Feature Articles


February Issue 2001

Center for Documentary Studies in Durham, NC, Features Personal Histories Exhibition

The three artists featured in Personal Histories, a new exhibition at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in Durham, NC, on view through Mar. 30, all draw upon their own lives in the creative process. Radcliffe Bailey, Juan Sanchez, and Renée Stout incorporate family or found photographs in their artwork, using them in various ways to examine and express their identities and their ethnic heritage. Through photographs, text, mixed media, and construction, these artists are defining who they are and where they have come from, while also giving voice to their ancestors. They use recovered images as a starting place to emphasize or inform their work. They ask questions about memory. What do we really "remember" or "gain" by searching the details of a family portrait? Bringing to light an individual identity or narrative, they seem to be saying, represents the collective memory for an entire people.

These artists approach the photograph and its multiple possibilities for self-exploration and self-image in provocative ways. Over the years the Center for Documentary Studies has initiated and supported projects that encourage young people to make images of themselves and their world and to paint and write on these images as a means of self-exploration. The work of these three artists invites viewers to consider how everyone's personal history can be explored using a varied set of documentary tools.
The exhibition is accompanied by a film series (listed below) and a companion exhibit, A Community Portrait, which will provide an opportunity for school and community groups and other visitors to engage in the ideas and themes raised by Personal Histories. Participants will provide a family photograph and participate in one of three workshops to create and share writings about their photos. The photographs and writings will be presented in A Community Portrait.

Personal Histories was curated by Susan Page. This project received support from the NC Arts Council, an agency funded by the state of NC and the National Endowment for the Arts. The exhibition and its associated programs are also supported by the Lyndhurst Foundation.

The Three Artists

Radcliffe Bailey
Born in New Jersey in 1968 and now living in Atlanta, Georgia, Radcliffe Bailey finds inspiration in both African and African American cultures. Bailey's colorful mixed media pieces are centered on vintage photographs from his collection of family images, surrounded by vibrant geometric shapes (recalling quilt patterns as well as abstract expressionist painting). Bailey often includes ritual objects in his work, referencing African minkisi figures. He explores the ideas of migration, both physical and spiritual, and the many manifestations of freedom and enslavement over time. He is also greatly influenced by music, and his artwork projects the energy and interplay of a sort of visual sound. Choruses from spirituals inspired four pieces in the Personal Histories exhibition, from his Until I Die series. To Bailey, painting and music share a creative process best likened to a jazz musician's search for the right sound through improvisation. "What I do may not even be called art," he has said. "It may be called music."

Juan Sanchez
Born in 1954 in Brooklyn, New York, to Afro-Puerto Rican parents, Juan Sanchez layers his artwork with references to multiple cultural experiences from his own history and that of the Puerto Rican people. Using old family photographs, Taino symbols, Afro-Caribbean religious imagery, portraits of Puerto Rican patriots, crosses, and many other icons, he creates personal and collective narratives with a social and political consciousness. Sanchez's political convictions, shaped early by the working-class neighborhoods where he grew up and his involvement with Puerto Rican activist organizations as a youth, are expressed through his art. Art, he believes, has impact. It can transform individual and community lives. Sanchez calls his mixed media works RICAN/STRUCTIONS, a term coined by the salsa jazz musician Ray Barretto, reflecting the artist's commitment to redefining false assumptions. "We as a people must deconstruct the colonized history that is oppressing us and reconstruct the false 'reality' to give testimony to our real history and truths," he has said. "We must re-create ourselves and give light to our virtues and strength in order to really appreciate who we are and be proud of it."

Renée Stout
Renée Stout grew up in Pittsburgh but moved to Washington, D.C., in 1985, when she was in her late twenties. Because she does not have her own family photograph albums to draw upon, Stout uses found photographs in her work, instilling them with character and meaning through mixed media assemblages of objects and structures. Stout's artwork has often explored African healing myths, rituals, and traditions within the context of contemporary social problems. In some of her work, Stout has examined the violence of urban American street life along with various struggles for justice and freedom by minorities over time.

She writes, "Several years ago I was told an African proverb that has become a mantra that I live by: 'Until the lions tell their own histories, tales of hunting will always glorify the hunter.'"

"At this stage in my career as an artist, I feel that I have a responsibility to bear witness to the ways historical and current social and political events affect me and the community I am a part of. Through my creative process I deal literally and metaphorically with all the joy, pain, love, anger, frustration, hope, and fear that living in these strange and surreal times can bring. But, my work is also about paint, wood, color, dirt, texture, the "what-ifs," the possibilities and alternative ways of seeing.

"Influenced by the blues musicians and singers that have come before me, I consider myself a 'visual bluesist' because I work from a blues aesthetic. This aesthetic allows me to find humor, beauty, and transcendence in even the most adverse situations. It has also allowed me to hold on to and celebrate all that is human, spiritual, and sensual in a technological age that seems determined to remove from our lives all that is human, spiritual, and sensual."

A Community Portrait in the Lounge Gallery at CDS

The Center for Documentary Studies invites participation in the installation of A Community Portrait, a companion exhibition organized in conjunction with Personal Histories. This continuous installation will occur simultaneously in two exhibition spaces: the Lounge Gallery at CDS and on-line at the Personal Histories web site at (http://cds.aas.duke.edu/personal histories). A Community Portrait will provide an environment for school and community groups and other visitors to actively engage in the ideas and themes raised by Personal Histories.

Participants provided a family photograph and participated in one of three workshops, community events bringing together individuals of various ages and cultures to create and share writings about contributed photographs. The workshops explored examples of interaction between text and photos and themes of identity, memory, and personal history. The photographs are displayed in the gallery version of A Community Portrait, along with portions of the text, creating a growing collection that documents the local community through individual and family stories.

The Web version of A Community Portrait includes photographs and text from participants in the Triangle area as well as contributions from those who live farther away and cannot visit CDS in person. In you wish to contribute, check the "Personal Histories" Web site for details on the submission process.

Personal Histories Film Series at CDS

In conjunction with the exhibition Personal Histories (Through Mar. 30), the Center for Documentary Studies is screening seven award-winning films that tell individual stories of diverse lives and cultures. These Thursday night screenings, all beginning at 7pm, are free and open to the public. The screenings are co-sponsored by the DoubleTake Documentary Film Festival, which is produced in association with the Center for Documentary Studies.

February 8
In Search of Our Fathers (1991,55 mm.)
African American filmmaker Marco Williams was twenty-four when he first learned his father's name. He had been raised in a close-knit family where for generations strong, husbandless mothers were the norm and fathers disappeared. This film documents his seven-year search for his father and his coming to terms with the truth of his origins. The quest actually brings him closer to his mother, whose resourcefulness enabled both of them to improve their lives.

Oma Rhee (1999, 20 mm.)
Narrated by her four grown daughters, the story of Oma Rhee is not a happy one. The film begins as the sisters relive childhood memories of family trips taken out West, the deterioration of their parents' arranged marriage, and ultimately their mother's suicide. Directed by Rosylyn Rhee, this warm and sensitive film lends fascinating insight into the experiences of a Korean American family.

March 8
The Devil Never Sleeps (1996, 56 mm)
Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Lourdes Portillo mines the complicated
intersections of analysis and autobiography, evidence and hypothesis, even melodrama and police procedure in this highly original work. The filmmaker returns to Mexico, the land of her birth, to investigate her uncle's identity and death, which has occurred under questionable circumstances. Portillo blends traditional and experimental techniques to capture the nuances of Mexican social and family order.

The Body Beautiful (1991,23 mm)
This bold, stunning exploration of a white mother who undergoes a radical mastectomy and her black daughter who embarks on a modeling career reveals the profound effects of body image and the strain of racial and sexual identity on their charged, loving bond. The filmmaker, Ngozi Onwurah, weaves memory and fantasy as she explores the depths of maternal strength and daughterly devotion.

March 22
Osaka Story (1994, 75 mm)
After three years abroad, filmmaker Toichi Nakata comes home to Osaka and turns his camera on his family, exposing all its hidden fault lines. Nakata's father, a Korean Immigrant, cannot reconcile his Korean and his wife's Japanese families. Nakata's mother is preoccupied with her social status; his brother is torn between the family business and a cult religious sect; and his sister has forsaken the family altogether.

Fighting Grandpa (1998, 21 mm.)
Korean American filmmaker Grek Pak creates a touching meditation on the human heart in Fighting Grandpa. He tells the story of his immigrant grandmother's seventy-year struggle with her husband. Forced to give up her dreams of becoming a nurse, left with four children for ten years alone on Korea while her husband studies in America, and finally brought to Hawaii to endure new hardships created in part by her husband's parsimonious ways, Grandma had every right to be bitter. But, as the filmmaker discovers, questions of love have no simple answers.

For more information, call CDS at 919/660-3663, e-mail to (dkdreyer@duke.edu) or at (http://cds.ass.duke.edu).

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