Atlanta artist Jerushia Graham’s medium is the papercut; figures formed with an X-Acto knife and paper that require exceptional delicacy to create but which have the bold lines of signage.
And despite working in such a terse, pared-back format, Graham’s papercuts convey some surprisingly nuanced detail. Body language like an arm gripped tight across the body or a wary expression create a low simmer of uneasiness in Graham’s artworks. In her solo exhibition “Freedom Isn’t Free” at Callanwolde Fine Arts Center Gallery, Graham uses an economical vocabulary and form to muse on the meaning of concepts like freedom, liberty and America as they are experienced by the Black Americans who Graham makes the focus of her work.
The papercut itself is an interesting form for tackling social issues. A practice that originated in ancient China, papercutting has had decorative associations with celebration, the holidays, folklore and storytelling. But contemporary artists have subverted those associations, using the form as a metaphor for society’s elisions and denials, tapping into all the subterranean muck hidden beneath the papercut’s pleasing forms. Artist Kara Walker has, most famously of all, turned the form on its head, using paper silhouettes to scatological, profane and cathartic ends in her autopsies of America’s racist past.
Credit: Jerushia Graham
Credit: Jerushia Graham
Graham’s papercut figures are by and large Black men and women who look more than a little world-weary, casting side-eye and embodying existential fatigue in their demeanor. In “From Where I Stand #3” a young man in a white t-shirt and towering hair glares into the distance, his fingers jammed in a defensive gesture into his jeans. In “Waiting #2” an older woman in cornrows and hunched posture leans over a chair, as if girding herself for something unpleasant.
Credit: Jerushia Graham
Credit: Jerushia Graham
In addition to those striking portraits that can have the clean, graphic punch of block prints, the central motif in “Freedom Isn’t Free” is the American flag rendered literally and abstractly in cloth. The same simple lines that characterize her papercuts repeat in the rows of fabric in various shades of blue that form the ground against which Graham has sewn the word “Liberty.” That word is affixed to the background in a cursory mending stitch to emphasize the word as a kind of haphazard afterthought. Those stitched-on phrases, “Happiness” or “Life,” are the ideals that Graham, who grew up in a military family, has seen promised in the Declaration of Independence, but not always delivered — especially to Black Americans.
Credit: Caroline Giddis
Credit: Caroline Giddis
In many ways Graham’s solo exhibition is a welcome relief. It’s refreshing to see an artist tackling the divide between belief and reality that the American ideal can often represent, especially in the realm of social justice. After a year and a half of isolation and cataclysmic social upheaval, it is surprising to see so few local exhibitions digging deep into the pain, injustice and rage that defined 2020. Though devoid of anything as powerful as anger, there is a thread of discontent running through “Freedom Isn’t Free” in references to the slave trade, to the heavy burden borne by Black women and, as indicated from the enormous loads and babies toted by the women in two small “Exodus” papercuts, the toll of emigration.
The exhibition is a mix of more contemporary work and other pieces that are more than twenty years old. For an exhibition that doesn’t purport to be a retrospective, but more a themed show, that sampling of pieces from such a wide swath of time can make “Freedom Isn’t Free” feel at times unfocused and catchall. That lack of focus does a disservice to the ideas the artist is addressing. That is especially true when some of the earlier works feel markedly different in style and effect than Graham’s current work.
ART REVIEW
“Freedom Isn’t Free” by Jerushia Graham
Through Sept. 2. 9 a.m.-8 p.m. Mondays-Thursdays; 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Fridays. Free. Callanwolde Fine Arts Center Gallery, 980 Briarcliff Drive NE, Atlanta. 404-872-5338, callanwolde.org
Bottom line: A talented Atlanta artist uses delicate papercuts to examine big issues of racial justice.
