Family Cultures: Unintended Juxtaposition

By Mike Lavin

The family plays a crucial role in enculturation: transmitting a "world view" from generation to generation. For example, my grandmother came from Ireland and strongly framed her family’s attitudes and beliefs, particularly those that were Irish Catholic. She had pictures of the Pope, JFK, and FDR proudly hanging in her living room, and she was more than willing to sit you down and have you listen to her devotional appeal to the three on the wall. My father, her son, was stalwartly pro-Irish as you may expect, that is Irish with a green not an orange. When I was young, I can remember the time when our family vacationed in San Francisco and we hired a tour guide to take us around the city. His Irish brogue and tone of voice keyed up my father until that fateful moment when he inadvertently mentioned that he was from Northern Ireland. My father immediately stopped the car and told us, all seven of us, to get out. We trudged regretfully back to our hotel. It is from those experiences that the following article springs.

Since I already had an appointment with Laura Washington, Director of Communication at the New York Historical Society, I thought I would take the opportunity and view their new exhibit entitled “Group Dynamics: Family Portraits and Scenes from Everyday Life.” Since “family and community” was the theme of our next volume, I thought it was worth exploring the family portraiture of early Americans on display.

The exhibit was an interesting portrayal of how early Americans, mostly New Yorkers, mostly affluent, perceived themselves. Ninety works were on display, spanning across colonial through to the Victorian era. I saw cultural definition through familial and social identity. The clothes they were wearing, the male-female portrayals (males with books and females with flowers). The eyes reflected optimism, assuredness, eagerness, happiness, and hope.

I took a moment out and asked the room assistant which painting, according to him, best captured the spirit of a family. He sat down and talked to me at length. Knowledgeable and courteous, he first spoke about this exhibition. Then, almost talking to himself, he commented that, being African American, he finds it too disturbing to go to the “other” exhibit on that floor. So, off I went in search of this “other”.

It was just down the corridor, the other exhibit, entitled “Legacies: Contemporary Artists Reflect on Slavery”. I am quite sure the museum had no real purpose in juxtaposing these two very different sets of paintings. However, like the assistant, I did see a connectedness in the direct contrast, particularly when you looked at the eyes of the portraits. Legacies was the antithesis of Dynamics. Though it focused mainly on how slavery fashioned American society, my concern was how slavery affects the family, how it affects development and socialization.

The most startling, and disturbing for me, was Lorenzo Pace's sculpture Julani and the Lock Family History Tree, 2004. His work, his family tree, is studded with icons of slavery, as are the eyes of the family members – all eyes seem to be in proximity to slave codes such as locks and fences. If you look closely, you can see a quote from Pace’s five year old daughter, "Daddy, am I a slave?" The eyes in Compos-Pons' 2003 Replenishing manifests the linkage of pain and sorrow of hopelessness and despair. So too are the eyes of Cedric Smith's Runaway Man, 2006. In Queen Nanny: Maroon Series, 2004 by Renee Cox, the rebellious gaze provokes one to explore the historical roots of suffering.

The corridor between the two displays is short, but in fact it is immeasurable. One exhibit manifest families with hopefulness, the other with despair. One with smiles, books, and flowers and the other with shackles, lynching, and enslavement. Slavery, even after so many years, appears to linger in one's generational legacy and shows, once again, the power of one’s history.