#DeanaLawsonEdition
While giving a 2018 tour of Kerry James Marshall’s breakthrough solo exhibition, Mastry at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, photographer Deana Lawson gravitated first to his work Slow Dance. In the painting, a man and woman embrace each other in an intimate dance in their living room. After commenting generally on the image and its resonances with her work, Lawson shares some specific stylistic choices that stood out to her. Among these, is that the man in the image is belt-less, with his shirt untucked. “That means he’s very comfortable in his space,” she notes. Disorder, in some ways, can be a signifier of home.
It is quite like Lawson to so immediately see dignity and power in an unpolished appearance. Her own images are rife with this dichotomy. She is able to make us hold both how these things are generally perceived — with judgment, disdain, or even pity — alongside the certainty that her subjects do not care. Lawson makes her viewers certain that we are guests in these spaces. She has the ability to see the subjects of images as self-determined beings. It is their experience, not the experience of the viewer, that is privileged.
In a domestic space, one is liberated from the expectation to present as the world expects, and may instead expect the world to see them as they are. Lawson associates these visual motifs with a sense of personalautonomy. Throughout her body of work, she has turned this association into an entire visual language. She constructs an iconography where vulnerability in one’s presentation, from untied shoes to nudity, lends authority to the sitter and humility to the viewer.
For this edition of the Ujima WIRE, Abena Osei Duker discusses the work of photographer Deana Lawson — whose first-ever museum survey opened this month at the ICA/Boston — and her importance within the tradition of Black image-making.
Deana Lawson’s First Museum Survey at the ICA
When you first enter the exhibition space, two expressly seductive images stare back at you. Each depicts a Black woman, looking enticingly at the camera. In Ashanti (2005), the image on the left, a nude woman lies on a bare mattress in a classical reclining like an odalisque. Though her form recalls Titian’s Venus or Manet’s Olympia, her position is reversed. With her back towards the camera, she gazes at us over her right shoulder. In Hair Advertisement (2005), Lawson has appropriated a commercial image from the 1970s, cropping it tightly around a model’s face and neckline to zero in on her soft smile and sultry eyes. The model oozes glamour, with refined makeup, gold jewelry, and freshly manicured fingers — one of which she holds coquettishly to her chin. The two images have an overt eroticism. Yet they also possess a coy modesty. Both refuse to present the fullness of their bare bodies, yet make you aware of their nudity and your own voyeurism. Taken together, the two images seem to hover somewhere between invitation and challenge.
Those images set a particularly skewed tone for Lawson’s show. Though nudity features heavily in her work, it on the whole doesn’t feel sexualized in the way these images do. Those familiar with her work might find irony in this. Lawson is playing with your expectations here.
At the opening reception, visitors discussed amongst themselves how to interpret the images. How they processed and took in these particular representations of Blackness, they knew, was a very delicate and tenuous thing. Possibly because Lawson doesn’t concern herself with critiquing whiteness or articulating Black pain, she is simply involved in mining Blackness from within — demonstrating what it is. And white audiences, even those ostensibly committed to dismantling racial oppression, are still not used to thinking outside its terms.
The world of these images is, I gather, murky water for them. They do not know exactly what they have been let into, and exactly how far they can step. And though they might find it enticing (rewarding, even) to tow that line until they can find it in the dark, this act is one they know better than to have seen or remarked upon. The privacy created by these images is almost more important than the privacy they capture.
The work that shines the most are the objects in corners. A body against a flat wall is on display, staged. A body tucked into or framed by a little cavity is offered the beauty of context. Corners force us to consider space. The elements in the background are not simply props, they become players on this shared stage. The angle feels like an encounter, there is inherent relationality in the ways we negotiate space.
Lawson in the Tradition of Black Image-Making
Born in Rochester, New York, the home of Kodak, Lawson got her bachelor’s in photography at Pennsylvania State University. She later went on to complete her M.F.A in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design and was inspired by Black image-makers like Carrie Mae Weems and Renee Cox. After learning about the work of Lorna Simpson, Lawson recalls, “Just to have that model — to realize that not only did I like to make pictures but that I could actually do this, you know, was absolutely important to reaffirm myself as an artist.”
Carrie Mae Weems’s Kitchen Table Series holds a particular place in the canon of Black photography. Weems produced this series of photos in 1990 at a kitchen table in her home, illuminated with a single light source — a hanging pendant lamp. There are traces of Weems’s influence in Lawson’s work — elements of performance, staged scenes of domesticity, and a universal tenderness. Elizabeth Sann, a gallerist who exhibited Weems’s work said, “I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met in the art world — artists, curators, dealers — that point to ‘The Kitchen Table Series’ as the one piece that made them know they wanted to be…in the arts.”
Lawson developed a distinct vernacular in her interior portraits, in the twenty years since completing her studies. In 2008, Lawson relocated to New York City with her then-husband and two children to work at the International Center of Photography. She took advantage of the renowned classes there, steadily honing her craft, and was later recognized in a 2011 Museum of Modern Art Show. While maintaining a teaching position at Princeton University, Lawson’s artistic career soared, and by 2020 she won the Hugo Boss Prize — the first Black photographer to do so.
After years of photographing strangers, she’s known to have produced only two self-portraits. The most recent of which surfaced earlier this year. “I just want to make a picture that gets closer to representing how I envision myself — as an artist, as a creator, as a person who holds a camera.”
Power, Photography and the Gaze
In her thoughtful Hyperallergic piece “The Many Problems with Deana Lawson’s Photographs,” the art historian Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw discusses the discomfort generated by the appropriative nature and other concerns about Lawson’s work. In researching for this piece, I found the article but must admit that I almost didn’t engage with it. “In a world where Black female bodies are continually exploited in real life and in art, I am not sure there is true willing consent in Lawson’s prurient nudes,” DuBois Shaw states. Initially, I assumed what I’d found was an underbaked conservative critique. The kind I wouldn’t necessarily blame anyone for making, but felt precedes a deeper layer of analysis in the trust she must share with her subjects.
On a deeper level, perhaps I also feared the frustration of finding myself reading a critique that did not mention my own concerns, as I so often do in the context of discussions around celebrated Black artists. The centrality of slavery and displacement to the diasporic Black experience has created a very raw, very tenuous relationship between all Black people and the continent of Africa. We all inherit all of this legacy but in very different ways.
As a first-generation American, the child of Ghanaian immigrants who arrived in this country in early adulthood but retain many close ties to home, I have felt, in a sort of unremarkable way, the confusion of an obvious cultural identity from which to draw meaning and inspiration, and the estrangement. The last time I visited Ghana was in 2019, for an uncle’s funeral. That year was dubbed the “Year of Return” by the Ghanaian government, as it marked the 400th anniversary since the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the New World at Jamestown.
Knowing my tribal origin with certainty and specificity is an immense psychological and social privilege, yet it also means that I don’t feel access or claim to any Ghanaian or broader African experience outside of that very specific context. Even within it, I have felt viscerally, as part of every encounter with my people, my estrangement from them and that context. I have been to Ghana many times, and while I love communing with my family in a place that feels warm and familiar, none of these trips has ever felt like “going home” to me.
I don’t know where I stand in the debate on whether one can responsibly make art in and about any place that they are removed from. And I don’t know that I need to. What I know is what I feel. Walking through those galleries with all my pre-existing reverence for (what I knew of) Lawson’s work, I found myself afraid to engage with those parts I thought might complicate my feelings.
It is rare to appreciate things with the kind of depth and singularity I feel when gazing at Lawson’s interiors. When I came upon The Garden (2015) and Oath(2013) in the galleries and found the characteristic peculiarly staged domestic vignette settings replaced with the nondescript lush greenery of an imagined African non-place, I felt like I had found a crack in a small boat. I did not investigate further, because I knew I could keep the boat from filling with water. A nude, Black figure is already such a loaded thing. When that figure is situated in a contemporary interior space, assuredly meeting your gaze, their humanity, agency, and identity are reified. In works like Otisha (2014) and Nicole (2016), Lawson’s nude figures are offered not only an aesthetic identity through a social and spatial context, but a literal identity generated from the use of the sitter’s (real or imagined) names.
Studying art with the collection of experiences and locations that I have, has meant that many engagements with art about Blackness have brought up these tensions. While I desperately seek broad representations of Blackness, and I feel deep appreciation for distinct, nuanced, and powerful forms this has taken and may take, I don’t want or need any particular artist to reflect mypersonal experience or those of my family. Yet, there is also a very real and private betrayal I feel when an artist’s work and the broader discussion surrounding it feels simultaneously insensitive to and wholly unaware of those experiences. Yet I have also come to expect it. I’ve conditioned myself to look past threads of appropriation and exotification, and find where an artist’s work feels more full and more true. Because it often is there — sometimes within the same body of work, sometimes in others. Artists like Lawson may frustrate me at times, but they have also produced images and works not shy of necessary.
Black liberation is a process but it is also an ideal. Lawson’s work isn’t interested in the process — it refuses to chronicle the struggle on a macro level. It is an ongoing archive of micro-experiences that, taken together, produce a mosaic, more than an encyclopedia or how-to manual.
I asked Deana why she has her subjects central in the frame: “ultimately, it’s about power.”
Abena Osei Duker studied/s design and art history at Harvard. She’s now a Boston-based visual culture and built environment nerd doing a variety of projects to advance community engagement in both of those fields.
Deana Lawson’s first museum survey exhibition will be on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art until February 27th, 2022. Learn more here.
