Organized as part of Black History Month at Bard College and co-curated by Aliyah Hyman (Bard ‘27) and CCS Bard Executive Director Tom Eccles, The Message Is the Medium presents two recent acquisitions from the Marieluise Hessel Collection by Terry Adkins (1953-2014) and Ja’Tovia Gary (b. 1984).
Adkins’ Progressive Nature Studies (2013) and Gary’s Giverny I (Négresse Impériale) (2017) are shown in tandem, highlighting a longstanding history of Black Americans recognizing the gaps in the art historical canon and utilizing their practice as a means to assert Black autonomy, as well as to solidify or reconstruct an alternative perspective on the role of Blackness within the history of art-making.
Terry Adkins’ Progressive Nature Studies contains a fictionalized portfolio of the legendary agricultural chemist and inventor George Washington Carver. In his lifetime, Carver, who also painted (and received an honorable mention for his botanical paintings at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair), produced a number of paints, dyes, and pigments extracted from minerals found in the soil of Alabama. Beautifully rendered in a series of monographic prints, Adkins created Progressive Nature Studies from the backsides of his own collection stereo view cards, imagining what Carver’s abstract paintings might have looked like, and transformed here to support the excitingly bold claim that Carver was a pioneering—perhaps the first—abstract painter.
The work of Adkins is on view alongside a small selection of archival material narrating the great mass of historical records covering George Washington Carver’s accomplishments across his lifetime. Books ranging from autobiographies to illustrated children’s books to first-day covers and postcards evidence the extraordinary achievements of one of America’s most celebrated citizens who, born into slavery in 1865, became one of its foremost agricultural scientists.
In the single-channel version of Giverny I (Négresse Impériale), Ja’Tovia Gary asserts her reconstruction of canonical art history, placing her own body within the famous garden of the Impressionist painter Claude Monet. Like a finger pointing to the fine print that history often skips over, Gary’s film makes class position and the tragedy of racialized violence in the U.S. difficult to separate from the luxury of the European artist’s lifestyle and the historic role of painting as an idealized and often ignorant world perspective. The film combines footage of Gary occupying space in Monet’s historic Giverny gardens in France with archival footage of Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton, footage of Monet himself painting in Giverny in 1915, and snippets from Diamond Reynolds’ live Facebook recording of the fatal police shooting of her boyfriend Philando Castile on July 6, 2016.
