1993) and Untitled (Seated Female Nudes with Bird) (1997), the body becomes a site of spiritual combat. Figures twist into serpentine postures, their limbs doubling as arrows and talons, mouths slackened into masks of both ecstasy and dread. Nipples bloom like wounded eyes; the sex is rendered with a quick, ceremonial blush of red. Neither pornographic nor prudish, the drawings occupy an older, more dangerous register—eroticism as invocation, eroticism as ward. Dial, whose assemblages are often read through the language of Southern memory, reveals here that even the most delicate line carries an arsenal. These are apotropaic drawings, distortions designed to repel as much as seduce.

Vernacular objects echo this same logic of protection and provocation. A set of layered American flags collapses national mythology into something unstable—patriotism folding in on itself, revealing the fragility beneath the fabric. (The artist’s name, like many elsewhere in the gallery, is unknown, nor do many of the works have titles or dates.) Venetian blinds painted as a flag tease the viewer with concealment and exposure, a reminder that the nation’s symbols have always been screens. Nearby, a coiled industrial spring casts the shadow of a snake, an ouroboros of labor and survival—heavy, unyielding, yet strangely graceful in its spiral. In another corner of the gallery, a languid nude reclines on a pink settee encircled with thorned roses, her body dusted in a raw shade of jade. Resisting the clichés of pin-up paraphernalia, she’s instead enveloped in an innocent, almost meditative aura. Remote, dreamy, deep in thought, she seems caught in a private ritual.

These artists do what Hollywood could not sustain and what the canon often refused: they give us back ourselves, our rhythms, and strengthen our connection to that which was. The sublime was never the sole property of elite culture; it has always been embedded in the textures of everyday life, in the hands of those who made art because they had to, because it was a mode of transcendence.

Seen collectively, American Vernacular reads like a counter-canon, a visual grammar of the untrained and the unacknowledged. If the English language was birthed by poets, then these objects are its renegade offspring—mispronouncing, improvising, bending the rules to say what official tongues cannot. They look back at the viewer the way Dial’s women do: evaluating, confronting, keeping watch. In a time when so much of our very lives are flattened into content—streamed, optimized, emptied out for speed—this exhibition feels like a reclamation. It asks us to look again, to listen carefully, to remember that the language of living doesn’t merely exist in books or on the silver screen. It exists in every extension of our beingness. An elegy for what and whom our nation chooses to forget is perhaps the truest American vernacular.