Chapters

Collectively and in their discrete groupings, these objects represent the ways in which materials, motifs, and ideas reverberate across histories and geographies. Themes of spiritual uplift and awakening, survival and endurance, decoration and homage, and domesticity and narrative weave through the works. Pasts and presents mingle and offer imagined futures. The works speak to the human need to protect, dream, question, mourn, and love in times of prosperity and adversity alike.

CONVERSATIONS

Dr. Vivian Li, the DMA’s Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art, discusses three objects in the exhibition To Be Determined made between 1937 and 2017. She explores how artists working in a range of media use the tradition of landscape to offer perspectives on the issues of their times.

Jammie Holmes’s work centers on narratives of Black life in the Deep South. His paintings celebrate family, tradition, and ritual while portraying experiences of struggle, mourning, and survival. For To Be Determined, the artist created works that together collapse the time between his present and his childhood memories of Thibodaux, Louisiana. Four Brown Chairs depicts the quiet, intimate scene of a gathering, marked by a sense of closeness, loss, and emotional introspection. In Tired, an exhausted figure lies on a couch; his repose suggests both physical and spiritual retreat.

CONVERSATIONS

Watch as Vivian Crockett, the DMA’s Nancy and Tim Hanley Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, interviews Jammie Holmes about his life and art.

A titan of 19th-century American art, Frederic Edwin Church’s The Icebergs suggests the majesty of the Arctic, which was then a site of frequent—and often failed—explorations. The subject is revisited in Blue Turned Temporal, in which Lorna Simpson inserts thin strips from Jet and Ebony magazines into the scene. While Church presents a heroic struggle of humanity versus nature, Simpson’s inclusion of Black women’s faces and a blue palette recasts the meaning of inhospitable landscapes.

CONVERSATIONS

Watch an excerpt from a conversation with Sue Canterbury, The Pauline Gill Sullivan Associate Curator of American Art, on Civil War Era debut of Church’s “The Icebergs.”

These works consider the challenges and complexities of written language. In Untitled (America), Glenn Ligon inverts the word “America” in flickering neon, compromising the legibility of the nation. The work implores us to be critical of the American project, not as an exercise in despair, but as a call for change. Similarly, Adam Pendleton and Mel Bochner use words to visualize layered meanings, questioning the notion of identity and the rationality of language.

Jeffrey Gibson emblazons an Everlast punching bag—an object associated with both violence and resilience—with a lyric from “I Loves You, Porgy,” from the opera Porgy and Bess. A member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and half Cherokee, Gibson draws on the cultural hybridity of his own Native and queer identities to reflect on the experiences of love, fear, care, and longing. This sense of intimacy and melancholy likewise emanates from Dorothy Austin’s Slow Shuffle, where the dancers’ bodies gracefully curve around each other, swaying forever to a silent song.

CONVERSATIONS

Hear Nina Simone’s 1958 rendition of “I Loves You Porgy,” the lyrics of which are emblazoned on Jeffrey Gibson’s “I WANNA STAY HERE WITH YOU FOREVER”.

Designer Ini Archibong initially created this interactive installation for the exhibition speechless (2019) as a meditative experience of sound made visibly and tactile, as well as audible. For To Be Determined, Archibong has reconceptualized the installation to address how COVID-19 protocols silenced this work, which had previously been activated by human touch. Against the backdrop of social unrest, Archibong reflected on the harsh reality of growing up as a Black male in America. He altered the harmonic tones from serene beauty to imposing drone, and the once inviting glowing sculptures are now rendered untouchable and with lights dimmed.

These works emphasize natural materials and industrial objects as having inherent artistic meaning. Nobuo Sekine, a leading member of the Japanese group Mono-ha (School of Things) in the 1960s and 1970s, employs a stone and cloth in an examination of mass tension. Oshay Green’s Untitled similarly communicates the weight and solidity of its materials while also alluding to ori (head), a Yoruba concept of spiritual identity and inner balance.