attention to the fragility of this history, the ease with which it can be erased.”5 Black women’s labor is fundamental here: the subjects’ work to make history, Thomas’ to narrate it. Like the steady rhythm of a protest song, we can hear the labor in this collection.6 Indeed, for me, it is difficult to discuss “Mugshot Portraits” without referencing Thomas’ tambourine installations. In these works, the artist replaces the drums of variously sized tambourines with mirrors, or differently colored translucent acrylic, or lambskin etched with words. In “Requiem for Our Mothers,” the pieces hang from above and sway gently, humming with the wind. In “Requiem for Charleston,” (fig. 2, p. 33) a memorial work in honor of the victims of the 2015 Charleston, South Carolina church shooting by a white supremacist, the tambourines’ placement on the wall in the form of a cross calls attention to their immobility and silence. The tambourine is generally an accompanying instrument, part of a larger ensemble that gives the choir its richness, its rhythm, fig. 3 its drive. It reminds us of the necessity of the small but powerful sound. It is a profoundly egalitarian instrument that requires little in the way of specialized skill or formal training, but rewards desire and commitment. The tambourine is the sound and instrument of the Beloved Community. The tambourine installations help us hear more carefully “Mugshot Portraits: Women of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.” To recognize the labor of black women in the freedom struggle as present and necessary if not always center stage. To note their refusal of dehumanization through a series of small but persistent choices. Thomas has made the visibility of her black women subjects into a powerful sound.
1
Lava Thomas, conversation with the author, Berkeley, California, May 23, 2018. Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (NY: Vintage, 2011); see also Jo Ann Robinson and David Garrow, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987). 3 Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October, Vol. 39 (Winter, 1986): 3-64. 4 Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe, Number 26 (volume 12, number 2), June 2008: 1-14. 5 Lava Thomas, “Contemporary Artists in Conversation with History: 1968,” Washington, DC, April 4, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQTNi5wwrD0 6 I borrow here from Tina Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 2
5
D57374_txt_v3.indd 5
8/31/18 9:56 AM