The Brooklyn Rail

Dr. Lisa Farrington asks in her new book, The World Before Racism: An Art Story, “Is it possible that art can effect change (or not) with regard to racism?” The question stimulates thought about art and perception, the eye and the mind, vision and visuality, the art object and the visual field, psychological forces and historical contexts, and not least, race and representation. It immediately aroused my memory of my 1985 “Lynching” series, particularly Hidden Memories: Mary Turner, and the shocked reactions of some viewers when they saw the work in an exhibition that I curated, The Wisconsin Connection: Black Artists: Past and Present, in the Memorial Union Gallery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1987. The composition commemorates Mary Turner, a pregnant African American woman who was lynched in Lowndes County, Georgia in May 1918 after courageously calling for justice for her husband, Hayes Turner, who was lynched the previous day in Brooks County, Georgia. A spree of Brooks-Lowndes lynchings of Black men occurred in May after a Black man killed an “abusive” white farmer.¹ I created this work decades ago, inspired by Walter White’s Rope & Faggot: The Biography of Judge Lynch which addresses mob violence in the US—an ugly history.

Hidden Memories: Mary Turner memorializes Mrs. Turner in an abstract icon of martyrdom, rather than in the upside-down figural depiction of her actual lynching (she was hanged by her ankles, set afire and shot—her unborn child was cut from her womb). The composition is structured in a verticality of black-and-white contrasts, symbols, and text, imbuing a mystical aura of life, death, and spirituality. Off-center, a dark columnar figure floats in a white luminescent column as if ascending into a spiritual realm, parallel to undulating, hanging strips that end in knots. Its Africanized elements—flaring Ekoi braids, animated neck scarf, and nkisi nails—move rhythmically above the symbolic orb with organic projections. These qualities in colors, symbols, the overall effect of aggressive scratching, cutting, knotting, erasing with warm and cool underpainting, and dynamic red lines, invoke an aura of violence, struggle, trauma, and sanctuary. Beyond aesthetic form, an ekphrastic text in a diminutive circle beneath the orb delineates the violence done to Mary Turner and her unborn child. It includes the desecration of Turner’s gravesite—a whiskey bottle with a “cigar stump” protruding from its neck; presumably, an index of celebratory mob masculinity.

The entanglement of researching lynching, creating Hidden Memories, and living my own pregnancy at the time (1985) was trying. Yet, as Julie Buckner Armstrong observes, “By juxtaposing Mary Turner’s name and story against the title, Tesfagiorgis suggests that such memories, while traumatic, must be recalled.”² Decades ago, American legal scholar, Cheryl I. Harris, addressed the black/white racial line of demarcation that was instituted during slavery through laws, habits, and myths, marking “whiteness as property” with entitlements, privileges, protections, and above all, freedom.³ That line of demarcation also negatively affected Native, Latinx, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders. Like slavery, territorial and population displacement, mass deportation, forced incarceration, and colonialism, respectively, are factors of systemic racial violence. Artists have historically made works inspired by these histories, entering the field of racialized discourse: Edmonia Lewis (1844–1907), Meta Warrick Fuller (1877–1968), Henry Sugimoto (1900–1990), Jaune Quick-To-See Smith (1940–2025), Ester Hernandez (b. 1944), Howardena Pindell (b. 1943), Kevin Cole (b. 1960) and Ken Gonzales-Day (b. 1964). Similarly, artists have countered attacks on gender, transgender, sexuality, class, ability, motherhood, age, and religion, all appearing to share the tenet with Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012), that art can be a liberating force.

Yet, how can art with themes of racial violence, war, rape, neglect, death in a hospital emergency room, and lynching liberate or effect change? Exemplary are Faith Ringgold’s American People Series #20: Die (1967), Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937), Joyce Scott’s, Day After Rape Series: Gathering Water (2009), Simone Leigh’s Waiting Room (2016), and art inspired by the murder of many—Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd—that sparked/advanced the Black Lives Matter Movement. The psychological effect of visual forms on a knowing, compassionate humanity may be one answer. Perhaps that stimulated my “Lynching” series, from whence Hidden Memories emerged.

In figuration and symbolism, art has the power to arouse aesthetic pleasure, inflict pain, validate recognition, make histories visible, intervene in misrepresentations, and to effect change with regard to racism. Art objects, like books, museums, and universities can advance power-knowledge paradigms, trumping systems and signs of erasure.