It’s Saturday at the Seattle Art Museum. Not my usual day out. A perk of self-employment is the option to engage the public off hours, and I like to have the museum to myself. But on Saturdays, the lobby bustles with families and couples, locals and tourists, and solo visitors like myself who want to fill their eyes with new delights, escape the summer heat, or a bit of both.
There is a sign near the ticket counter. I do not stop to read it because I already know what it says: a warning for visitors to expect to hear intermittent screaming echo throughout the halls. I visited SAM a few weeks back in the middle of a Wednesday. I took myself on an Artist Date, a solo expedition that Julia Cameron, author of the 1992 bible for creatives, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, recommends to nurture or “woo” our artistic selves. The thinking is that because creative people give and give and give, the Artist Date allows dedicated time to receive from other artists. To look at, listen to, and feel something – simply because.
Moseying gallery to gallery, I stumbled upon the source of all the warnings. Tlingít artist Nicholas Galanin’s exhibit: Neon American Anthem (2023). There lay plastic grass mats, arranged on the floor in a three-by-five grid, ornamented by a single plastic daisy placed at the upper right corner with intention. An invitation to kneel… in prayer? in reverence? in grief? all of the above? In large bright neon letters against a black backdrop, Galanin tells us: “I’VE COMPOSED A NEW AMERICAN NATIONAL ANTHEM.” Then, the instruction: “TAKE A KNEE AND SCREAM UNTIL YOU CAN’T BREATHE.”
There is so much to scream about, too much to scream about. Historic and ongoing genocides. Climate disasters. Police violence. Fascism. Land theft. Wage theft. Time theft. Life theft. Soul theft. To function, however maladaptively, we remain silent/silenced about too much. I want to scream but I am afraid because I do not trust I will ever stop.
I knelt on both knees. Positioned my body in what some might identify as a “child’s pose,” but I intended as a deep revering bow. A quiet cavern to whisper aloud to myself for nearly 15 minutes until I found my voice. I inhaled, then exhaled a guttural grieving shout.
Today, I am not here for an Artist Date. I am here to work. I came to SAM today to witness and write about the new exhibition, Jacob Lawrence: American Storyteller.
Self-Portrait, 1977, Jacob Lawrence. National Academy of Design, New York Artwork © Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence, courtesy of the Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation.
Perhaps that is why I breeze past the warning signs, why I keep my podcast playing in my earbuds until I find the exhibition, located, the front desk clerk instructs me, in a room above the counter, to the immediate left at the top of the escalator. Perhaps that is why I do not rest and allow the moving stairs to carry me leisurely to the second level, but instead stretch my legs, skipping steps, and ascend with propulsion.
A woman holds out her hand and stops me at the top of the escalator. I miss her words in the scramble to turn off my earbuds. Her face looks relaxed. She has kind eyes, but I do not take to her kindly. Whatever the reason for her interruption, her name badge makes this stop official. I am on guard.
This happens a lot.
Occupying third spaces in Seattle as a Black woman, I’ve acclimated to feeling like I am always doing something wrong, like I’m on the brink of getting sent to the principal’s office. Thankfully, the New York in me that will never leave, even as I approach 10 years in Seattle, braces me against a barrage of cold glares from strangers whose eyes ask, what are you even doing here? Perhaps I notice it more today, having just returned from a two-week trip out of the country – freed, however briefly, from the invisible cages of American racism. I can feel its frictional drag now as I stand in front of this woman. Although I know I am doing nothing wrong, I begin my mental checklist anyway:
Paid entry? Check.
Earbuds? Volume low. Check.
Proper attire? I'm wearing black bulky cotton shorts, a blush pink crop top, a black visor with the words MELANIN printed on the side, and, because 90s fashion is in full swing, a black and royal blue flannel button down tied around my waist and a crossbody sling purse made from the backside of a pair of Levi’s jeans. A proper fit. Check.
Arrrrrrrrggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!
A stranger’s scream refocuses my attention on the woman’s words. She tells me she is a volunteer and to find her should I have any questions. Her intention is to help, not harass. But because I am not used to SAM on Saturdays, a day the expected crowds demand a bit more than SAM’s midweek staffing infrastructure, and because I am a Black woman, I did not once consider someone would offer genuine help.
I tell the helpful woman no, and soon, muscle memory overrides the front desk clerk’s instruction. My body walks toward the Gwendolyn Knight & Jacob Lawrence Gallery. This is not where his paintings are hung today. Tail tucked, I return to the helpful woman. We have a brief, dynamic exchange about Lawrence’s famed Migration Series, which SAM had on view in 2017, as she escorts me to the Virginia & Bagley Wright Gallery. The teacher's pet in me is excited to tell her that yes, I spent hours walking through that exhibition. And why yes, it was amazing to see the series in its totality right here in town. (The Museum of Modern Art in New York and The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. jointly own Lawrence’s Migration Series, and the 2017 SAM exhibition was the first time all sixty panels were shown together in two decades on the West Coast.) I thank the helpful woman, put my things down on the wooden bench, and take a seat. Between my unnecessary hike up the escalator and the screaming jump scare, my heart rate is more elevated than Lawrence’s work deserves.
Struggle #2, 1965. Ink and gouache on paper, 22 1/4 x 30 3/4 in. (56.52 x 78.11 cm), Gift of anonymous donors in honor of the museum's 50th year. © Jacob Lawrence. Courtesy Seattle Art Museum
The escalator deposits more people onto the second floor, but still, I am alone, surrounded by Lawrence’s stories. A focused exhibition, a panoramic scan captures all the paintings at once in the room. I lose myself in each work, and even from a distance, find myself falling into its depths, though Lawrence's skillful spatial flattening makes no direct invitation for such a journey. He has a simple palette. Black, white, red, blue, marigold, brown. I sit here, still and waiting. Waiting for a painting to call me. Trusting my eyes to find a place to begin. A painting with a certain something like gravity that can pull me to my feet.
I begin in the far left of the corner of the gallery with Interior (1937). It depicts a woman in the center of a studio apartment, saturated in muted moody blues I cannot recall in Lawrence’s other work. No, this is a painting I have not seen before. This woman is sitting, but she is not resting. Hunched over a bucket, hand washing clothes, her shoulder blades and muscled arms are more prominent than her face. Out the window is a starry midnight blue sky, and Lawrence carries those blues indoors, or perhaps, this woman’s blues carry out into the night.
In the apartment, I see a stove, a clothesline and a purple and white shirt hung, a table holding a pile of laundry, and a bed with a simple yellow frame and tousled white and peach sheets. Only after reading the museum label did I notice the faces of three children poking out from the sheets, three dress shoes neatly lined underneath the bed, and three book satchels hanging from the same wall hook. This painting captures the interior of her home, and the demands on her interior life. The woman looks tired, which is how I know she is their mother. It is night and this mother is still working. It is night, and this mother is surrounded by labor.
Perhaps I am projecting.
The facelessness of this woman makes her any woman. Those children, anybody's child. I look at her and I see my mother. I look at the children and see myself and my two sisters. I am looking at this woman and searching for a memory of my mother sitting. I cannot conjure one moment during my childhood when she sat in rest. Not reading a book, or watching her favorite television show. Did my mother have a favorite show when I was a child? I know so little about my mother’s interior life as a woman. I only know her through her labor as my mother.
"Why does one painting call us more than others? What parts of ourselves, buried or thriving, known or unknown, does art draw out?"
Art is how we travel time. I want to travel to moments when I told my mother thank you, or I’m sorry, or offered to help, in a genuine way, without her asking first. But the longer I search, all I can find are rolled eyes and arguments with my sisters about whose turn it was to do what. My siblings and I bickered, broke things, and needed things – basic things like food, rest, clothes, stories and help with homework. Each thing meant more labor keeping my mother up at night.
In moments like these, I remember why I make a point to experience visual arts. Why I race on opening day to witness something that will hang unmoving on a wall for months. We need art to remember, and create new memories, and create new ways to understand our lives and the labor of those who make our lives possible.
Art can help us meet ourselves, if we learn to pay attention to our attention. To notice what we notice. To sit on a bench and wait for a sign on when, where, and how to begin. Why does one painting call us more than others? What parts of ourselves, buried or thriving, known or unknown, does art draw out? What does it mean to stand in front of a Jacob Lawrence painting and think only of my mother? I make a mental note to call her on my way out.
Jacob Lawrence, ‘American Storyteller’ exhibition on Sunday, July 14 2024 at Seattle Art Museum. Credit Chloe Collyer.
Two ink paintings neighbor where I stand, which is exactly where I want to go next. Untitled (1961) and Untitled (Harlem Street Scene) (1958) both portray what their moniker describes. Children jumping rope. Friends and neighbors swapping stoop stories. Folks walking, running, standing wherever and at their own pace. I love compositions like these. The ones that show you more the longer you stare, the closer you stand. I look at these paintings and I miss New York. I miss Harlem, where I lived for six years before moving to Seattle, as Lawrence did in 1970 when he accepted an appointment at the University of Washington’s School of Art. In these street scenes, Lawrence depicts the porous divides between in and out. Every door and window, open and filled with people. The streets, filled with people, all in some kind of relationship to each other. Friends. Lovers. Playmates. Caregiver and child. Some people are alone. But everyone is together, trying to make a place a home.
"This is the work American Storyteller aims to do in the exhibition’s title. To emphasize that Black life is life life; that Black storytellers give and give and give, and institutions take and take and take, treating our stories like asterisks to American culture. No, we are the culture."
It is all just so ordinary. I need to see Black people as ordinary, unremarkable, existing so plainly in a random, non-descript, non-urgent, non-teachable moment, non-first-to-do-this-and-that slice of life. This is the work American Storyteller aims to do in the exhibition’s title. To emphasize that Black life is life life; that Black storytellers give and give and give, and institutions take and take and take, treating our stories like asterisks to American culture. No, we are the culture.
Aaaaaaawwwwwwwaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!
Someone's insides break the silence.
This scream was not done in jest.
This scream ends on a note of sobbing.
Isn’t that how it goes sometimes? Living your everyday life, just being a person. Minding the business that pays you, and the people who love you back. And then some headline, some alert, some friction, some microaggression, some aggression aggression, something happens, and you remember why an ordinary day walking the streets of your own neighborhood is such a brief, wondrous delight. That scream was an echo, call and response.
I am now standing in front of Struggle #2 (1965) and that’s exactly how I feel right now. It’s the third black and white painting in the exhibit. It depicts a police officer mounted on a raging horse. He wears a helmet, and in his hand, a baton. Underneath the horse are one, two, three, four, five, six faces. Although only one of the six faces is filled in black, I know each face is Black. The horses’ hooves are stained red. A red that feels too red. Too real. The color bleeds in contrast to the sharp black ink in the rest of the painting.
The Galanin exhibit is a few steps down the hall and around the corner. Screams, the gutting kind, have been the soundtrack for my time with Jacob Lawrence's work. But just as the noise is the loudest in my mind, thinking about fatal state-sanctioned terror, I notice the room is quiet. Or perhaps I stopped noticing the noise. And the inability to distinguish between the screams in my own mind, and those down the hall, reminds me of James Baldwin’s harrowing declaration, “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all of the time.”
The 1920's...The Migrants Arrive and Cast Their Ballots, 1974, Jacob Lawrence, American, 1917-2000, ink on paper, 32 x 24 5/16 in., Gift of the Lorillard Co., N.Y., 75.70, ©️ Jacob Lawrence. Courtesy Seattle Art Museum.
I am writing this the day after President Joe Biden officially dropped from the 2024 Presidential Election, and through each revision of this essay, new legacy democratic leaders emerge to throw their full weight behind Vice President Kamala Harris, who will seek election in his stead. It is an historic moment. Vice President Harris is slated to become the first woman of color to head a major party's presidential ticket. Over 44,000 Black women gathered in a virtual meeting last night to discuss, strategize, and be in community with each other in an effort to fight for democracy, and the ideals it has promised us and continues to break.
"I found what I did not know I was looking for—a moment of respite, a replenishment of creativity, a reminder that together we are what keeps us going."
I searched my phone’s camera roll from that Saturday at SAM for Lawrence’s ink painting, The 1920s…The Migrants Arrive and Cast Their Ballots (1974). It was the last painting I spent time with that day, but I did not take any contemporaneous notes. Perhaps because I was tired. Standing in a cold museum can be mentally and physically taxing, but I am pretty sure it was because this is an election year. Back in January, I was already exhausted. Lawrence’s scene portrays an energy about democracy and politics and faith in the electoral process I no longer have. Nobody is coming to save us.
The real human beings who inspired such a scene likely felt just as, if not more, betrayed and exhausted. They moved from one horror to horrors of a different kind, and still found a way to move forward. Lawrence, so moved he painted it. And here I am, doing my best to ignore the election frenzy on social media to write about his work. I lost myself in Lawrence’s painting again, examining each face, the kinetics in their movement. Some are standing. A few are sitting. None of them are resting. No, they are working. Frozen in this scene, I found what I did not know I was looking for—a moment of respite, a replenishment of creativity, a reminder that together we are what keeps us going.
JACOB LAWRENCE: AMERICAN STORYTELLER
Jun 28, 2024–Jan 5, 2025
Seattle Art Museum
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jodi-Ann Burey (she/her) is a sought-after speaker and writer who works at the intersections of race, culture, and health equity. Her debut book, Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work disrupts traditional narratives about racism at work and is forthcoming in 2025 with Flatiron Books.
Beyond the written word, Jodi-Ann stands out as a catalytic orator, having conducted over 100 keynotes, including TEDx, panels, fireside chats, and interviews. She is a regular contributor on KUOW-NPR's podcast, Seattle Now and live radio program, Week in Review. Inspired by her own experience as a cancer survivor and her academic and professional experience in public health, Jodi-Ann is also the creator and host of Black Cancer, a podcast about the lives of people of color through their cancer journeys. In partnership with oneKIN, Jodi-Ann is the co-creator and host of Lit Lounge, a curated book collection and author interview series.
An alum of Boston College and the University of Michigan, Jodi-Ann has over 15 years of entrepreneurial, corporate, non-profit, and start-up professional experience. Her writing has been supported by Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation (VONA), The Hambidge Center for Creative Arts & Sciences and The Virginia Center for Creative Arts (VCCA).She enjoys snowboarding, photography, oil painting, and prides herself on being a cool auntie and a reluctant dog owner.
Jodi-Ann splits her time between Seattle, WA and New York City.
Learn more about Jodi-Ann on her website.