One time I wrote poem so fast and so good a man who heard it told me it was like I had been ridden by angels. Now I’m generally skeptical of religious anything and I was certainly uncomfortable with this stranger conveying to me his visions of my being mounted. But I caught his meaning nevertheless & couldn’t exactly say he was wrong.
It was 1997 and I was living in a frenzy of creative Eros, writing constantly, sleeping little, in perpetual motion, so emotionally raw — by which I mean both tender and unprocessed — that I was never sure if my heart was breaking or bursting. Each person I met was a muse and everything was all so hot and sharp to the touch. I was living here and by here I mean California which is where I call home now but then it was there and so I was also living on borrowed time in a future place, going full out every day until the day I was supposed to return to what everyone told me was my real life. It was clear that I was ready to produce that poem which came so fast and so good and better than anything else I’d written in my life up to that point that I became convinced that I just might die and it might be okay if I did. But I was 24 and to me death wasn’t actually a thing, angels riding me or not.
Now I’m 44 and I don’t have time for angels or poetry or muses or living so raw, by which I mean unprepared and naked. At middle age Death makes ever more frequent appearances. But I am skilled at keeping the tears out of my eyes & my skin cool to the touch. I’ve seen what happens when members of my bloodline give in to the angels who usually turn out to be devils. It ends poorly for them & even worse for the rest of us. When the frenzy knocks I’ve learned what to do: run or hike or sleep or go into the closet to cry. Bake or disappear into a museum. Phone a friend & drink, or drink & fuck my husband. And when that all fails, get on a plane.
Month before last, as sociopaths and Nazis prepared to take over the White House and the crack in the Antarctic ice shelf grew to 17 miles, I could feel the edges fraying. So I bought a ticket to New York and then bought a ticket to see Kerry James Marshall’s Mastry at the old Whitney (now the Met Breuer). It is a show so brilliant, as in so glittering, that it takes three museums to show it and has basically forced a rethinking of the whole history of art. It is a retrospective so full of light that every time I thought I would be consumed by dark dark anger at how white supremacy has effectively consolidated its power through visuality especially through celebration of its own mediocrity, it was the sheer beauty of Marshall’s work that opened all the doors and windows and let the light back in at every turn.
I could talk all day about “School of Beauty, School of Culture” or “SOB” or “Mr and Mrs Harriet Tubman” or “Black Painting” or the installation “Art of Hanging Pictures,” all of which read the Western art canon with such evisceration and serve us black life in loving large scale fabulist realness. “Mastery of form, deformation of mastery,” as Houston Baker might say. Or following VèVè Clark, “diaspora literacy” of the highest order. I was ready for all this, hungry even. But what was totally unexpected was a small early acrylic and collage on a book cover at the start of the show. When I saw “Woman with Death on Her Mind,” I was shook.
Made in 1990, the piece comes early in the show, situated in the galleries of small works that appear studies, explorations of themes and methods that would appear in what would later become the signature works: the blackness of skin, the use of gold paint and glitter, symbology drawn from a range of histories and traditions. These rooms felt like prolegmena, the orchestra tuning up the opening phrases to a well-known and celebrated symphony.
“Woman with Death on Her Mind” is just that: a portrait of a woman’s head with a skull resting in the architecture of her hair. Kerry James got jokes. I mean there is no metaphor here. Death is literally on this woman’s mind, a second head that she carries with her. Yet “Woman with Death on her Mind” manages to be both totally matter-of-fact and also full of conjuring. Death sits in the nest of the Woman’s natural, giving the skull a home and a shrouded body. And in turn, Death gives the woman a third eye, divine sight. Indeed Death wears a halo golden and vibrant, whose light casts warm rays across the woman’s face. It can’t be an accident that both Death and the woman are black (a black skull when the Enlightenment tells us that all our stories rest on white bones?). Nor an accident that the woman’s head is framed by upward green brushstrokes that end to reveal the tangle of vines and fleur de lis of the vintage book cover. And it certainly isn’t an accident that both are smiling. Death & the Woman sharing a secret. You know about this, Leigh, they smile slowly at me… Wait was anyone else seeing this?
Kerry James Marshall had read my cards and then painted my fortune inside a book cover where he knew I would I find it. (It’s hard for me not to read “Woman with Death on Her Mind” as Marshall’s own space clearing for what would come next in his own practice.) Death rides heavy on my mind these days, an almost debilitating fear of loss, loneliness, finality. But here in Marshall’s double portrait, I encountered Death in the tradition of Vodou, as (black) ancestor, as “fierce protector,” as necessary to conditions of life-making. Death and the Woman are symbiotic. A funny kind of love story. In dark times now is the moment to carry the spirits with purpose.
