Silent Protest: Perspectives on War and Disability Exhibition Booklet for The Rollins Museum of Art

Silent Protest:

PERSPECTIVES ON WAR AND DISABILITY

January 20 – April 7, 2024

Artistic creation is almost always informed by the context from which it emerges. Whether it is the result of personal experiences or in response to social and global events, art has the power to confront and to console; it invites (sometimes demands) viewers to reflect. In times of turmoil, art can give visual form to upheaval and uncertainty while also providing solace and hope. In this sense, art functions as primary source, documenting the impact of socio-political and cultural events on individuals, families, communities, and on society as a whole. In the context of our teaching mission, the Rollins Museum of Art organizes exhibitions and programs that provide our students and visitors with opportunities to expand the traditional definitions of art engagement.

Drawn entirely from the RMA’s permanent collection, Silent Protest— Perspectives on War and Disability, seeks to do just that.

I am grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with Dr. Keri Watson,

Introduction Gisela Carbonell, Ph.D. Curator, Rollins Museum of Art

Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Central Florida, co-curator of this exhibition and author of the essay included here, whose vision and expertise helped shape the concept of this project and the framework for reinterpreting the works in the exhibition.

Consisting of a selection of paintings, prints, photographs, and objects, Silent Protest examines ways in which war and disability intersect and overlap with social class, history, politics, race, gender, and cultural expression. Inspired by Ilya Kaminsky’s book Deaf Republic, the exhibition presents historical and contemporary works in dialogue. It provides points of entry through text and images to consider multiple perspectives in relation to history and to current events.

This exhibition is part of the 2023-2024 NEA Big Read. An initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest, the NEA Big Read broadens our understanding of our world, our communities and ourselves through the power of a shared reading experience.

This project is funded in part by the National Endowment for The Arts #NEABigRead

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As Israel and Palestine fight for control of the Gaza Strip, the War in Ukraine rages on, and political divisiveness marks much contemporary discourse, many are left to consider the fate of autonomous nations, the hegemony of autocracy, and the fate of democracy. Silent Protest: Perspectives on War and Disability (Rollins Museum of Art, January 20 – April 7, 2024) explores the consequences of war, displacement, and trauma on communities and visualizes the courage of those who speak out against injustice. Featuring pieces from the Rollins Museum of Art’s permanent collection, Silent Protest presents fourteen works in sculpture, painting, photography, and lithography by historical and contemporary artists. Individually, many of these works react to the civil unrest of the time of their making. Together, they engage in a pointed critique of late-stage capitalism and global exploitation, as well as their debilitating effects on individuals and communities.

Disability as Metaphor and Lived Experience Keri Watson, Ph.D. University of Central Florida

The exhibition was inspired by Deaf Republic, Ilya Kaminsky’s 2019 book of poetry that follows a family of puppeteers as they struggle to resist the war that surrounds them.1 Drawing connections between global and local political conflicts and conveying the importance of standing up to tyranny, Deaf Republic weaves a rich allegory of the urgency of collective action in times of oppression. Told in two acts, it begins with a shooting of Petya, a deaf boy, by soldiers occupying the fictional town of Vasenka. In response to his murder, the townspeople collectively go deaf, inventing their own sign language and using puppets to resist their oppressors. As the sound of the gun that kills Petya triggers deafness in the villagers, disability acts as a metaphor for the limitations of empathy and dangers of ignorance.

War

disproportionately

impacts

those

experiencing

disability,

displacement, poverty, and racialization. According to statistics gathered by Human Rights Watch, “an estimated 9.7 million people with disabilities are forcibly displaced as a result of conflict and persecution and are victims of human rights violations and conflictrelated violence.” 2 As noted by Achilles Mbembe, globalization is a key component of necropolitics or “the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not.”3

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Or, as asserted by Nirmala Erevelles, social marginalization most often occurs at the intersection of ideologies of race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability.4 Theorizing a new disability justice movement that challenges necropolitics and rejects models of disability based in heroic narratives of individual rights, these scholars, like Kaminsky and the artists whose work are on display in Silent Protest, look to the material conditions of marginalization, such as enslavement and racial capitalism, to conceptualize disability as a systemic issue based in inequitable institutions and hierarchical structures. The artwork featured in Silent Protest engages with this discourse, and this brief essay offers a closer look at the work of four artists included in the exhibition to illustrate the power of art to speak truth to power.

Two photographs (FIGS. 1 AND 2) taken by Margaret Bourke-White in the Soviet Union during the early 1930s connect the exhibition to the imagined geographical location of Deaf Republic. Bourke-White, who made her name as a champion of industry and photographer for Fortune magazine, made three trips to the USSR between 1930 and 1933 to cover the new nation’s rapid industrialization under Joseph Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan. In 1930, she visited eastern Ukraine and southern Russia and photographed the construction of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station (DniproHES), the Stalingrad Tractor Factory, and the Novorossiysk Cement Plant. Fascinated by technology, she traveled to Chelyabinsk Oblast in the Southern Ural Mountains in 1931 to cover workers building the largest steel mill in the world, the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works (MMK), and in the summer of 1932, she returned to the USSR, traveling from the Caucasus to Baku and back to Ukraine to witness the opening of the DniproHES, the largest dam in Europe and the most powerful hydroelectric station in the world. While there, Bourke-White found herself increasingly interested not only in the industrial landscape but also in the strength and character of the people she encountered. Village School Kolomna FIGURE 1 Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971) Village School Kolomna: Volga Region, early 1930s Photogravure print, 16 x 20 in.

Museum purchase from the Michel Roux Acquisition Fund, 2013.15 © 2023 Estate of Margaret Bourke-White / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

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captures this fascination, depicting students in a small village school outside the city of Kolomna, southeast of Moscow. Bourke-White arranged the children in a rough triangle that emphasizes their communal solidity and the austerity of their surroundings. While

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Bourke-White points the camera down at the children, exaggerating their pyramidal arrangement and putting the viewer in the position of the teacher, in another photograph on display, Soviet Serenade (1931), she shot up, dramatically foreshortening and heroicizing the street performer. Here the viewer is the audience, the musician’s accordion looms large as he looks down upon us.

Bourke-White’s photographs, among the first images taken by an American in the Soviet Union, were published in Fortune magazine, the New York Times, and her book Eyes on Russia (Simon and Schuster, 1931). The two photographs included in Silent Protest, Village School Kolomna: Volga Region and Soviet Serenade display what Tobin Siebers termed “disability aesthetics” and challenge modernity’s preference for “non-materialist aesthetics” that can resist authoritarian and hegemonic politics. Bourke-White was in the USSR during the Holodomor, the 1932–1933 famine that took the lives of four million people in Ukraine, and her increasing sympathy for the Soviet people prompted a similar identification with working-class people in the United States, India, and South Africa. Over the course of her career, which was cut short by her diagnosis with Parkinson’s Disease in 1954, Bourke-White consistently used her camera to bring attention to the important social issues of her day, even as her Popular Front sympathies brought her to the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Like Bourke-White’s Soviet Serenade, Henry Botkin’s 1948 painting Solo (Trumpet Player) (FIG. 3) captures the power of music to communicate that which often goes unspoken. Existing at the intersection of ideologies of race, class, and disability and mimicking the chameleon-like aesthetic of the puppets described by Kaminsky in Deaf Republic, the musician is rendered in flat geometric planes. His race is ambiguous, his skin rendered in cool greens and purples. He FIGURE 2 Margaret Bourke-White, (American, 1904-1971) Soviet Serenade, 1931 Photogravure Print, 20 x 16 in.

Museum purchase from the Michel Roux Acquisition Fund, 2013.23 © 2023 Estate of Margaret Bourke-White / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

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sits on a low wide stool or perhaps a drum, while the musical notes of his profession float around him on a ground of reds and oranges.

Hewing closely to Siebers’ conception of disability aesthetics, the cubist rendering asserts “the incontestable conclusion that modernist

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techniques and formal experiments render bodies whose shapes mimic deformation, whose coloration resonates with disease conditions, and whose subject matter takes on explicitly the representation of physically and mentally disabled people.”5 Born in Boston in 1896, Botkin moved to New York in 1917 where he attended the Art Students League while living with his cousins, the composer George and lyricist Ira Gershwin. After studying in Paris from 1926 until 1933, he returned to the US and accompanied the Gershwins on their 1934 trip to Folly Beach, South Carolina, to adapt DuBose Heyward’s 1925 novel into the Tony Award-winning jazz opera Porgy and Bess. Recounting the story of a Black disabled man living in the slums of Charleston who tries to rescue his girlfriend from her violent ex-boyfriend and drug dealer, Porgy and Bess is a meditation on race, class, gender, and disability in America that has enjoyed a long and complicated history. Porgy’s portrayal, like that of Botkin’s trumpet player, exhibits what disability studies scholar Carrie Sandahl terms “representational conundrums,” or those “challenging, puzzling, or paradoxical issues that are unique to or complicated by disability’s presence.”6 This is the case for both disabled and raced bodies, as “Heyward’s black characters epitomized a vision of American race relations congenial to southern and northern whites alike.”7 While the Gershwins wrote the opera, Botkin was at work on a series of paintings depicting jazz musicians, and Solo exhibits the artist’s engagement with the abstracted figurative painting tradition of the first half of the twentieth century, the influence of Porgy and Bess, and conflicting ideologies of race, class, gender, and disability at midcentury.

Finally, Yoan Capote’s 2014 sculpture Abstinecia (Libertad) (FIG. 4) counters Bourke-White and Botkin’s depictions of music with adamant silence, asking “What does it mean to be heard?” Using American Sign Language to defy self-restraint and self-silence, Capote cast the hands of anonymous Cuban laborers in bronze as they formed letters in sign FIGURE 3 Henry Botkin, (American, 1896-1983) Solo (Trumpet Player), 1948 Oil on Canvas, 21 x 14 in.

Bequest of Dr. Kenneth Curry, Ph.D. ’32. 2000.1.6

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language that can be arranged to spell out: política, religión, economía, democracia, and Libertad. Challenging viewers to recognize and appreciate multiple different languages (ASL, Spanish, and English)

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and hear the voices of those silenced by racism, classism, ableism, and necropolitics, Capote’s work interrogates power and politics and addresses the international refugee crises and the suppression of civil liberties. Capote’s depictions of the hands of immigrants gesture to the weight of silence and the power and potential of disability to act as more than metaphor.

Echoing Kaminsky’s assertation, “The deaf do not believe in silence.

Silence is the invention of the hearing,” the works on display in Silent Protest, like the few highlighted in this essay, focus on the power of visual art, an intrinsically quiet medium, to respond to the catastrophic effects of war and the systemic marginalization of people with disabilities. Engaging with political violence, disability, resistance, resilience, and the power of language, and inspired by Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic, this exhibition explores the consequences of war and necropolitics, while also visualizing the courage of those who speak out against injustice.

Silent Protest: Perspectives on War and Disability is generously funded by the NEA Big Read, an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest, that broadens our understanding of our world, our communities, and ourselves through the power of a shared reading experience. Special thanks to the University of Central Florida College of Art and Humanities and the Rollins Museum of Art for their support of this project.

FIGURE 4 Yoan Capote, (Cuban, b. 1977) Abstinencia (Libertad), 2014 Cast bronze and engraving and drypoint. Dimensions variable.

The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Gift of Barbara ‘68 and Theodore ‘68 Alfond, 2014.1.39

1

Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic (London: Faber and Faber, 2019).

2

“UN: War’s Impact on People with Disabilities: Security Council Meeting to Focus on Risks, Needs,” December 3, 2018. https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/12/03/un-wars-impactpeople-disabilities

3

Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019). 27.

4

Nirmala Erevelles, Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a Transformative Body Politic (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), 99.

5

Tobin Siebers, “Disability Aesthetics and the Body Beautiful: Signposts in the History of Art,” Alter, European Journal of Disability Research 2 (2008): 330.

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Carrie Sandahl, “Using Our Words: Exploring Representational Conundrums in Disability Drama and Performance.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 12, no. 2 (2018): 130–31.

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Ellen Noonan, The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess: Race, Culture, and America’s Most Famous Opera (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 15–16.

© Yoan Capote. Image courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman.

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FEBRUARY 27, 2024 | 6 P.M. Arte y Café Con la Curadora (Recorrido de la exhibición en español) Dr. Gisela Carbonell MARCH 7, 2024 | 12:30 P.M. Common Conversation Disability Activism

Exhibition Related Programming

Dr. Steven Noll, Professor of History, University of Florida MARCH 26, 2024 | 6 P.M. Lecture Silent Protest: Looking at Art, War, and Disability Dr. Keri Watson APRIL 5, 2024 | 11 A.M. Exhibition Tour Dr. Gisela Carbonell and Dr. Keri Watson, co-curators

All programs are free and open to the public.

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Gene Davis (American, 1920-1985) Sonata, 1981 Lithograph, 20 5/8 x 28 1/2 in.

Gift of Mr. Eugen Ivan Schuster, 1991.23.6