On a whitewashed supermarket wall in the middle of McGinley Square — right across from the Crema cafe and the fire station — there’s a musical mural. It’s not one of the town’s best-known pieces of outdoor art, but it sure makes an impression on me. In attitude, design, and relationship to the city, Lawrence Ciarallo’s rendering of guitarist and peace activist couldn’t be more different from the mammoth painting of David Bowie that bosses the Hoboken border. Eduardo Kobra’s Bowie is gigantic, godlike, literally untouchable, transmitting brainwaves from innerspace to a point in the cosmic distance. If you didn’t know who he was, you’d wouldn’t guess he was a pop songwriter. You’d think he was a pharaoh.
By contrast, Ciarallo’s version of Havens is deeply human. The singer is rugged, pained, and looking out warily at the same street that you are. Havens looks like he’s sizing up the opposition for a real and physical throwdown that he’s about to have. His weapon is sound, and we know this from the multicolored eighth note that he rests his cheek against. This is, unmistakably, a portrait of a working musician. And Lawrence Ciarallo believes in music.
More than that: he also has faith in the musician’s sincerity. The words of freedom and resistance written into famous protest songs are, for Ciarallo, not market positioning or incendiary rhetoric for its own sake. They’re expressions of genuine solidarity with listeners engaged in the daily struggle against oppression. Lyrics are all over “A Longer Table,” Ciarallo’s earnest, varied, congenial exhibition in the lobby at ART150 (150 Bay St.). This is a show inspired and invigorated by words from artists with rebellious reputations: antifascist folksinger Woody Guthrie, Joe Strummer of the Clash, the peerless Nasir Jones, the anonymous composers of the Biblical psalter.
A tag line from a rap by the combative Killer Mike of Run the Jewels sits at the center of nine painted skateboard decks, stuck together, framed, and hung on the wall. Verses from “The Old Ship of Zion,“ a spiritual associated with the civil rights movement, are painted above an amalgam of headlines and articles snipped from periodicals. A Bob Marley quote — itself a paraphrase of an aphorism from the Book of Proverbs — burns from the middle of a blank map of the United States. Around the nation, all is turmoil: subway maps, newspaper editorials, dollar bills sliced in half, leaflets and pieces of agitprop, insignias and statistics, cutouts of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and pages from Ta-Nehisi Coates, and squiggles, loops, and electric-coil flashes of paint. The area within the borders of America, are calm, trouble-free, dominated and pacified by a spiritual message. Through the harmonizing power of Marley’s wisdom, the internal dividing lines have been erased.
Fat chance, yes. Then again, it’s not like the DNC has had a better plan for you lately. Marley shows up on a small canvas of his own, smiling sleepily from a painted reproduction the front of an old page of the Jamaican Daily Gleaner. This is a favorite trick of Ciarallo’s: he likes to pair artists with the front pages of newspapers from the cities they’re most associated with. Sometimes this can take on the character of a tourist’s souvenir poster or the celebrity cartoons on the wall of the Palm Steakhouse, as in “Spread Love,” which surrounds the Statue of Liberty with black and write representations of famous New Yorkers.
But Ciarallo’s famous faces are saved by the same qualities that made his Richie Havens mural so memorable: personality, approachability, righteous irascibility, humanity. Even when they’re in heroic poses, the artist’s famous subjects are people, not icons. In “A Longer Table,” they’re engaged in the same battle for equality that you are. The backgrounds they inhabit are filled with signs of turmoil, but they’re clearing up the mess. These are working-class champions elevated by their talent, providing ideological support for conscientious resistors, showing the way through the chaos of contemporary happenstance, pushing through injustice and stepping into a clear spotlight like a singer parts a curtain.
Is this an accurate understanding of pro entertainers who spent their lives laboring in the culture industry? Ones who, for all their admirable qualities, were never exactly beyond sloganeering? There’s good reason for doubt. But Lawrence Ciarallo’s straightforward application of star power to social justice causes is endearing because he’s taking these artists’ word for it without reservations. His is the least cynical show I’ve ever seen in New Jersey, and as we gird ourselves for another bruiser of an election season, I think we skeptics can afford to entertain his vision of progressive unity. (The artist’s reception is Saturday, February 17). Ciarallo is even supportive (tacitly) of mainstream media: most of the headlines and ledes that he’s lacquered into his giant newsprint collages are from The New York Times and other flagships of the normie press. His vision is a constructive, inclusive one, and what he’s requesting isn’t complicated. A seat at a longer table wouldn’t be a hard thing for the overseers of the furniture to provide. They’ve just got to get off of their butts and make a little room.
“A Longer Table” is a look at how simple things can be. “Warriors,” on view one block to the west at Art House Productions (345 Marin Blvd), exposes how complex things currently are. The show isn’t a big one — it’s only got a dozen pieces in it — but each delivers a haymaker, and each one rewards close, open-hearted engagement. Curator Andrea McKenna has brought together three of the region’s most celebrated African American female artists (and another we’re sure to hear much more from soon) and coaxed portraits from each of them. Though these four warriors swing their swords and cast their spells in different fighting styles, the human beings they’ve summoned have much in common. They’re all tough, they carry history in their eyes, and they’ve been sanctified.
Visitors to the Morris Museum will recognize Theda Sandiford’s watchful “Wonder Woman,” a tapestry that, at ten feet high and nearly as wide, occupies the entire north wall of the Art House gallery. The Wonder Woman was, for awhile, the guardian spirit of the Museum, staring down at visitors in the entry hall, battle-ready, impassive, and equally evocative of images from fashion magazines and Egyptian deities. A handsome face and single outsized eye are ringed by a gigantic Afro comprised of cut-outs from comic books, stickers, fabric flowers, trinkets, and beads in the sort of plastic globes spat out by mall vending machines.
Painter Armisey Smith’s everyday wonder-women wear somewhat more traditional halos: theirs are red circles, Valentine-colored holes knocked out of tempestuous golden skies for troubled heads to rest in. “Mwikali Words,” a portrait of a friendly but wary woman, possesses the combination of sweetness and apprehension that characterized the side-eye paintings in “In Time and In Tide,” her early 2022 show at Aferro Gallery in Newark. Mwikali grins at us, but the heavy, shield-like folds of her blue dress suggest elusiveness, and maybe protectiveness, too.
Smith, a master of facial expression and body language, is an artist at the top of her game. So, too, is Danielle Scott, who has returned from a residency in Angola with renewed faith in female resilience, and some of the most sensational mixed-media pieces she’s yet shown. She continues to play with memory, history, and heritage, burying pages of genealogies under thick sheets of resin, dressing the newsprint-faded faces of her black and white subjects in brilliantly colored clothing. Like many of Smith’s works, “Athena” incorporates found objects: pages of books, snatches of old fabric, a window frame through which the young title character appears to lean. Her stare is both a provocation and an echo — a call across time, a puzzle, a dare to the viewer to understand identity as something carried across generations.
After those colorful works, Myiesha Miller’s three charcoal drawings feel understated. On closer inspection, they’re more like punctuation at the end of a long and complicated tale. Her human figures have the character of smoke: parts of her images coalesce while others drift out of focus, and there’s a creeping sense that her figures are coming undone. In “Silhouette,” the entire frame is suffused with the subject’s intense defiance. She looks like she’s been told something particularly displeasing, and she’s determined to hold on to an identity that’s fraying at the edges. Unlike Smith, Scott, and Sandiford (and Ciarallo), Miller is a relative newcomer to Hudson County art. This is surely not the last we’ll hear from her. She’s got a contribution to make to a continuing story. I fully expect it to contain some fighting words.