The Everson Museum of Art’s substantial video art collection is not always apparent in each visit to the museum. Yet the museum has been amassing a collection since the 1970s, and was one of the first institutions to do so for the medium. Celebrating its long affiliation with the medium, the Everson christened a new first-floor video gallery (developed with funds from the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University) with artist Yvonne Buchanan’s Strange Tongue.
Buchanan, who is also an associate professor of art, design and transmedia at SU, is excited to be the first artist to exhibit in the new space, and to have her first solo show at the museum. “It’s wonderful to be part of a gallery that deals with the sound and the light issues that video arts sometimes has being presented,” she says. “The Everson also has a collection in ceramics, so it’s sort of interesting to have this material of mud, and this material of basic light. It’s an interesting combination.”
The same could be said for her stirring and thoughtful video-sound installation, shown in a black room just beyond the lobby, with a projection on one of the walls. A song plays overhead, comprised of a melody and musical harmony with moans and other unintelligible sounds where there should be words. It sounds like a dirge.
Almost unrecognizable because of its obscured lyrics, the song is “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” performed by the legendary gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. Buchanan skillfully removed small pieces of the recording to distort the words without hindering much of the melody. The lyrics, written by the Rev. Thomas A. Dorsey, infuse hope into the despair over the loss of his wife and newborn son in childbirth.
“It’s about death, but it’s about hope in the afterlife. So when I take out the words, you’re just left with grief,” Buchanan explains.
On the wall, faint brush strokes in the paint appear on the screen as the song continues to play. That those brush strokes are visible in this almost lightless room, with a projected non-image on a black wall, means that there is still some light in all this dark, howling grief.
“You’re dealing with the black room, and the projection of light but no image, and I think that is an important distinction,” she says. After a few minutes of listening and watching, it becomes clear: Projectors require light to send out an image, even if that image is the absence of color. The words may be gone, there may be no definable image, and there may be wailing cries of misery, but there is still light. Buchanan’s superb achievement in this piece is removing words from the song, and transmuting them into a room full of hope, while losing none of their power.
In the context of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” became a song of perseverance in the face of adversity. Reportedly Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s favorite song, Jackson sang the hymn at his funeral, and recently Aretha Franklin performed it at the dedication of King’s memorial in Washington, D.C.
“Originally I wasn’t connecting it so much with Dr. Martin Luther King, but with lynchings and violence, racial violence,” says Buchanan. The installation opened Jan.19, on a very auspicious weekend for conversations about race in the United States. “I think the museum calculated that, they did ask me to show at this time, and I think it’s a sort of a synergy or something, with the inauguration, and {King’s} birthday,” she notes.
Buchanan is also the next featured artist with the Urban Video Project, and her In Court (Basketball) video will begin projecting on the north side of the Everson, beginning Feb. 14, from dusk to 11 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays. Both pieces will be on view until March 31.
The Everson Museum, 401 Harrison St, is open Tuesdays to Fridays and Sundays, noon to 5 p.m., and Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Suggested donation: $5. For more information, visit everson.org or call 474-6064.
