America’s Whispered Truths
Archer Gallery – 2019
Exhibit by Renee Billingslea and Willie Little
If you want a truly unvarnished yet nuanced exhibition, America’s Whispered Truths screams in silent terror, giving scope and sobering scale to the whole discussion of racism in America.
Portland.net
Renee Billingslea
Lynching shirts remind, or inform, of a time when white families kept their children out of school, packed a picnic basket, and put on their Sunday’s finest to witness the lynching of a Black person.
The ending often taking place in gruesome fashion that American history books failed to capture and schools failed to teach.
The lynching shirts, adorned with name tags, make it real for us today. The top hats adorned with phrases place us in the white conversations retelling the event.
What wasn’t taught, is now on display and it will grab you, shake your beliefs and make you feel the rage that Black people felt then and today.
You can see more work by Renee Billingslea at reneebillingslea.com.
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Willie Little
In America’s Whispered Truths, Willie Little displays pieces from 3 bodies of work: In the Hood, Nodder Doll/Living Doll, and In Mixed Company that address some of America’s social dilemmas on Race & Black Lives Matter.
Froelick Gallery artist Willie Little and Renee Billingslea critique portions of America’s social dilemmas, and confront the murky history of racial tensions in this country. Diverse media and tactics explore the corporeal human tragedies of the past, and subvert icons of degradation, thus reclaiming and representing them as symbols of beauty, strength, and resilience. The works reveal painful truths in our nation’s past, and challenge viewers to examine the current predicament of race in America.
Froelick Gallery
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In the Hood exploits the KKK’s symbol of racism in America.Through socio-political satire the work alluded to the irrationality of America’s nouveau KKK (a vocal extreme right faction of the new Tea Party) and its rise to the mainstream with its shameless, divisive rhetoric and obsession with race, blame, and hyperbole. In the Hood contrasts elements of the defiant, ever present, mocked, ridiculed, yet copied Hip Hop culture, with the phenomena of the (then) new emerging Tea Party. The farcical parody is the juxtaposition of this unlikely pair. The union weds the KKK with the very culture it may hate so much, thus becoming perhaps its metaphorical worst nightmare.
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In the series Nodder Doll/ Living Doll, Willie reclaims the ceramic and chalk nodder (bobble head) picaninny banks, that were made in Japan in the 1950’s.
They were marketed and sold to white America as souvenir, a novelty, as Black Americana. Willie defiantly reclaims, re-presents them, to elevate and celebrate their beauty from the ill-conceived form of degradation they originally represented.
The assemblages sit proudly beside large-scale figurative portrait-like paintings on canvas and wood panel. The work hints and suggests the pieces could be living, breathing modern day adult manifestations of today’s Black woman
Through the use of iconography, found objects, the Nodder Doll/ Living Doll exhibit trumpets and speaks to the subversive nature of racism in the past and present.
Willie reclaims the disrespectful and insulting fruit and uses found objects to embrace today’s real-life issues and struggles the Black woman faces today. Issues and struggles that showcase the Black woman’s strength and resilience.
The picaninny1 was the dominant racial caricature of black children for most of this country’s history. They were “child coons”… Picaninnies had bulging eyes, unkempt hair, red lips, and wide mouths into which they stuffed huge slices of watermelon. They were themselves tasty morsels for alligators. They were routinely shown on postcards, posters, and other ephemera being chased or eaten. Picaninnies were portrayed as nameless, shiftless natural buffoons running from alligators and toward fried chicken.
From the article: The Picaninny Caricature, Jim Crow Museum.
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In Mixed Company, explores the “privileged conversation” – those true southern tête-à-têtes spoken intra-racially and never in mixed company.
Often where black and white farms of Willie’s childhood stood side by side, the prejudices and notions spoken on one side of the fence were vibrantly echoed on the other – but never together and never in mixed company.
This work’s notion is to open the arena of the kitchen table conversations that take place behind closed doors. Those sometimes shocking, sometimes funny, in your face stereotypical intra-racial conversations. The ones never to be shared with those who’s race differs from their own.
*In the Hood has been funded in part by a 2010 grant from the Pollock Krasner Foundation.
*In Mixed Company has been funded in part by a 2006 grant from the Pollock Krasner Foundation