Otabenga Jones & Associates ~RAID~ The Menil Collection

Thursday, 16 August 2007 01:29

HOUSTON, TX - The Menil Collection founders, John and Dominique de Menil, believed that the individual artist’s eye could bring new perspectives to a museum experience, offering novel and unexpected ways of exhibiting and looking at art. Famously, in 1969, the de Menils asked Andy Warhol to curate the exhibition “Raid the Icebox I,” setting the artist loose in storage vaults at the Rhode Island School of Design’s Museum of Art in Providence. “Raid the Icebox I,” which was presented at the Rice University Art Gallery in Houston — and whose checklist ranged from Maxfield Parrish and Velazquez portraits to 19thcentury hatboxes, Navajo blankets, and early-American furniture (including an enormous cabinet filled with women’s shoes) — established a precedent for exhibitions that expose the inner workings and explore the unseen corridors of museums.

It also set the stage for such projects as Fred Wilson’s landmark “Mining the Museum” (Maryland Historical Society, 1992). In recent years the Menil has invited such artists as David McGee, Robert Gober, and Vik Muniz to produce exhibition projects based on the museum’s distinctive collection, buildings, and history.

Now enter the Houston-based collective, Otabenga Jones & Associates, to raid the Menil’s own vast icebox for Lessons from Below. Otabenga Jones & Associates, a collective comprised of four young African-American artists — Dawolu Jabari Anderson, Jamal Cyrus, Kenya Evans, and Robert A. Pruitt — met in Houston at Texas Southern University’s Department of Visual Arts, founded by John Biggers. The group takes its name from a disturbing spectacle from the early 20th century: the public display of Ota Benga, a member of the Batwa people from the former Belgian Congo, at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair (two years later, the man was caged at the New York Zoological Park, in a sort of living diorama illustrating human evolution).

This history of display motivates the performance- and installation-based work of Otabenga Jones & Associates. The artists, whose work has been included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial and in exhibitions at Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum and Clementine Gallery in New York, has always been about African-Americans creating their own sense of identity, drawing on historical civil-rights and black-power images of the 1960s, socially conscious hip-hop of the 1980s, and contemporary black culture — images and objects and texts juxtaposed and forced into dialogues “to mess wit whitey,” as the group has declared in its mission statement, quoting Sam Greenlee’s “The Spook Who Sat by the Door.”

For this project, the group searched through the Menil’s “treasure rooms” and other storage and archival areas to create a hybrid exhibition-classroom performance piece. The material on view will include masks, headdresses, and figures from the Congo, Cameroon, Nigeria, Kenya and other African nations; sketches from Ellsworth Kelly’s massive “Tablet;” slave-trade documents; a bronze bust of Paul Robeson; a Joseph Cornell box; a Surrealist landscape by Yves Tanguy; Andy Warhol’s silkscreened portrait of Chairman Mao; lapel buttons commemorating political and sports figures; photographs, including selections from Emil Cadoo’s “Harlem” series and Henri Cartier-Bresson’s portrait of Malcom X; memorial memorabilia honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; Walter de Maria’s stainless steel “High Energy Bar;” maps of Africa — a dazzling array of more than sixty objects and works of art.

Organized by Franklin Sirmans, Menil curator of modern and contemporary art, and assistant curator Michelle White, Lessons from Below will also include a classroom within the galleries, complete with chalkboards, film projectors, and bulletin boards. “More than just a selection and installation of works from the collection,” said White, “Lessons from Below is itself a work of art — a performance piece in an interactive space with an element of intervention. In this exhibition, the museum, a historically pedagogical institution, becomes a platform on which to explore the cultural tension of knowledge as both an effective form of self-empowerment and a culprit of racist ideology." First solo museum exhibition for the Houston-based collective.

Classes will be held on six Saturdays during the run of the exhibition (partial list below), with notable guest lecturers and a curriculum based on objects the group has selected and displayed. Discussion topics will range from the value of collecting and controlling cultural materials to the use of racial images for purposes of propaganda. By creating an openly didactic experience, the exhibition will implicitly explore one of the Menil’s key curatorial doctrines: the unmediated experience of viewing art demands an intellectual and intimate encounter with the object. On View September 14 — December 9, 2007. Exhibition Preview: Thursday, September 13, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.

 With its confrontational nature, assemblage of objects and ideas that cross eras and cultures, and amalgam environment, Lessons from Below will “support and point to several interesting fusions and facets of Menil history,” said Sirmans. “While the artists’ political motivations may find great resonance with the work of John and Dominique de Menil, they have agreed — as Warhol did in sixties — to turn an artist’s eye on the collection, and by doing so can show us things we might not normally see.” Lessons from Below promises to be a work of art that is “aggressively present,” as Dominique de Menil described the most powerful museum experiences. Such moments, she added, “force our reaction...(putting) us on the spot.” . . . “I think we have that here,” said Sirmans.

The Menil Collection is a unique museum environment located in the Montrose-area Museum District housing the collection of John and Dominique de Menil. The museum building is the centerpiece of a neighborhood featuring satellite gallery spaces and related cultural institutions set in a park-like setting. The Menil Collection is open Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. - Admission and parking are free - 1515 Sul Ross Street, Houston, TX 77006 - tel 713 525 9400 Visit : www.menil.org

This exhibition is funded in part by the City of Houston.