February 4: [Sunday] All here to dinner except Mat. We had quite a lively day. Some poor woman in the Quarter lost her baby today. Two children have died in the last 3 days. After the distraction of the visitors, I busied myself in my Phrenological pursuits.

Mary Virginia Montgomery was one of four children born to Mary Lewis and Benjamin Montgomery. Both the Lewises, the Montgomerys, and their children were former slaves of Joseph Davis, brother of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. The plantations known as Hurricane and Brierfield, were located near Vicksburg along the Mississippi River. By the time Mary Virginia wrote in her diary, her parents actually owned both Davis plantations and a third plantation known as Ursino. In 1872, the Montgomerys were some of the wealthiest planters, black or white, in the South.

But MV, as she was affectionately known, spent some 14 years as the slave of Joseph Davis growing up at Hurricane. Her father, Benjamin Montgomery, had been sold down river as a young man. Joseph Davis purchased him and brought him to Hurricane. Ben Montgomery immediately ran away. When I asked why he ran, Montgomery expressed that he did not want to be a slave. During the course of the questioning, Davis realized that Ben Montgomery was no ordinary slave. He was quite brilliant and literate, having learned to read and write from his former captor.

Hurricane was unlike any of the other plantations in the area. Some time prior to Ben Montgomery coming to Hurricane, Davis had taken a stage coach ride with utopian idealist and social reformer Robert Owen. Owen espoused that if you treat your workers with some degree of dignity and respect, they would be more productive. The key words here are "productive" and "production." White men often operated under the guise of benevolence and honor in the antebellum South, wearing patriarchy like an Easter Sunday dress. All their insecurities, weaknesses and homophopic tendencies were interwoven within the garment's silken threads, carefully stitched and displayed under the banner of honor.

Patriarchy, productivity, curiosity and science caused Joseph Davis to sit up and listen to Scottish reformer Robert Owen and to institute some of Owen's ideas on his plantation. For instance, many slaves were allowed to learn to read. There were also courts in which the enslaved played a role in determining the fate of their peers. The enslaved captives were also given medical care and housing well above what was allowed on nearby plantations.

In a few short years after being sold down river, Ben Montgomery reached a mutual agreement with Davis to open a mercantile business. Montgomery become so successful at this venture that he actually paid Davis his wife's wages so that she could stay at home with their children. Ben was deeply concerned for the education of his children. At one point, he hired a tutor for Mary and her siblings. When Davis found out, he sent his own children to the class. Surrounding planters heard about the integrated "school" and protested. The school was summarily dissolved.

It was in this atmosphere that Mary Virginia was born--a female slave in Mississippi, whose father and mother, also slaves were allowed to accumulate some degree of wealth. While this may appear to be advantageous, we must ask how might their social status affect they way that they were treated and their attitude towards others. There is something troubling about MV's passage in her diary, especially when she comments on the "distraction" of the deaths of the two babies in the quarters.

It appears that MV has much on her plate, she has been a slave, yet not a slave. She is educated and isolated. She is pretentious, yet realistic being constantly reminded by the flooding waters of the Mississippi River and the weakened levees that her father fights to repair and adjust on a daily balance that life is delicate at best. For an un*slave, however, imagination and fantasy are rich in abundance. The question is, 'how do we get there' and when we arrive, what will we find?

February 3, 1872: The sun shines beautifully today. Our garden has been reploughed. I am so proud of the prospect of a flower yard & the orchard improvement that I feel like one just embracing the threshold of a new life. I find now the study of agriculture most necessary.(464)

So wrote Mary Virginia Montgomery in 1872. MV's diary as well as the photographs of her family provide critical primary sources and inspiration behind the installation Hurricane. I hope that Sistagraphy will join me in this installation, one of three in the exhibition.

Basically this works as it did for Silence Speaks. In Silence Speaks I enlarged and then painted a stereocard entitled Georgia Cotton Plantation. It is a very well known card (I even saw it in a Toyota commercial). One side of the card was left as originally photographed, however, on the other side, I transformed the cotton fields into fields of clouds. We worked from the diary of Anna Matilda King, a wealthy plantation owner who lived at St. Simons Island. We used information in King's letters to bring to life Rhina, King's personal servant. We examined notions of both physical and spiritual healing. Sistagraphy members mounted black and white photographs of women around the stereocard and also mounted shelves that held recipes for "potions", herbs, and remedies. We sprinkled blue sand on the floor of the gallery and embedded objects in the sand. The color of the sand represented the ocean--water the giver of life and healer. The ocean brought us to this land and keeps untold millions of Africans beneath her waters. In Islam, it is said that water is constantly praising the Creator through her movement.

When I look to the past, I often wonder about how our ancestors managed to survive and cope with the hardship of everyday life during slavery. Even so called "free blacks" were subject to unimaginable conditions. My mind refuses to wrap itself around the living conditions of African slaves in the Carribbean and America. Black women were particularly brutalized. Interestingly enough, I realize that as African American women, we continue to be confronted with the same kind of violence that permeated the past. The black female body continues to be sexualized and devalued. But more on that later.

As I remember my ancestors, the notion of "tranference" comes to mind--the ancient practice of transferring ones feelings and emotions to another object or place--to fetishize oneself if you will--through spiritual performance and imagination. The Africans were masters at transference creating objects and rituals that allowed them to literally "shape shift" as they assumed and consumed energies from both inanimate and animate objects. Trees, plants, and rocks were sentient objects often transformed into fetishes through creative manipulation becoming masks, garments and divining tools. The Africans, the objects, the songs, and chants--all worked together to transfer individuals into another word. This ability to transfer one's self into an imaginal space, an other world, became an important tool, probably the most important tool in the survival of the Africans. It was a world to which white slave owners were not privy.

The series Hurricane uses the notion of transference and storytelling to examine a snippet of life from a young woman, Mary Virginia Montgomery. MV's life is one of contradictions. She was both slave and "free" simultaneously, her family becoming a part of a unique experiment whose roots lie in the concept of Utopia. It examines race through an imaginal space where things are not always as they seem--where symbols and stories conflict, contradict and confound. It is a trip into another world and I will tell more about the concept in my next post.

Peace,
lynnlinn

Greetings Sistas:

I am very excited and pleased that you are able to join me as I present my first "solo" show in a number of years. I look forward to the installation, the dialogue and the interaction. I encourage you to utilize this blog for questions and comments about our collaborative work.

This installation follows "Silence Speaks", which was installed at The Contemporary in 2002. In that installation historical narrative was re-imagined and reinterpreted using family stories, objects, and photographs that were juxtaposed against the environmental confines of a 19th century Georgia sea island plantation. The installation entitled, "Silence Speaks" utilized the stereographic format as a vehicle to examine the past and the present, allowing the viewer the opportunity to visualize simultaneously how white society viewed "the other" and the way that we interpreted the spiritually charged and transferential world of our own African-American imaginal space.

We return to fetch the past (Sankofa)
in this new work that once again utilizes the stereographic format.

I hope that we can challenge the present by looking at the way that African American women are viewed (or are made to be invisible) in contemporary society. Like the women in the stereocard that we have chosen, we are defiant, cautious, guarded--complex--the antithesis of the stereotype. Our images will speak to these notions.

Below are dates for the show, which will run through the National Black Arts Festival. I will post a more precise timeline once the museum provides me with information. If you get a chance, check out the April issue of Atlanta Magazine. Writer Virginia Parker has listed the exhibition as one of "twelve pulse-pounding, mesmerizing, captivating, thoroughly entertaining arts events you can't miss." It's up there with an exhibition by Chuck Close and the Broadway play "Wicked" just to name a few. In other words ladies, "It's Showtime!"

Dates: July 8, 2006 - September 16, 2006

Opening Reception: July 8, 5:30p.m. - 8:30 p.m.