CLEVELAND, Ohio — Art emerges from personal experience, but it also needs to speak on its own terms without too much explanation by the artist.
Amanda King, an influential Cleveland artist, activist, and advocate for social justice achieves compelling moments in her first solo exhibition, on view at Karamu House, the East Side’s historic theater and arts center, through Friday, Oct. 22.
At times, though, King’s symbolism veers into personal or historical territory that requires an assist from a text she provides in the gallery.
Yet if the show doesn’t always speak as clearly as it might about anti-Black racism, faith, family history, it reveals King as an artist who communicates outrage, passion and hope with a restrained minimal approach. She could shout, but she chooses to whisper, which makes you lean in and listen more closely.
Entitled “God is Anti-racist (GiA-r), composition no. 1,” the show comprises 19 objects or clusters of objects that transform a lobby outside Karamu’s recently renovated main theater into the virtual nave of a church.
The works on view include found objects, conventional color photographs, and silkscreen prints based on black-and-white photos of family members or cultural figures such as Huey Newton, co-founder of the Black Panthers, and Kirk Franklin, the crossover gospel and hip-hop artist prominent in the 1990s.
King’s enthusiasm for Andy Warhol, inspired by her early visits to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, where she grew up, comes across strongly. Her portrait of Franklin, for example, repeats his face three times, like a Warhol Elvis, while also referencing the Christian Trinity.
In a grainy black-and-white self-portrait, King poses in a dark gown with her hands clasped behind her back, her eyes peering at us through shadows that darken her face.
A pink bathtub in the center of the gallery functions as an imaginary baptismal basin, providing the show’s central focal point. At the far end of the space, a wall is covered by a commercially produced rug depicting a semi-circle of young Black girls in prayer, framed with a fringe of blue denim tassels.
The rug is intended to represent the four girls killed by Ku Klux Klan bombers in September 1963, at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Atlanta, but that’s not entirely clear, because the image depicts five girls, not four.
A small photo of the church is attached to the lower right corner of the tapestry, but viewers may not immediately recognize its significance. The denim tassels, however, convey an elegiac mood, while also recalling the indigo dye produced in the American south by enslaved Blacks.
King anchors the opposite end of the lobby with a large poster emblazoned with the words “Is Dying Dead?” printed in a black field with a red border intended to evoke the iconic, 1966 Time Magazine cover asking, “Is God Dead?”
The poster could be interpreted as raising the question of whether killing inspired by hate has come to an end, and whether eternal life will provide a release from racism suffered by Black people.
Other works in the show explore themes of Black Liberation Theology, which emerged in the 1960s as a way to link Christianity more strongly with objectives of the Civil Rights movement.
In one of the most effective set of objects in the show, King presents snippets of scripture or political expressions in small type amid large framed sheets of paper, with slight edits that create new meanings.
She crosses out “I thirst,’’ Christ’s words on the cross, and writes in the word “Water,’’ providing a verbal balm to suffering.
“Insurrection,’’ which appears to refer to the Jan. 6 assault by Trump supporters on the U.S. capitol, is crossed out and replaced with “Resurrection.’’ “Give me liberty or give me death’' becomes “Give me salvation and eternal life.”
In these and other verbal moves, King creates insights that feel like Zen koans — riddles intended to provoke enlightenment —but informed by Christianity and the Black Lives Matter movement.
King, 32, comes to such material naturally. She grew up in Pittsburgh as the daughter of Ruthie D. King, a diversity officer who worked in Pittsburgh hospitals, and William C. King, Jr., a lawyer and African Methodist Episcopal Zion minister, now based in Youngstown. After earning a law degree at Case Western Reserve University, she turned to art.
In Cleveland, King co-founded and acts as the creative director of Shooting Without Bullets an educational arts program that has morphed into a creative agency providing opportunities for young artists of color.
In November 2019, King co-organized an event at the Cleveland Museum of Art in which speakers including Chicago artist Theaster Gates argued that artists should collaborate with surviving family members of Black people killed by police when making artwork inspired by their deaths. King organized the event with Samaria Rice, the mother of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old boy killed by a Cleveland police officer in 2014.
The Karamu show includes King’s own meditation on death in the form of color photographs of personal objects owned by her paternal grandfather, William Clinton King, Sr., who died of COVID in February at age 1995.
The images depict King’s hands holding her grandfather’s personal effects up to a camera lens like evidence in a police file — a set of dentures, a cellphone, a fanny pack. They constitute an indictment of a society that couldn’t protect her loved one.
But here we are very far from King’s reflections on the Civil Rights movement and her dissections of scripture and political phrases. It’s almost as if the artist had so much to say, so many points to cover, that she wanted to squeeze it all in.
A sharper sense of focus might be the key to achieving even more artistic power in King’s next show.
REVIEW
What’s up: “God is Anti-racist (GiA-r), composition no. 1,’' works by Amanda King
Venue: Karamu House
Where: 2355 E. 89th St., Cleveland
When: Through Friday, Oct. 22. King will speak in a free event Wednesday, Oct. 20, 5:00-6:30. moderated by minister Marilyn Sanders Mobley a Toni Morrison scholar and former vice president for inclusion, diversity, and equal opportunity at Case Western Reserve University.
Admission: Free. Call 216-795-7077 or go to karamuhouse.org.
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Cleveland artist Amanda King’s show at Karamu communicates quiet outrage against racism, injustice - cleveland.com
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