Complex Uncertainties Exhibition Guide
From the rise of America as a world superpower after WWII—and with it, a distinctly individual and identifiably “American” approach to artmaking—to the proliferation of technologies that homogenize American culture today, artists have always been at the forefront of social response. Complex Uncertainties is an evolving exhibition grounded by works in Telfair’s modern and contemporary collection that sheds light on these responses and reveals some of the ways in which historic events challenge artists to explore unknowns, construct narratives, and react to power.
Telfair’s holdings of modern and contemporary art comprise paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, sculptures, and works in new media, representing American artistic achievement from 1945 to the present day. This distinct collection offers a rich and singular institutional story, highlighting artmaking at its most ambitious through strong representative works. It features experimental works that provide clues to artistic transitions, and it boasts uncommon works that enrich our understanding of the history and current complex state of American art.
Complex Uncertainties acknowledges the ever-evolving social, political, and cultural conditions that contemporary artists react to and create within. Through this ongoing installation, visitors can explore the impact of artistic responses to specific historical events, as well as palpably empathize with the growing sense of uncertainty that artists address throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
Faith Ringgold (American, B. 1930), Under the Blood Red Sky #9, 2007, Offset lithograph on Somerset paper, Museum purchase, 2021.7.8
Faith Ringgold is an internationally recognized artist and activist best known for her painted narrative quilts that deal with African American life and culture, civil rights, and gender equality. Although Ringgold has worked in a variety of mediums, her art is generally united by a blend of semi-autobiographical, fictional, and historical storytelling.
This print of two figures journeying to a white house under a “blood red sky” is part of a larger body of work known as the Coming to Jones Road series—a group of prints, quilts, children’s books, and paintings chronicling the escape of 28 enslaved people to Aunt Emmy’s farmhouse on Jones Road in the Palisades in New Jersey. The artist created this vibrant group of works in response to her relocation from New York to New Jersey, where she felt unwelcome. By exploring and depicting the area’s history as a hub of the Underground Railroad, Ringgold sought to forge a meaningful connection to her new home and community.
Select a new work
Louise Nevelson (American, b. Ukraine, 1899-1988), Mirror Shadow XXIII, 1986, Mixed media, On loan from the Melaver Estate
Louise Nevelson moved to New York City in 1920, where she later studied at the Art Students League (1929–30). During the mid-1950s she produced her first series of black wooden sculptures, for which she became most known: monumental in scale, totemic and dark—challenging the notion of what type of art women in midcentury America could and should be making. She collected scrap wood—including moldings, dowels, spindles, chair parts, architectural ornaments, scroll-sawed fragments, pieces of furniture, and even wheels—which she then stacked, assembled, and bolted into carefully framed compositions.
At a time when “sculpture” was a convention meaning an artwork either carved or molded, Nevelson’s process of sculptural “constructions” was groundbreaking. Nevelson formally unified her work by painting her assemblages monochromatically (usually black, white, or gold) to obscure the identity of the original objects. For Nevelson, black had a mystical sense of wholeness: It “is the total color. It means totality. It means: contains all.” The social archaeology suggested by the objects’ individual histories and functions, then, is not erased but allowed to form new meanings while also inviting viewers to perceive complex tonalities of light and shadow.
Nevelson’s series of Mirror-Shadows from the 1980s were unlike the more ordered and geometric wall reliefs of prior decades—these create dynamic diagonal movements that activate surrounding space. Self-titled the “Architect of Shadows,” she completed this work at 87, just two years before her death.
James Rosenquist (American, 1933–2017), Fire Fountain, 2005, Lithograph on paper, Kirk Varnedoe Collection, Telfair Museums, Gift of the Artist, 2006.20
After a formal arts education, James Rosenquist initially found work as a commercial artist, painting billboards and signs around Manhattan. The commercial imagery in which Rosenquist was immersed during these early years certainly came to bear on his mature work as a preeminent artist of the Pop Art movement. Around 1960, Rosenquist became known in the fine arts world for juxtaposing unusual and disparate commercial images, often employing unexpected materials and working on an exceptionally large scale. His painting F-111 (1964–65) measured 86 feet long and was specifically designed to wrap around the room in which it was exhibited.
Fire Mountain is an example of Rosenquist’s lithography work, a medium he adopted in 1964. The artist selected this piece for Telfair’s Varnedoe Collection because the fire and vigor in its composition reminded him of the indefatigable energy with which Kirk Varnedoe championed the arts.
John Folsom (American, B. 1967), Salt Marsh Refuge, 2016, Archival pigment print on board with oil and wax medium, Gift of John Folsom, 2019.13
Salt Marsh Refuge shows an area of the National Wildlife Refuge near Savannah, a protected environment that boasts 31,551 acres of freshwater marshes, rivers, creeks, and low-lying land, and an active habitat for wildlife. John Folsom complicates the atmospheric beauty of the Lowcountry landscape by incorporating a grid structure within the image. Created by digitally altering a photograph he has taken, cutting it into a grid, reassembling the work and painting on top with oils and wax, Folsom ultimately calls attention to the manmade constructions and interventions within the natural world.
Marcus Kenney (American, b. 1972), Strictly Personal, 2003, Mixed media, Gift of the Ronald J. Strahan Estate, 2009.11.7
This scroll uses text from an October 23, 1961 issue of The Augusta Courier newspaper. Although only a small section of the scroll is unrolled, the legible red and black words reveal the politically and racially-motivated narrative featured in the pages of the paper. The article titled “Strictly Personal” argued for the segregation of the school system. By appropriating those words, Kenney forces a confrontation with the racist propaganda of the past. In its use of materials, the work also speaks to Kenney’s interest in discarded items. Having lost all his own belongings in a fire as a teenager, Kenney became “obsessed with rescuing others, albeit from through the dump or the side of the road.” The desire to rescue and collect and expose and uncover is a recurring thread throughout his work.
Kenney holds an M.F.A. in photography from the Savannah College of Art and Design and lives in Savannah. He works in many mediums including sculpture, painting, and photography. His large-scale survey exhibition Topics in American History, Volume I was organized by Telfair Museums in 2007.
Bertha Husband (Scottish, 1948-2017), Book, from The Ruse of Law series, n.d., Gouache, paper, metal, and binder’s board, Proposed gift of Mary Jo Marchnight
Using a Georgia state law book as her source material, Bertha Husband married text and painted narrative to raise questions over the alleged equal distribution of justice. Playing off the phrase of the “the rule of law,” the series The Ruse of Law considers the often deceptive nature of justice. The series was a collective project between internationally-born but Savannah-based artists Bertha Husband, Asa Chibas, and Milutin Pavlovic. After rescuing the law books from a dumpster, each artist used the books to interpret their opinion and understanding of the law.
Husband made visually compelling works that addressed broader issues of political and social concern. Born in Scotland, Husband traveled extensively and exhibited internationally and was part of several artist collectives in her ongoing effort to show that art has the power to subvert and liberate.
Nick Cave (American, b. 1959), Soundsuit, 2012, Mixed media sculptural suit including beaded and sequined garments, fabric, and metal with a display mannequin armature, Museum purchase with funds provided by Mr. and Mrs. Robert M. Levy, Susan Willetts and Alan K. Pritz, Cathy and Philip Solomons, Diane and Ed Schmults, Pamela L. and Peter S. Voss, Jan and Lawrence Dorman, Friends of African American Arts, Dr. William Goldiner, Dr. David M. Hillenbrand, Rosaleen Roxburgh, Ted and Linda Ruby, Marti and Austin Sullivan, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Young, and the Jack W. Lindsay Acquisition Endowment Fund, 2017.6.a-b
Nick Cave is an artist, dancer, and “messenger” known for his sculptural soundsuits—wearable constructions that are fabricated to the scale of his own body. Cave’s soundsuits can operate as a second skin, meant to conceal race, gender, and class. His first soundsuit was created in response to the Rodney King beating by LA police in 1991. Cave’s work reflects on his own identity as an African American man and questions how to navigate public and private domains. The soundsuits protect and transform one’s identity, disguising race and gender in an attempt to eliminate prejudicial prejudgment.
Michael Kolster (American, B. 1963), Tidal Marsh, Savannah National Wildlife Refuge, South Carolina, 2014, printed 2020, Archival pigment prints, Gift of Karen Wells and Andrew Canning, 2019.32.10.a-c
As part of his Rivers series (2011–14), photographer Michael Kolster created contemporary wet-plate ambrotypes and subsequent digital prints of four American rivers that flow into the Atlantic Ocean—the Androscoggin, Schuylkill, James, and Savannah. His photographs emphasize the centuries worth of industrial use and neglect inflicted on these bodies of water.
Tidal Marsh, Savannah National Wildlife Refuge, South Carolina is a triptych of the brackish water and natural vegetation at the National Wildlife Refuge located outside of Savannah. Kolster first made glass-plate ambrotypes, a historic and complex photographic process that required him to set up his large-format camera and a portable darkroom to chemically fix the images onsite. Later he scanned the plates into his computer to produce digital files. Kolster’s photographs suggest that as the boundaries continue to dissolve between humankind and nature, we should embrace and cherish places once degraded by industry and discover beauty in their ongoing ecological evolution.
Betsy Cain (American, B. 1949), Saturation Totem 3, 2012, Oil on board, Gift of Mr. Joseph V. Ryan Jr. in honor of Captain and Mrs. Joseph V. Ryan Sr. and Ms. Kathleen C. Ryan., 2020.18.10
Betsy Cain has maintained an active studio practice in Savannah for 38 years. Her work is influenced by the salt marshes, tidal creeks, and barrier islands surrounding her home. The natural elements that enliven the marsh—flowing grasses, viscous pluff mud, reflective water, shifting light—all find expression in Cain’s paintings and cutouts. The artist describes her paintings as “a primordial soup” infiltrated by water, mud, and light. Her work also effectively distills less tangible aspects of the coastal environment, such as texture, density, light, and humidity.
Her bold, sweeping strokes and unfettered swirls are evidence of a body in motion, finding artistic precedent in mid-century action painting. Cain identifies a “liquidity or dance” in the gestures she records on canvas and rarely works larger than her own reach, ensuring that her works relate to the scale of the human body. She seeks to create a dialogue between the internal and external that expresses physical energy and mental states.
Ulysses Davis (American, 1914–1990), Top: Scorpio, c. 1970s–80s, Bottom: Libra, c. 1970s–80s, Wood and glass, Museum purchase with Telfair Museums’ acquisitions endowment funds, 2020.2.1 and 2020.2.2
Ulysses Davis is Savannah’s best-known self-taught artist. He began “whittling” as a young boy, a passion for carving that lasted his lifetime. In his spare hours between clients at his barbershop, Davis worked on his art, which ranged from portraits of historical and biblical figures to depictions of flora and fauna.
Using shipyard lumbar as his source material, Davis reduced the wood into smaller pieces with a hatchet or band saw and further refined the work with knives and chisels. He was even known to add details with hair clippers. The works on view here, Scorpio and Libra, were gifted to Raymond and Mina Smith, owners of the Savannah Barber Supply store that Davis frequented.
Davis was lauded in his time, notably through his inclusion in the exhibition “Black Folk Art in America, 1930–1980” at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1982. Uninterested in wider recognition, Davis refused to sell many of his works. “They are part of me.… If I sold these, I’d be really poor,” he insisted. Today, most of Davis’ works are in the collection of the Beach Institute in Savannah.
Larry Connatser (American, 1938–1996), Untitled [#2048], 1976, Acrylic and black marker on canvas board and wood, Gift of Mr. Joseph V. Ryan Jr. in honor of Captain and Mrs. Joseph V. Ryan Sr. and Ms. Kathleen C. Ryan, 2020.18.14
Raised in Atlanta, Connatser attended Vanderbilt University and began a career in publishing before establishing his true passion as a self-taught painter at the age of 24. Returning to the South in 1971, he lived between Atlanta and Savannah and established his career through mural commissions, private collectors, and museum exhibitions. A prolific artist, Connatser is credited with around 2,500 paintings. He layered dots of pure color over flat areas of paint to create a rich texture on the surface of his brightly-colored paintings. His work was the subject of a posthumous retrospective at Telfair Museums in 2002 called Southern Melodies.