{"id":8047,"date":"2020-09-14T18:07:37","date_gmt":"2020-09-14T18:07:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/media-archive.blackartinamerica.com\/?p=8047"},"modified":"2020-12-28T03:18:10","modified_gmt":"2020-12-28T03:18:10","slug":"syd-carpenter-making-her-mothers-garden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/earthexhibitions.org\/media-archive\/?p=8047","title":{"rendered":"Syd Carpenter: Making Her Mother\u2019s Garden"},"content":{"rendered":"

Syd Carpenter: Making Her Mother\u2019s Garden<\/span><\/h2>\n
By Shantay Robinson<\/span><\/pre>\n
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In her iconic essay, \u201cIn Search of Our Mother\u2019s Gardens,\u201d Alice Walker writes, \u201cWhat did it mean for a Black woman to be an artist in our grandmother\u2019s time? It is a question with an answer cruel enough to stop the blood.\u201d Walker refers to Black women as they have been described in folklore as \u201cthe mule of the world\u201d because they were \u201chanded the burdens that everyone else \u2013 everyone else \u2013 refused to carry.\u201d Some of our mothers and many of our grandmothers didn\u2019t have the opportunity to sow their artistic roots. As Walker notes, instead, many of them \u201c\u2026dreamed dreams that no one knew \u2013 not even themselves, in any coherent fashion \u2013 and saw visions no one could understand.\u201d Walker asks if we can imagine voices like Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, and Bessie Smith not having the space to sing. In Walker\u2019s own case, her mother who worked in fields from before sunup to late at night, tended glorious gardens that yielded strangers who gawked at what she calls, \u201cA garden so brilliant with colors, so original in its design, so magnificent with life and creativity\u2026\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n
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Syd Carpenter ( photo: The Center for Emerging Visual Artists)<\/p><\/div>\n
Syd Carpenter knows this story well. Although encouraged by her parents to be an artist, Carpenter noticed creativity in her own mother, Ernestine, that was never truly expressed. Her mother particularly encouraged her art making. Carpenter doesn\u2019t have a moment in her life when she was made aware that she is an artist. Her parents recognized, \u201cThis is who this child is.\u201d So, they allowed her to pursue her lifestyle and she never lacked supplies and was even enrolled in Saturday morning art school as a child.\u00a0 Of her parents, Carpenter says, \u201cThere was no concern over, is this going to be something that is going to be lucrative and productive in terms of her being able to make a living.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
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The Provider by Syd Carpenter, Clay, graphite and acrylic paint, 2016, Petrucci Family Foundation collection<\/p><\/div>\n
Carpenter admits she adored her mother, a single parent raising three children. Her mother gave her permission to be an artist and even taught her how to draw. \u201cMy mother also was a person who was an artist, but because of the time she was living, a young black woman with children, she didn\u2019t get the opportunity to engage in that,\u201d says Carpenter, noting that \u201dwas not something she had the luxury to pursue.\u201d Instead, her mother obtained a bachelor\u2019s and then a master\u2019s in English, although she worked as a lab technician to support her family.\u00a0 \u201cShe was one of the most creative people I could think of at the time,\u201d says Carpenter. \u201cShe taught me how to look and to notice things.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n
Carpenter created <\/span>Mother Pins<\/span><\/i> in homage to her mother. In these artworks she sculpts antique clothespins. \u201cFor me the clothespin is symbolic and emblematic of my connection to my mother. I still own the bag of antique clothespins that she used to hang my clothes on the clothesline in the backyard when I was a child in Pittsburgh.\u201d Along with this connection to her childhood and mother, Carpenter notices clothespin\u2019s likeness to the female form. \u201cAnd so, this clothespin, which is one of the most mundane domestic female associated objects you could probably come up with becomes a sense of strength.\u201d By making them large, she makes them heroic. \u201cEach one of them represents [my mother] in some state of being.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n
In addition to the clothespin series, Carpenter might be most known for <\/span>The Farm Portraits<\/span><\/i>. It\u2019s a series of work she says, \u201cwould not exist without the history of African American farming and gardening.\u201d Carpenter recollects on African American history dating back to the abolition of slavery when the newly freed people had to rely on what they knew for survival. She calls it a time when \u201cwe were all on the land.\u201d She talks about the Great Migration and how African Americans brought to the north what they knew from the south. She identifies her maternal grandmother, Indiana Hudson, as one of those people who had an amazing garden during the 1940s and 1950s in Pittsburgh because that\u2019s what she knew how to do. Carpenter is a self-identified \u201cintense gardener.\u201d She says, \u201cAll through my career when I look at the shapes, I can find shapes and rhythms and surfaces and textures that remind me of my time gardening. And the two things, making objects and gardening happen simultaneously.\u201d She cites the urban farming movement as an aspect of our survival and our continued well-being.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Her exhibition, <\/span>Syd Carpenter: Portraits of Our Places,<\/span><\/i> will open at the Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, PA on October 16. The exhibition is made up of 10 free standing portraits of clay and steel honoring farm proprietors in the face of erasure. In 2012, she drove to South Carolina, the Gullah Islands, and Georgia looking for African American farms and gardens. \u201cI interviewed dozens of folks to see what their history on the land was. I came back to my studio and made about a dozen sculptures about that experience, about meeting those people.\u201d Carpenter talks about how farms were central to developing community amongst African Americans post-Civil War, as farmers started churches and churches became institutional foundations. \u201cFarming is the basis of any stability we were able to achieve post slavery,\u201d she stresses. \u201cSo, to discount that is a critical issue.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n
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Albert and Elbert Howard by Syd Carpenter, Clay and Steel, 2014, Petrucci Family Foundation collection<\/p><\/div>\n
Carpenter believes a challenge of being an artist is \u201cfinding this balance between giving yourself license but at the same time being aware that you are a part of a critical conversation and to what extent do you want to be a vital contributor to that conversation.\u201d Her intense interest in agriculture tells us that she is fully invested in this conversation. \u201cI\u2019m thinking about the work in terms of legacy and people when people remember me about a particular subject it would be the farm and garden series.\u201d This work is in her bloodline. From her maternal grandmother, Indiana Hudson, who had visitors to her garden from places unknown to her intense cultivation of her own garden, Carpenter realizes the impact gardening has on African American communities.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
She wants there to be a connection when someone sees the farm portraits. If the surface reminds them of their own skin or a place they\u2019ve been, then she thinks her work is done. That connection to the history of African Americans is invaluable. Despite the lack of sustenance in terms of material wealth, African Americans had their skills as workers of the land and that knowledge allowed them to build communities. Carpenter realized that African Americans as enslaved people built the foundation of the American economy through harvesting cotton, indigo, and rice. Understanding this is a very important source of wealth, she clarifies, noting, \u201cSo, if we as a people are not aware or beholden to that very humble activity, we would not have survived.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n
Carpenter\u2019s grandmother realized her gift, and maybe gardening was her artistic talent. Though sculpting is her profession, gardening is also Carpenter\u2019s gift. But women like her mother, Ernestine, may not have had an outlet other than sharing creativity with their children. There are many more opportunities today that allow women to be artists and explore our history through their artistry. Carpenter\u2019s exploration into agriculture collapses the distance between a time when women didn\u2019t have the luxury to dream of artistic pursuits and the now when gardening and its implications find their way into museums.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Alice Walker writes, \u201cFor these grandmothers and mothers of ours were not \u2018Saints,\u2019 but Artists; driven to a numb and bleeding madness by the springs of creativity in them for which there was no release. They were Creators, who lived lives of spiritual waste, because they were so rich in spirituality \u2013 which is the basis of Art \u2013 that the strain of enduring their unused and unwanted talent drove them insane.\u201d Today, as an African American woman who has the luxury to be an artist, Syd Carpenter is using her occupation to bring the women in her historical lineage with her as she inserts agriculture and gardening into museum spaces. Carpenter says, \u201cI watch what a garden does, and it gives me an idea about how to gesturally situate an object. So, the garden growth, the idea of farming, and its rhythms would be a consistent thread [in my work].\u201d The encouragement to be an artist Carpenter received from her mother allows her to honor the sacrifices that generations of African American women have made in lives that didn\u2019t permit them to fully be themselves. Their legacies live on in the gardens we tend, the artwork by African American women we place on our walls, and the stories we tell about them.<\/span><\/p>\n
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Shantay Robinson has participated in Burnaway<\/i>\u2019s\u00a0Art Writers Mentorship Program, Duke University\u2019s\u00a0The New New South\u00a0<\/i>Editorial Fellowship, and CUE Art Foundation\u2019s Art Critic Mentoring Program. She has written for\u00a0Burnaway, ArtsATL, ARTS.BLACK, AFROPUNK, Number, Inc.\u00a0<\/i>and\u00a0Washington City Paper<\/i>. While receiving an MFA in Writing from Savannah College of Art and Design, she served as a docent at the High Museum of Art. She is currently working on a PhD in Writing and Rhetoric at George Mason University.<\/p>\n
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