Isn't It Ironic?
Ann Johnson at Hooks-Epstein
Printmaking dates back to the Han dynasty in China and was originally practiced on silk fabric. It preceded the invention of paper. Nonetheless, printing and paper go together in our modern minds. When we think of, say, Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut prints, we can’t really imagine them as being on anything but paper. The whole process of fine art printing now depends on paper. But printing can be on any sufficiently flat surface. It is this truth that underlines much of the art of Ann Johnson.
For years Ann Johnson has been printing on highly unlikely surfaces—leaves, feathers, etc. These prints appear quite fragile and delicate. Migration has a man’s face printed on a leaf. Bonded has two women’s faces on a broad sycamore leaf. While paper can last a long time with a little care, a dried leaf seems likely to crumble away after a while. Many of these pieces are mounted in shadow boxes, which will slow their decay. But it seems like these beautiful prints will disappear shortly. Since they seem to take as their subject memory and personal histories, this fragility reflects the forgetfulness of history. And given titles like Migration and Bonded, that history is the history of the African-American people in the United States. There are people and whole states (Florida) trying to erase this history—it is important for writers and artists to keep it alive.
The works mentioned above are not really a part of Johnson’s current exhibit at Hooks-Epstein, called Ironic. They were on view in the back of the gallery. Ironic consists of a series of works printed on old ironing boards. All have photographs printed on them—faces of Johnson’s family members. When I walked into the gallery and saw all the ironing boards, I reflected that I hadn’t personally ironed an article of clothing in decades. And when I did iron a dress shirt, for example, I was terrible at it. When I have shirts that need laundering and ironing, I take them to my local dry cleaner and let the professionals handle it. An ironing board is a very old-fashioned piece of domestic gear.
What the use of ironing boards makes me think of is domestic service, but this association has a lot to do with me being a white middle class American man of a certain age. When I was a kid in Houston, my family had an African American maid who we called Sammy V. She was a living avatar of the infamous racist symbol of African American womanhood, the “Mammy” figure. A Mammy appears as a collaged element on one of Johnson’s ironing boards, Yes I Am My Ancestors. Like all the ironing boards in this exhibit, the composition is vertical. At the top and in the middle are two female figures derived from photographs. Then there is a horizontal row of cotton bolls, then at the bottom is the Mammy figurine. The figurine depicts a very fat black woman in a kerchief with a notepad in her belly. One imagines it was a notepad hung in the kitchen, perhaps near the telephone.
When I saw Yes I Am My Ancestors, I thought of The Liberation of Aunt Jemima by Betye Saar, which I saw in 2020 at the Museum of Fine Arts in the exhibit Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power. Both pieces implicitly reclaim the hateful Jim Crow image of the mammy. Yes I Am My Ancestors reminds us that a mammy was a real person. Personally, it reminds me that Sammy V was more than our servant—she was a human being.
A reclamation of humanity through history is woven through this exhibit. Concubine features a young woman’s face in three-quarter view printed onto a rusted old ironing board with a nickel glued to it showing the face of Thomas Jefferson, who in addition to writing the Declaration of Independence was also a slave rapist.
Cotton, that commodity that enslaved people grew and harvested, is a key element in several of Johnson’s ironing boards. Slavery persisted and thrived in the United States because the industrializing world had an insatiable demand for cotton.
At the very real risk of sounding patronizing, some of the boards present a images of pride and dignity. The figure in House Negro is looking straight at the viewer, with an expression that I read as “don’t fuck with me.” Worn Out’s title describes the ragged ironing board Johnson uses, but the portrait within depict a man bearing up under whatever burden he carries.
I was reluctant to review this exhibit. Not because the art fails in any way; on the contrary, I think it is a powerful suite of meaningful objects. But it calls up a history I can only see from the outside. Nonetheless, it should be seen, especially since this history is actively being suppressed in many parts of America.
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This is an important show. Thanks for writing about it!