Herbert Singleton was a compelling New Orleans folk artist whose inclusion in Prospect.3 reflects its focus on important, if too often overlooked, people and places. A lifelong resident of Algiers, he was a carpenter before a drug habit landed him in prison. Both left him scarred by the time he died, at 62, in 2007. Today his eloquently mordant observations live on in the visceral social commentary seen in wood carvings like Leander Perez, below. Here the late, racist, Plaquemines Parish political boss points out a man in a work gang whose expression tells us this isn't going to end well. Except for Come Out of Her--his pithy meditation on black womanist theology's notion of a female first human--Singleton's subjects are mostly deeply flawed outsiders like himself yet, like characters in Dostoyevsky's novels, their stark pathos connects with our most basic human emotions.
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Leander Perez by Herbert Singleton |
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Come Out of Her by Herbert Singleton |
A few images from Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick's classic, unflinching, documentary photos of life at Angola, the notorious Louisiana state prison, help provide a context for Singleton's crime and punishment obsession while previewing their nearby Slavery, The Prison Industrial Complex exhibition, where prisoners appear like caged animals in banana republic zoos, or laboring in fields where they are either indistinguishable from slaves on antebellum plantations or else resemble documentary scenes from South Africa under Apartheid. Calhoun and McCormick have been working on this project for decades, and their recent video of a man who spent 30 years at Angola only to be exonerated by recent DNA evidence underscores why this series is so profoundly important. (More on Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick and this exhibition can be found here.) ~Bookhardt
