YUAG Art Show Turns The Numbers Back Into People

Prentice looks like a no-nonsense woman. The depiction of her is simple, but it appears to capture some of her essential nature. Prentice looks smart, curious, and strong. But she also looks a little tired, like she’s been carrying a lot of weight. That she can bear it doesn’t make it any less heavy.

According to the thorough (and thoroughly helpful) accompanying text, Prentice’s portrait is the ​“central and defining work” of ​“Mickalene Thomas/Portrait of an Unlikely Space,” running now at the Yale University Art Gallery at 1111 Chapel St. through Jan. 7, 2024. The portrait ​“represents the domestic laborer in her mid-sixties. Born in 1771, Prentice was enslaved in Massachusetts and New Hampshire before being manumitted (or freed) and moving to Boston. She lived in the Beacon Hill neighborhood, as did Sarah Goodridge, and initially continued her housework for Elizabeth Tucker MacGregor, whom she had earlier helped raise in Londonderry (now Derry), New Hampshire. The impetus for the portrait’s creation was likely the parting between Prentice and Tucker MacGregor, who kept the miniature; it later descended through the Tucker line. By 1841, when Prentice drafted her will, the whereabouts of her only child, Leonard, were unknown, though it remains unclear how their separation occurred. In the absence of any surviving kin, Prentice apparently formed a close friendship with an African American family, the Alexanders, fellow residents of Beacon Hill.”

The portrait anchors the first part of the show, Solitude, as Prentice’s ​“yearslong enslavement led to her separation from her biological family and restriction to domestic work even after being freed.” More broadly, she demonstrates just how precarious were the lives of enslaved people, both in the way they lived them and the way they were preserved. The violence of slavery is mirrored in the damage to the historical record. So many enslaved people in images from that time are nameless, or even when they’re not, their records are incomplete. Too often this means that our conceptions of the horrors of slavery are restricted to the scales of populations. We know that millions of Black people went through it. We have precious few individual stories of going through it, and even fewer that are well-known. ​“Portrait of an Unlikely Space” seeks to change that for a few, and in the process, argues for the importance of changing that for as many enslaved people as possible.

Thus many of the works in the show highlight the stories of individuals, as we move from Solitude to Togetherness and beyond. We learn about Alice, who was enslaved as a toll collector at the crossing of the Delaware River at the crossing to Philadelphia, until she started to go blind. At the age of 100 she took up fishing, and died, it is said, at 116. We learn about Henry Bibb, an antislavery activist who was able to escape to freedom but never was able to free the rest of his family. We learn about an unidentified woman photographed with a banjo during the Civil War, suggesting it was a prized possession, which suggests, in turn, that she was free. The stories are moving in their incompleteness. We gain only a glimpse of their full stories; the full glimpse of the subjects’ humanity makes the loss of so many of their stories all the more felt.

In addition to curating the series of older portraits, Thomas has included in the show works by several contemporary artists. Among them is Curtis Talwst Santiago, whose ​“jewelry-box dioramas vary between depicting real and imagined scenes, often reflecting on contemporary issues that affect people of the African diaspora,” the accompanying text explains. For this piece, ​“made while the artist was living in Johannesburg, Santiago was inspired to subvert the cultural stereotype that Black people were always at work, never resting, while only white South Africans enjoyed leisure.” The piece shows ​“gatherings of what Santiago calls his ​‘educated, smart … wonderful, creative African friends,’ in which they share moments of relaxation. The walled-in worlds they inhabit are animated by various furnishings and objects, including miniature works by fellow Black artists Kerry James Marshall and Yinka Shonibare CBE, RA. With Santiago’s peripatetic lifestyle, he regularly moves among several cities and countries, generating along the way transcultural connections through his art and his friendships.”

Certain aspects of the modern pieces, as in Santiago’s, remind us just how far we’ve come since slavery. In Santiago’s charming and exquisite piece, hardship is nowhere to be found. Its fun and playfulness are poignant for the lack of suffering. Only ease is felt. This is mirrored in Santiago’s own life, as he is (clearly) free to travel the world in ways that few can. Santiago’s life and work point toward possibilities for the present and the future that acknowledge everyone’s humanity.

But if part of exercising that freedom involves restoring humanity to those in the past, Betye Saar’s Imitation of Life illustrates the difficulties that remain. In this piece, ​“Saar has taken the stereotype of the Black caregiver and exposed two different aspects of her identity: one side of the work shows the woman’s agency, symbolized by the grenade in her hand, and the other her attachment to a family of her own, suggested by the child seated in her lap,” the accompanying text reads. ​“A newspaper clipping pasted inside the container — adjacent to the platform for the figurine, which consists of a slice of watermelon and a human mandible — advertises the sale of an enslaved famly. The description begins, ​‘A valuable Negro woman, accustomed to all kinds of house work,’ followed by a note specifying that she would be sold separately from two of her children. Saar’s drawing of the mother and her infant might be interpreted either as a representation of the woman’s past, before her children were cruelly taken from her, or as a retelling of her story — one that imagines her life otherwise.”

Saar’s piece puts a jagged edge on the work of unearthing the names and stories of enslaved people. Until we do that, they remain figures, numbers, all too easily typecast and stereotyped, laborers in cotton fields, women toiling in kitchens. But they were all people, and finding even fragments of that, a name, an age, a record of existence or action, is a tiny step toward freedom, from obscurity, from oblivion. It is also, as the domestic spaces that Thomas constructs throughout the gallery suggest, a way to come home.

“Mickalene Thomas / Portrait of an Unlikely Space” runs at Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel St., through Jan. 7, 2024. Admission is free. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.