COSMOWHYTET H E E N I G M A O F A R R I VA L

COSMO WHYTE : THE ENIGMA OF ARRIVALThe Mason-Scharfenstein Museum, Piedmont College, Demorest, GeorgiaJanuary 30 - February 28, 2018

Headboy, 2017C-print photograph, 60 x 43 inches

Introduction

Cosmo Whyte is an American multimedia artist based in Atlanta, Georgia, and Montego Bay, Jamaica. Born in 1982 in St. Andrew, Jamaica, Whyte relocated to the United States in 2008. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont and a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland. Whyte lived in Atlanta from 2008 to 2012 before moving to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to pursue a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Michigan. He returned to Atlanta in 2015, where he established a strong presence in the region as an artist and educator. Currently, Whyte is a Visual Art Lecturer at Morehouse College. He exhibits work throughout the United States as well as internationally in Jamaica, Norway, France, and South Africa. Recent accolades include WonderRoot’s Arbes Award and the prestigious 2016 Atlanta ARTADIA Award. In 2017, Whyte was selected as a Hudgens’ Prize Winner Finalist.

Whyte’s work for “The Enigma of Arrival” at the Mason-Scharfenstein Museum of Art includes drawings and sculptures. Often drawn from his personal experiences as an immigrant, Whyte’s art suggests the complexity of migration. His ease in different media perhaps reflects his ability to negotiate different cultural identities: he is a black male artist from the American South, yet his origins trace further south to the Caribbean. Despite differences between the two places, they share a historical context; both Whyte’s chosen home and his country of birth are tied inextricably to the history of European colonial oppression and the transatlantic slave trade. Throughout “The Enigma of Arrival” he attends to the complex dualities of this complicated past and its relevance to contemporary constructs of race and identity.

My work employs drawing, performance, and sculpture to question and critique identity construction in representations of migrant peoples. My process begins with an interrogation of my own body: racialized as black, gendered as a man. I use personal experiences of migration and immigration to question colonialist constructions of masculinity, race, and belonging. My work also explores notions of identity as disrupted by migration, which I address as an unfinished arc of motion. Its final resting point remains an open-ended question.

My most recent work references bodies of water as liminal, transitional spaces with allusions to international trade, human migration, and liberation. Rituals, and their displacement, erasure, and adaptation also enter the work as generative sites of intervention, and as stages for performing and experiencing place (or placelessness).

Cosmo WhyteArtist Statement www.cosmowhyte.com

Cheaper to Keep Her, 2017Charcoal and gold leaf on paper, 86 x 51 inches

Cheaper to Keep Her shows Princess Margaret visiting Jamaica in 1962 during the independence ceremony marking its transition from colony of Great Britain to self-governance. Standing in an open vehicle, the young princess’s clothing, gloves, and position in the composition suggest her relationship to the school children assembled to greet her procession.

Whyte works in both additive and subtractive rendering techniques, often calling attention to the physicality of his materials. In contrast to the rich chiaroscuro of the charcoal, thin layers of gold leaf accent the feet of the onlookers. This accents the paper’s surface and imbues the children with an angelic quality. It suggests the ethereal splendor of Christian Renaissance altarpieces and the intertwined relationship of colonial conquest and European religion. Indeed, the luxurious material evokes the colonial Spanish desire to find gold in the Caribbean that brought the first Europeans to Jamaica.

Erasing, sanding, and cutting the paper of his large-scale drawings, Whyte purposefully omits imagery to disrupt the hierarchy of the empire and the subalterns. The princess’s scraped-away face alludes to her disconnect from Jamaican day-to-day life despite the fact that the island had been under British control since the seventeenth century. The effaced, spectral visages of the background figures suggest the relationship of the Jamaican populace to their colonizers. Predominantly they are people of African descent first brought to the island by the Spanish in the sixteenth century and later, in greater numbers, by the British after they acquired Jamaica in 1655.

Whyte’s manipulation of the picture plane suggests his interpretative and critical encounter with history. Like the school children depicted in the drawing, Whyte positions himself as witness to history. His title, Cheaper to Keep Her, recalls the continued economic subjugation of Jamaican people long after the transatlantic slave trade ended and foreshadows the economic growing pains of self-governance.

Keloid Drawing #2, 2015Charcoal on paper, 72 x 53 inches

Keloid Drawing # 2 belongs to a series of abstract figurative black-and-white drawings. Recognizable parts of the body emerge out of a tangle of limbs rendered in charcoal: hands, feet, and a foreshortened face. A keloid is a raised scar more common in people with darker skin pigmentation and therefore may be understood as a metaphor for experiences of people of color. Whyte is a dual citizen of Jamaica and the United States who divides his time between Montego Bay and Atlanta; the visceral drawing might have personal significance as a portrait of a fragmented self. Yet, despite its conjuring of identity in flux, Keloid Drawing # 2 transcends tropes of immigrant and migrant experience.

Though often deemed unattractive, a scar is the body’s natural means of healing. Strata of skin tissue accumulate like the layers of a drawing. Whyte reclaims the keloid as a symbol of both pain and regeneration—the layered, amorphous body suggesting the generative potential of the African diaspora.

YOU Know WE Can’t Swim Right, 2017C-print photograph, 65 x 40 inches

YOU Know WE Can’t Swim Right documents a performance from 2017. It shows Whyte floating face down in blue-green Caribbean water, his arms stretched out as if drowning. The title wittily appropriates and challenges a racist slur.

Like the drawing Cheaper to Keep Her, Whyte evokes the role of the British rule in Jamaica from the seventeenth through the twentieth century. He wears a gold-trimmed red coat that he purchased in London. The costume recalls Jamaican-American photographer Renée Cox’s use of the red coat in her series Queen Nanny of the Maroons (2004–2005), a reimagined pictorial account of a famous and mythologized eighteenth-century leader of an autonomous, escaped slave community at war with the British.

Whyte’s use of the easy-to-recognize symbol of colonial power is freed from the specificity of Cox’s quasi-historical account. It reads, instead, as a symbol of the long-lasting, deleterious effects of British imperial presence that extend into contemporary culture. Yet, the iridescent water connotes liminality and the possibility of rebirth in the post-colonial era.

Left: The Enigma of Arrival in Four Sections. Section 1. Guess Who Is Coming to Dinner, 2017, Mussel shells, life vests, and shipping pallet, 72 x 39 x 20 inchesRight: The Enigma of Arrival in 4 Sections. Section 2. Red, Green, Blue, and Black, 2017, Neon, ceramic bowl, indigo blue pigment, and postcard, 48 x 20 inches

Part of a larger series that treats the theme of migration, The Enigma of Arrival in 4 Sections. Section 1: Guess Who Is Coming to Dinner, consists of life vests and mussel shells. Mussels often inhabit coastal intertidal zones;

this echoes the theme of transition present in YOU Know WE Can’t Swim Right. The assembled life vests form an organic mass that mimics the shape of each individual mass of mussels and serves as a floating vessel to transport them. Thus, they represent a state of perpetual transit, and the split shell of the mussels repeats the theme of divided identity present throughout the exhibition. The title calls to mind the 1967 Stanley Kramer film, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Sidney Poitier stars as a doctor and fiancé to a white woman, played by Katharine Houghton, whose parents, played by Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, grapple with latent racist attitudes. Similarly, Section 1: Guess Who Is Coming to Dinner calls to mind underlying biases regarding the entry of immigrants into the United States.

The Enigma of Arrival in 4 Sections. Section 2. Red, Green, Blue, and Black features a hanging neon sign that reads “We Process VISAS & GREEN CARDS here.” Its colors suggest both the American and Pan-African flags. Below, a broken porcelain vessel holds traces of indigo blue pigment and a postcard with a printed image of Frederick Douglass, the famous nineteenth-century African-American writer, orator, and abolitionist who overcame significant adversity as a former slave to advocate for civil rights on an international stage. Because it thrives in the tropics, colonial Europeans grew indigo in the Caribbean; it was one of the crops Jamaica produced for Britain. Also, subtly alluding to Section 1, mollusks are natural sources of indigo pigment.

In both sculptures, objects stand-in for the absent figures. Perhaps the most potent symbol is the vessel in Section 2. Red, Green, Blue, and Black. In stark contrast to Douglass’ portrait and the optimism it inspires, the shattered clay and spilled indigo suggest fragmentation and unfulfilled expectations.

The Mason-Scharfenstein Museum of Art is part of Piedmont College in Demorest, Georgia. Opened in 2011, it is the permanent home for art donated to the college by Dr. Bill Mason, a member of the Piedmont class of 1957, and Bob Scharfenstein, both of Birmingham, Alabama. The museum houses over 180 works in its collection and features six rotating exhibitions per year in its Alumni Gallery.

Piedmont College is a private, comprehensive, liberal arts institution located in Demorest and Athens, Georgia. Founded in 1897, Piedmont’s Demorest campus includes 300 acres in a traditional residential-college setting located in the foothills of the northeast Georgia Blue Ridge mountains. Learn more about Piedmont at www.piedmont.edu.

Cosmo Whyte is represented by Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia. Marcia Wood Gallery represents contemporary artists of exceptional merit who range the spectrum from ground-breaking young artists with emerging careers to internationally established masters. The criteria for inclusion in the gallery program is an artist’s rigorous commitment to contributing compelling work that is pertinent and critical in today’s contemporary art arena. www.marciawoodgallery.com

The catalog text is by Rebecca Brantley, Instructor in Art and Director of the Mason-Scharfenstein Museum of Art. She began her tenure as director in 2016 after serving as teaching fellow for the previous two years. In addition to managing the museum’s permanent collection and curating exhibitions, Brantley teaches courses in art history and criticism for the college’s Art Department. She appreciates the help of editors on this project: Brian Hitselberger, Jackie Ellett, Tyler Mann, Bryson Gunter, Bre Kendall, Ann Wallace, Natalie Freel, and Kadence Cole. She is grateful to Cosmo and Marcia for making this exhibition possible.

The catalog design is by Piedmont senior Chase Kane. Kane is a graphic design major with a business minor, and his interests include working with web design, apparel, and print. Kane works in a minimalistic aesthetic, and he enjoys incorporating photography in his work. After graduation, Kane hopes to either move to downtown Athens and experience its diverse culture or to move back home to California in hopes of pursuing a career in graphic design around the Silicon Valley area.

Thanks to the Historic Habersham Mills in Demorest, Georgia, for supporting this exhibition! Find out more about the arts, leisure, and lodging space at www.habershammillsga.com.

piedmont.edu/MSMA