Three dollars. How can anyone put a price, especially such an insignificant amount, on a real body, a real soul?
Black women’s lives matter in Still I Rise: An Exhibition of Works by Cora Marshall at the Dr. Carter G. Woodson African American Museum. While researching W. E. B. Du Bois’s collection of “Wanted” advertisements from the early 1800s in Washington, D.C., Marshall sought to turn these dehumanizing text descriptions of slaves into vivid portraits of human life.
Still I Rise: An Exhibition of Works by Cora Marshall
Through May 31. Dr. Carter G. Woodson African
American Museum, 2240 9th Ave. S., St. Petersburg.
727-323-1104. woodsonmuseum.org.
When you think of the typical depictions of enslaved people of African descent, I bet you don’t imagine one with a fringed green parasol or flowered silver-buckled shoes, as seen in Marshall’s paintings. In her studies, she found major differences between Northern slaves and Southern slaves, noting that Northern slaves often wore nicer clothes, were better spoken, and had more education than their southern counterparts. These factors gave them a better chance of escape, but women often had a harder time getting away. In the painting of Bilhah, described in her ad as a “well proportioned Wench,” the slave dresses in men’s clothing to increase her chances of survival. Wearing a coat that looks a few sizes too large for her frame, Bilhah stares out at us with strong, confronting eyes.
“Much of my work is about re-contextualizing our history and interpreting our present. I do so because throughout time the ‘conqueror’ gets to write the history from their particular point of view. My goal is to offer an alternative viewpoint by imagining other narratives,” Marshall says. The Gulfport artist’s use of vibrant color in her collages is a refreshing take on typically black-and-white photos of history; her work makes the past tangible, makes it real.
“The wax is used as a veil that both protects and conceals; it also gives some distance between the here and now, and the subject and viewer,” she tells me.
Intermeshing photos of affluent young African American women with fragments of Maya Angelou’s poem Still I Rise, Marshall’s collage series of the same name is an extension of Du Bois’s goal to fight the stereotypical notion of there being one “type” of American negro. Mixing photographs, words and paper fragments, Marshall includes hidden parts that require getting close — literally — to these women.
Through the glassy layers of translucent acrylic medium in Dream and Hope, an escaped slave seems fragile despite her intense gaze. The painting shimmers with a thin opalescent glaze, almost as if she might disappear beneath the watery surface as quickly as she emerged from the past.As your focus shifts from her face to the background, more concealed faces appear, acting as her support system. I had the honor of having Dr. Marshall read aloud the poem alongside this collage, making undulating hand gestures of levitating smoke as she read the part “I rise, I rise, I rise.”
Marshall’s photography is as striking if not more compelling than her paintings. In her Ghosts series, the artist used her own body with long exposures on a large-format camera to create haunting images to blend the past with the present. Colonial and African images are projected onto her body, blurring the boundaries of time.
In Ghosts: Self #1, Marshall cautiously peers around the corner, disappearing more and more from our view as she moves forward. These pieces serve as a somber, but cautionary tale: African American voices should be heard, lest they disappear like a spirit into the mist.
This article appears in Mar 10-16, 2016.