‘Tales of the Conjure Woman’ explores the power of hoodoo at Spelman

• Community Day. 1 p.m., March 22. Fun-filled explorations of the Renee Stout exhibit for participants of all ages. Free, but registration encouraged.

• Community Conversations with Avelyn Sanders. Listening to the Voice of a Spirit: Can I Be a Conjure Woman and Still Make Heaven My Home? 11 a.m., April 15. Free.

One of the photographs in the exhibition "Renée Stout: Tales of the Conjure Woman" depicts the artist lost in thought in her Washington, D.C, home. She stands in front of bookshelves that are jammed with texts and topped with carved African statues and apothecary jars containing herbs. Her head turns to the left, her gaze focusing on something remote and undefined, something we cannot see.

This black-and-white photograph, titled “Listening to the Voice of a Spirit,” depicts a moment of attunement to a spiritual world. It’s a selfie but also represents Stout’s alter-ego, Fatima Mayfield, an herbalist and fortune-teller. Mayfield is a healer who consults with the spirits, gives advice and uses roots, charms, oils and “goofer dust” (graveyard dirt) to help people.

Just opened at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, “Tales of the Conjure Woman” takes us into Fatima’s fictitious world to explore hoodoo, a voodoo-like practice covertly observed in some African-American communities throughout the United States. More than 60 works are on view, including paintings, drawings, video, hand-blown glass, mixed-media sculpture, prints and installation. The show was curated by Mark Sloan, director of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, College of Charleston, where the show debuted before coming to Atlanta.

Growing up in Pittsburgh, the granddaughter of steel workers, Stout first became interested in African beliefs at the age of 10 when she encountered a nkisi, a traditional wood statue from the Congo basin believed to contain spirits, while taking art classes at the Carnegie Museum of Art.

Trained in painting at Carnegie-Mellon University, Stout initially launched her career as a realist, influenced by painters Richard Estes and Robert Cottingham.

Her skills in trompe d’loeil realism play a significant role in “Conjure Woman.” They enhance the power of objects while underscoring magic by tricking the eye. A painting of a small brown bottle, for example, endows the vessel with importance, making it come alive like a nkisi. Its liquid amber shadow is as lovely and mysterious as light bouncing off a lake.

Stout’s career took a turn when she moved to Washington in 1985 and discovered the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American Art. There she developed an intense interest in voodoo. And then she made her first trip to New Orleans.

“I started to make connections between all these religions and philosophies and the way they transformed in South America, the United States and the Caribbean. I also discovered root stores and spiritual supply stores. All of a sudden there was this perfect storm of discovery that led to the discovery of roots and women and men who practice magic and can affect certain circumstances in your life.”

Wandering through “Tales of the Conjure Woman,” a collaborative project between the Halsey Institute, Spelman, and the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, viewers encounter altars and shrines that resonate in unexpected ways. “The Rootworker’s Worktable” mimics a vodun altar with an assortment of interesting bottles crowded atop a vintage side table. Dials and meters, a wristwatch and an analogue TV screen attached to the body of the buffet suggest we can tune in to supernatural frequencies.

“I like the viewer to feel like a voyeur, as if the root woman has just stepped away for a moment and they are catching a glimpse of her secrets,” Stout says.

“The House of Chance and Mischief” renders spiritual ambiguity in a hybrid assemblage between an altar and an arcade game. The upper half of the altar offers a crazy quilt of images suggesting games, money and danger.

Five cartoonish Latino “homie” dolls stand on the fingertips of an upturned palm with heavy, inscribed lines from a fortune-teller. Stout carved the hand in a nod to “The Powerful Hand,” the representation of Christ’s palm in Latino folk heritage. With a blending of cultures, the figures riff on the nkisi, considered a “power object” believed to produce fortune and to heal.

A lower panel is dominated by a painting of a man wearing a funky getup with beads in his beard. Modeled after a chap in Stout’s neighborhood who calls himself “Hollywood,” the man represents the strange characters that visit Fatima Mayfield, Stout says. It is often the people on the margins of society who find solace in alternative systems of belief.

The formal qualities of Stout’s assemblages link to American artist Robert Rauschenberg, whose break-through “combines” of the 1960s fused painting, photography and found objects from the street. Stout’s content, however, is overtly purposeful. Her work offers layers of personal and ancestral meaning while confronting social issues, relationships and financial woes with gentleness and humor.

Stout experienced a backlash when her hoodoo-themed work was first exhibited. “A lot of African Americans became afraid of my work,” she said. “There was fear and apprehension in even pondering African-based beliefs. This is part of our heritage. I’m just presenting it for people to think about.”

But Spelman museum director Andrea Barnwell Brownlee says Stout’s work illuminates the tension between hoodoo and Christian beliefs. “People still feel strongly about both those things,” she said. “She allows us to enter the conversation in a way that’s not dogmatic or threatening, in a way that allows us to see the shades of gray.”

As a conjure woman, Stout leads us to consider new realms of possibility. Presented with challenges, we encounter life’s mysteries and the roots of our common ancestors.