In a more perfect world, the primly dressed ladies in rhinestone-studded hats and Sunday best dresses in artist Lava Thomas’s drawings would be the American heroes commemorated in Southern town squares.
The artist’s heroes are the ordinary citizens who became civil rights activists, the Southern women who questioned segregation on Alabama buses and went to jail for their insubordination. Instead, history has given us monuments of Confederate soldiers on horseback and fire and brimstone segregationists.
Thomas’ solo exhibition “Homecoming,” curated by University of California Irvine professor Bridget R. Cooks and on view at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art through Dec. 3, is a commemoration in its purest form: a celebration of the Americans who, because of their color and their gender, don’t typically rate monuments.
So Thomas, who is based in Los Angeles, has given her subjects their rightful place in history in her large-scale, intensely hypnotic drawings. Changing how we remember heroes and history is a significant part of Thomas’s work; she has also been commissioned to create a public artwork honoring author Maya Angelou in San Francisco.
Credit: Phillip Maisel
Credit: Phillip Maisel
Thomas’ heroines in “Mugshot Portraits: Women of the Montgomery Bus Boycott” are the women who in 1955-1956 refused to ride the city’s segregated buses — grandmothers, college professors and other ordinary folk.
Included among the portraits is the boycott’s instigator Rosa Parks, a slight smile playing about her mouth. In these drawings based on photographs, each woman holds her inmate number, an attempt to categorize and neutralize the women and strip them of their personhood. But in capturing their distinctive dress, expressions, jewelry and hair, Thomas restores their humanity. Her subjects are flesh and blood, distinct human beings plucked from the uniformity of a mugshot and transformed by the gestural warmth, the delicate pencil and Thomas’ rendering. The act of drawing becomes its own quiet, potent commemoration.
Credit: Phillip Maisel
Credit: Phillip Maisel
The boycott drawings are featured alongside two other bodies of work, “Looking Back and Seeing Now,” and “Decatur,” both of which originate in Thomas’ personal family history.
In “Decatur,” she chronicles the bureaucracy-plagued story of her great-great-great grandfather Charles H. Arthur, of Decatur, Texas who fought with the Union during the Civil War. He is depicted in a life-size drawing in old age, but with the upright posture and tidy outfit of a soldier.
But for the most part, Charles’ story is told through historic documents assembled and photographed by Thomas. Those affidavits and military records chronicle Arthur’s efforts, unfolding over eight years, to collect his military pension for his service. It’s an arduous and convoluted task, filled with onerous paperwork. In telling her relative’s story, Thomas tells a twinned tale about the often herculean efforts Black Americans have made to claim their rightful piece of the pie.
In the third component of “Homecoming,” titled “Looking Back and Seeing Now,” Thomas takes a partly sentimental and partly clear-eyed assessment of female relatives she came across in family photo albums. Those four images surround an installation piece of cascading tambourines hung from the gallery ceiling and ornamented with eyes and mirrors. The tambourines harken back to Thomas’s personal history playing the tambourine in her church choir. While the installation is striking, it’s hard for it to compete with the enthralling immediacy of the artist’s drawings, which speak on such a profound human level.
Credit: John Janca @ Artbotphotography.com
Credit: John Janca @ Artbotphotography.com
These large drawings are presented with each woman captured in a vintage-style oval frame to cameo and highlight their features. They are then highlighted again in conventional white mattes and crisp gallery frames, melding the world of Thomas’ family and that of her profession in the arts. The portraits have an almost eerie uncanniness that Thomas enhances by rendering their eyes in arresting sepia tones.
Thomas’ meticulous drawings create a strange alchemy in which strokes of pencil and enlarged portraits feel somehow more visceral, more “real” than the photographs they are based on. Historical photographs can document a truth but they can also flatten and render inert the humanity of their subjects. Thomas’ drawings restore that humanity, making her subjects appear to draw and expel breath, making them live again.
ART REVIEW
“Lava Thomas: Homecoming”
Noon-5 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays, through Dec. 3. Suggested donation $3. Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, 350 Spelman Lane SW, Atlanta. 404-270-5607, museum.spelman.edu
Bottom line: The power of an artist’s gesture to transform and reanimate is on profound display in this show dedicated to national and personal history.
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