"Radcliffe Bailey: Memory as Medicine" at the High Museum

Radcliffe Bailey’s multifarious and magical art is and has always been about roots and branches -- Mother Africa and the experiences of her people since their involuntary diaspora. He is not alone, of course: It’s the defining narrative for the enslaved and descendants and for America’s political and racial history. Yet, as attested by “Radcliffe Bailey” Memory as Medicine,” the High Museum’s survey spanning 1993 to the present, Bailey’s work is his own.

The New Jersey-born, Atlanta-raised artist has developed and keeps adding to a vocabulary of powerful, multivalent images and materials – the boat, the oar, railroad tracks, piano keys, black glitter – which he uses and reconfigures as deftly as any jazz musician working a riff. His formal prowess serves to engage visually, but he is gifted at reaching us viscerally, too.

Though soft-spoken in life and art, he carries a stick even bigger than his oversized bats: heart. Bailey feels the sweeping history he chronicles as biography. On one level, his works are pages in his family’s scrapbook –- often literally, thanks to the trove of tintypes, recurring images in his work, which his grandmother gave him 25 years ago – or an accounting of his family tree. Observe the vines and branches that overlay so many paintings or the more recent works inspired by 2007 DNA testing which traced his genealogy to Sierra Leone.

If railroad tracks, a recurring image, refer to his father, a railroad engineer, they also bespeak the Underground Railroad, the Great Migration or any journey.

Carol Thompson, the High’s curator of African art, organized this handsome exhibition around three themes: family, water and music. The structure mirrors the way he revisits subject matter, reinterpreting it using different materials.

“Windward Coast,” one of the most striking pieces, conflates all three themes. As viewers may remember from its debut at Solomon Projects in 2009, Bailey conjures a vision of the agitated sea through the stacking of hundreds of piano keys. A single figure, a plaster head sheathed in black glitter, bobs above the waves. The piece evokes the Middle Passage (the slaves’ transatlantic voyages) and universal feelings of loneliness, terror and determination with poetic pith.

Perhaps the exhibition’s most illuminating aspect is Thompson’s elucidation of Bailey’s deep engagement with African art and thought, which he adapts to suit his symbolic and formal needs. The African sculptures and masks sprinkled throughout the show and label commentary help make this point, which is detailed in the catalog.

A fascinating section of works inspired by a Mende mask, a symbol of his matriarchal lineage, displays a range of medium, scale and materials that bespeaks his formal inventiveness. One recent piece, a photo silkscreen of the High’s Mende mask on a steel panel (his contemporary version of a tintype) features a glass and steel structure (perhaps an abstraction of the pieces of the lanterns he made a few years ago) that pushes into the viewer’s space.

This work and the High’s recently acquired “EW, NS,” a stunning nocturnal painting, exemplify a departure of late from his complex, layered approach toward an elegant spareness. The painting’s geometry, which evokes Hans Hofmann’s push-pull esthetic and Piet Mondrian’s painting “Broadway Boogie-Woogie,” and its imagery imbues it with an urban vibe, which is also unusual.

But then, Bailey has made a fertile career of looking back and moving forward. Roots and branches, after all.

Catherine Fox is chief visual arts critic of http://www.ArtsCriticATL.com.