Metro Pulse/Artbeat/Women of a New Tribe

What:
Women of a New Tribe, photographs by Jerry Taliaferro, and Richard Westmacott’s “African-American Gardens and Yards in the Rural South,” on exhibit through March 31 and April 23, respectively.

Where:
Literacy Imperative, 201 Harriet Tubman Street (Call 673-8988 for information), and Ramsey House Plantation, 2614 Thorngrove Pike (Call 546-0745 or visit the Ramsey House website for information.)

Exhibits portray African-American faces, gardens

by Heather Joyner Spica

Regarding last month’s designation as Black History Month and this month’s as Women’s History Month: it seems a bit ridiculous to cordon off history into commemorative units. To some people, token acknowledgment might seem like a good thing, but it could also be considered offensive that African-Americans get February (with the least number of days) and women get March (coming in like a lion and going out like a lamb—shades of taming the shrew). Call me oversensitive—what matters is that exhibits like those currently at the Literacy Imperative and the 1797 Ramsey House are worth seeing any time of year.

Moving on too soon is “Women of a New Tribe: A Photographic Celebration of the Black American Woman.” A traveling exhibition featuring more than 50 black and white images by Jerry Taliaferro, it includes portraits of 16 accomplished local women nominated in recognition of their contributions to area neighborhoods. A native of Brownsville, Tenn., Taliaferro graduated from West Point in 1977 and was later posted to the Special Forces Officers Course in Fort Bragg, N.C., where he became interested in photography. He was published in a German magazine while serving overseas, and in 1988 he left the military to pursue a career in photography.

In 2002, “Women Of A New Tribe” premiered at the Afro-American Cultural Center in Charlotte, N.C., (where Taliaferro currently lives), and it is now at Knoxville’s Literacy Imperative community resource center through March 31. An outreach ministry of Mount Zion Baptist Church, the Literacy Imperative is housed in an impressive 12,000 square-foot space accommodating more than 20,000 print and audio books, tutors, discussion groups, a meeting space, exhibitions, a nonprofit book store, and other “tools of literacy.”

For a few weeks longer at the Ramsey House Plantation, landscape architect and University of Georgia environmental design professor Richard Westmacott presents images from his book titled African-American Gardens and Yards in the Rural South (UT Press). Prompted by interviews with 47 gardening families in South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, Westmacott’s own photographs documenting present-day places, in combination with others’ images dating as far back as the era of slavery, form yet another traveling photo exhibition. Together, photographs, extensive displayed text, and numerous maps outline the evolution of African-American gardening throughout the past century-and-a-half. According to anthropologist Theresa Singleton, because Westmacott is British, he is perhaps in a position to recognize elements of the rural Southern landscape that others might overlook—somewhat like 19th century giant Frederick Law Olmsted who “recorded details of Southern life that native Southerners took for granted.”

As fine art photography, “Women of a New Tribe” falls readily into the “Artbeat” category. Although the same cannot be said for Westmacott’s exhibit, there is a connection between the two shows that goes beyond African-American “subject matter” or notions of what is and is not art. It’s a fascination with diversity and in many cases, with the countless ways our past contributes to varying perceptions.

Responding to reading author Toni Morrison’s description of African-Americans as “new world Africans,” Taliaferro remarks that he was “thrilled...because it echoed a belief that I have long held: that African-Americans are a new people...[sharing an] experience of survival, struggle, and triumph.” At the same time, the photographer feels there are many versions of black female beauty arising from the mixing of different ethnic groups throughout generations.

“Sometimes it is a beauty so different from what we are conditioned to believe is beautiful we are shocked when we are instinctively drawn to it,” Taliaferro continues. “The purpose of this project is to...move the viewer to reconsider what makes a woman beautiful.” Employing a 1930s and ‘40s glamour approach to his portraits, Taliaferro conveys style originally associated with a very white, Hollywood-inspired ideal. By incorporating that style into images of black women in the new millennium, he acknowledges both lost opportunities and the attainment of positions of power.

Westmacott, too, is drawn to visual manifestations of a variety of influences. Of course his is a more academic pursuit, and his photographs are, as a result, less striking than those of Taliaferro. True, university publishing is hardly what you’d call big budget; nevertheless, there’s little to prevent Westmacott from approaching his subjects with the flair projected by the chosen places themselves. “The yards display a quality of creative improvisation that is a remarkable demonstration of the human spirit....a way of life that is disappearing yet is part of the cultural heritage of many African-Americans,” he says. “[However,] many blacks, because of the years of slavery and oppression, have ambivalent feelings toward the agrarian heritage.”

Unfortunately, many of Westmacott’s images also seem ambivalent, although he does a good job of providing adequate visual material to illustrate his well-considered history. What the photographs generally lack is a spirit found in low-income rural yards with recycled materials “rich in meanings and associations...where independence is asserted with extraordinary vigor and resourcefulness.” It’s a spirit heard in commentary recorded by Westmacott. In his book, he quotes Susie Evans of Perry County, Ala., saying, “Any anyone that would go to that gate [in the back of the yard]...we had it fixed so that it would [here, Susie screams loudly]...with the hinges on that gate, you could hear people coming. And I enjoyed it.”

Incidentally, the Ramsey House will also host several special programs during Westmacott’s exhibit, including “The Planting of an African-American Garden” (April 3 and 17, 10 a.m.; call 546-0745 for reservations)—emphasizing plants grown at the plantation and providing seed trays that can be brought home by parents and children. And beginning in July, the Ramsey House will present a Smithsonian show titled “Key Ingredients: America by Food.” I am eager to visit whatever show comes next at the Literacy Imperative, as well. Spring, it seems, has begun with a bang.

This article is dedicated to the memory of storyteller and community advocate Adora Dupree. She will be missed.