War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Memorials by Binh Danh and Robert Schultz TRAVELING EXHBITION PROSPECTUS

Transcription

1 War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Memorials by and Robert Schultz TRAVELING EXHBITION PROSPECTUS

2 War Memoranda War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Memorials by and Robert Schultz, a word and image exhibition featuring original photographs, poetry, chlorophyll prints, and artist s books, draws upon the war poems and prose of Walt Whitman and upon the Liljenquist Collection of Civil War portraits held in the Library of Congress. Using Whitman s writings as a guide, Danh and Schultz have sought to memorialize the experience of war by concentrating on the faces of individual soldiers, the landscapes where they fought, and our collective gestures of remembrance. First shown at the Taubman Museum during the 150 th anniversary of the Civil War, the exhibition proves timely again, opening a new perspective on the controversy that has arisen over the fate of national monuments. The exhibition s portraits and landscapes treat the U.S. Civil War, the Vietnam-American War, and the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, including s daguerreotype studies of the Lafayette Hillside memorial erected on private land in California to remember casualties of our current wars in the Middle East. Renderings in nineteenth-century photographic media daguerreotypes and cyanotypes assert that all wars are essentially the same: they are agonies borne chiefly by individual soldiers and their families. For Whitman, the land itself is a revivifying memorial. In his poem This Compost he wonders at the purifying power of the earth that takes in death and sends back life, as when the resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves. Correspondingly, the leaves that hold soldiers images in War Memoranda have grown out of contemporary American soil and fulfill Whitman s prediction that the war dead will inhabit every future grain of wheat and ear of corn, and every flower that grows, and every breath we draw. Concentrating on the portraits of common soldiers, battlefield landscapes, and memorials both public and private, the exhibition insists upon a personal and intimate perspective, a ground-level view beneath politics and ideologies. Molly Rogers, author of Delia s Tears, has written about War Memoranda:

3 [Schultz and Danh] have reconfigured the documents of war to create a new kind of memorial, one that speaks of war as personal tragedy. War memorials are too often mute, naming the dead with fitting solemnity but neglecting to say anything of what the dead know.... Perhaps of all our national monuments, only the Vietnam Veterans Memorial gives the civilian a shiver of understanding. We wade on in, Schultz writes of the Memorial, as if we were not on the Mall in Washington but in the swamps of Southeast Asia, a place where, faced with Maya Lin s austere granite gash, particular deaths rush out. It is impossible not to feel in some small but significant way involved. So it is with War Memoranda. Whitman s war poems are both elegiac and comforting, finding consolation in nature s renewals and human generations. In a wall text quoting Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, Whitman addresses us I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence and War Memoranda looks back at him in answering contemporary artworks and poems. Even portraits of Whitman himself are rendered in leaves plucked from his own Camden House garden, responding to the famous passage near the end of Song of Myself : I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, / If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. Similarly, portraits of young Civil War soldiers are rendered in leaves from battlefield witness trees that stood in the 1860s. Since August 2017, when white nationalists carried torches past Jefferson s Rotunda at the University of Virginia chanting the Nazi slogan Blood and Soil, the works and themes of the War Memoranda exhibition have taken on a new inflection and urgency. For Whitman, the grass springing from American soil was a sign of democracy, Growing among black folks as among white, / Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same. And American blood in American soil yielded the beautiful uncut hair of graves : Tenderly will I use you, curling grass, It may be you spring from the breasts of young men, It may be if I had known them I would have loved them. In December of 1862, after the Battle of Fredericksburg, when the poet traveled to Virginia seeking his wounded brother, he saw outside a field hospital established in a captured manor house a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, &c., a full load for a one-horse cart. Those amputated limbs were piled at the foot of two catalpa trees that still stand, flowering and

4 leafing out each spring in front of Falmouth s Chatham Manor. In War Memoranda, a soldier s portrait in a Chatham catalpa leaf makes literal Whitman s trope of regeneration. In War Memoranda, the flesh of leaves holds the images of Civil War soldiers Northern and Southern, black and white, who look out and seem to ask hard questions. Nearby, Whitman s poem Reconciliation, written at the end of the war, challenges us with its exemplary compassion.... my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead, I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin I draw near, Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin. The War Memoranda exhibition aspires to a similar humanity, and to be a kind of monument, itself a call to our better angels of reconciliation. Left to right: Unidentified Union amputee in Falmouth catalpa leaf; unidentified African- American soldier in hosta leaf; unidentified Confederate soldier in Appomattox oak leaf; images courtesy of the Liljenquist Family Collection, Library of Congress.

5 The Artists War Memoranda grows out of an ongoing eight-year collaboration between and Robert Schultz which has seen artworks and poems published side by side in national literary journals, in the book Ancestral Altars (Artist s Proof Editions, 2005), and on Scribners BEST AMERICAN POETRY website. received his MFA from Stanford University and has emerged as an artist of national importance with work that investigates his Vietnamese heritage and our collective memory of war, both in Vietnam and Cambodia works that, in his own words, deal with mortality, memory, history, landscape, justice, evidence, and spirituality. He developed a process for making chlorophyll prints, by which photographic images are embedded in the flesh of leaves, and his newest body of work focuses on the daguerreotype process. His works have been included in important exhibitions at museums across the country and internationally, and are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Corcoran Art Gallery, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the DeYoung Museum, the George Eastman House, and many more. In 2013 he was a featured artist at the 18 th Biennale of Sydney in Australia. He is professor of photography at Arizona State University and is represented by the Haines Gallery in San Francisco and the Lisa Sette Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona. Robert Schultz Robert Schultz is the author of five books and has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Cornell University s Corson Bishop Poetry Prize, and, from The Virginia Quarterly Review, the Emily Clark Balch Prize for Poetry. Poems included in War Memoranda have appeared in national literary journals, in anthologies, and in textbooks published by Random House and McGraw Hill. His books include three collections of poetry, Ancestral Altars, Vein Along the Fault, and Winter in Eden; a novel, The Madhouse Nudes; and a work of nonfiction, We Were Pirates: A Torpedoman s Pacific War. He holds MFA and PhD degrees from Cornell University and has taught at Cornell, the University of Virginia, and Luther College. Since 2004 Schultz has been the John P. Fishwick Professor of English at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia. He is represented by Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents in New York.

6 Traveling Exhibition Specifics Includes: Approximately 50 chlorophyll prints, 15 cyanotypes, 35 daguerreotypes, 8 poetry broadsides and artist's books. The artists welcome the opportunity to work with curators to adjust the exhibition for their venues. Space Requirements: 176 linear wall M., 2,500 square M., subject to layout. Space requirements are flexible, based on selection and arrangement of works. Rental Fee: *$15,000 *Rental Fee includes artist travel, talk and workshop Shipping Costs: Exhibiting venue pays pro-rated one-way shipping costs Insurance: To be carried by venue Courier Expenses: Exhibiting venue pays courier transportation, lodging and per diem Supporting materials: Electronic files of educational materials, labels, wall texts, and gallery guide. The artists are available for lectures, gallery talks, demonstrations, and other educational activities. Availability: Eight week rental, November November 2020

7 Selected Works & Robert Schultz Unidentified young Union soldier in forage cap, 2012 Chlorophyll print and resin 14.5 x 11.5 inches Image from the Liljenquist Family Collection, Library of Congress & Robert Schultz Walt Whitman in Camden House Hosta leaf, 2011 Chlorophyll print & resin 14.5 x 11.5 inches Daguerreotype by unknown photographer, probably Gabrielle Harrison, 1854, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, Rare Books Division & Robert Schultz Girl in mourning, with photograph, 2012 Chlorophyll print and resin 19.5 x 16 inches Image from the Liljenquist Family Collection, Library of Congress & Robert Schultz Unidentified Union soldier in catalpa witness tree leaf, Chatham Manor, Falmouth, Virginia, 2013 Chlorophyll print and resin 14.5 x 11.5 inches Image from the Liljenquist Family Collection, Library of Congress & Robert Schultz Unidentified woman in mourning with photograph, 2012 Chlorophyll print & resin 16.5 x 13 inches Image from Liljenquist Family Collection, Library of Congress

8 US soldier (Green Man) Chlorophyll print and resin, /8 x x 1.25 inch The memory and memorial at My Lai Artistis book, daguerreotypes, x 26.5 x 1 inch Stonewall Jackson Memorial Cemetery, Lexington, Virginia, 2011 Cyanotype x 26.5 x 1.5 inch, framed Song of Ourselves, nos. 3, 3b, 6, & 7, 2010 Unique photograms on daguerreotypes 10 x x 1.25 inches each, framed

9 Chlorophyll prints on grass and resin (left to right): James A. Wright, 21; Greg McColloug, 20; James Troy Ralph, 21; Harold James Warmsley, 24. All works by, 18.5 x 15.5 x 1.25 inches, framed, In Memory of Our Troops, April 22, 2012 (Earth Day) Original camera exposed daguerreotype x 14 x 1.5 inches framed We Will Not Forget You, May 20, 2012 Original camera exposed daguerreotype x 12 x 1.5 inches framed

10 War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Memorials by and Robert Schultz TRAVELING EXHIBITION PROSPECTUS For more information, please contact: Kimberly C. Piland, Exhibition Coordinator Taubman Museum of Art 110 Salem Ave, SE, Roanoke, VA