Tamia Alston-Ward: Le Deracinement (The Uprooting)
Through a suite of delicately toned metalpoint drawings and paintings on paper and wood panel, Alston-Ward explores the removal, decontextualization, and rebuilding of cultural and personal identity as an overarching theme in European colonization and American history. And through extensive research and her signature use of medium, mark-making and composition, Alston-Ward traces the conceptual basis of her source imagery while creating new contemporary narratives. Uprooting is the English translation for the French word d茅racinement, which describes the process of intentionally removing something or someone from their grounding environment or home.
The drawings and paintings in the exhibition are grouped into five categories, traditional African Art sketched by Alston-Ward during visits to the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia; Black mammies and other problematic figurines, genre scenes, self-portraiture and non-objective paintings on wood panel.
The mammies and figurines are painted with egg tempera to reference the false narratives that these items are intended to perpetuate namely, happy domesticity among Black women in the service of others; Black life as performance; and, child promiscuity. Alston-Ward employs 24Kt gold and composition to recontextualize Black subjects and subject matter particularly in the drawings that depict genre scenes and in the detail and outward gaze of her self-portrait. The three non-objective works - each one painted in red, black and white - call on the viewer to develop their own perceptions free from any association with the Black body and all that it conjures. Yet the palette, which is the same used in the mammies, and the treatment of the paint on each panel points to the way that Alston-Ward utilizes medium to signal manufactured and simple references to Black life and her need to create contemporary narratives. In Census #2 (2022), Alston-Ward captures the innocence of a moment in time when two young Black men are playing with a basketball. Through the use of gun and bullet metals, steel, lead, silver and nickel, Alston-Ward reminds us again of the sociopolitical context in which this image lives yet it is rendered with the care required of a contemporary sensibility.
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Through a suite of delicately toned metalpoint drawings and paintings on paper and wood panel, Alston-Ward explores the removal, decontextualization, and rebuilding of cultural and personal identity as an overarching theme in European colonization and American history. And through extensive research and her signature use of medium, mark-making and composition, Alston-Ward traces the conceptual basis of her source imagery while creating new contemporary narratives. Uprooting is the English translation for the French word d茅racinement, which describes the process of intentionally removing something or someone from their grounding environment or home.
The drawings and paintings in the exhibition are grouped into five categories, traditional African Art sketched by Alston-Ward during visits to the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia; Black mammies and other problematic figurines, genre scenes, self-portraiture and non-objective paintings on wood panel.
The mammies and figurines are painted with egg tempera to reference the false narratives that these items are intended to perpetuate namely, happy domesticity among Black women in the service of others; Black life as performance; and, child promiscuity. Alston-Ward employs 24Kt gold and composition to recontextualize Black subjects and subject matter particularly in the drawings that depict genre scenes and in the detail and outward gaze of her self-portrait. The three non-objective works - each one painted in red, black and white - call on the viewer to develop their own perceptions free from any association with the Black body and all that it conjures. Yet the palette, which is the same used in the mammies, and the treatment of the paint on each panel points to the way that Alston-Ward utilizes medium to signal manufactured and simple references to Black life and her need to create contemporary narratives. In Census #2 (2022), Alston-Ward captures the innocence of a moment in time when two young Black men are playing with a basketball. Through the use of gun and bullet metals, steel, lead, silver and nickel, Alston-Ward reminds us again of the sociopolitical context in which this image lives yet it is rendered with the care required of a contemporary sensibility.
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