Pretty Objects, Ugly Truths: Kerry James Marshall and the Power of Heirlooms
“Lynching in America: Outside the South.” Equal Justice Initiative, 14 Nov. 2019, eji.org/issues/lynching-in-america-outside-the-south/
On August 7, 1930, in the small town of Marion, Indiana, one of the most infamous lynchings in United States history occurred, resulting in the death of two young African-American men. Abe Smith, 18 and Thomas Shipp, 19, were dragged out of the jail cells where they were being held on suspicion of murdering a white man, Claude Deeter, and raping his fiancee, 18-year-old Mary Ball. The men were beaten, dragged, and lynched by a white mob of more than 4000. An image captured by photographer Lawrence Beitler of the bloodied, lynched bodies and a large white crowd beneath them sold thousands of copies instantly, and today remains one of the most infamous photos of lynching in United States history.
In 2002, American artist Kerry James Marshall, renowned for his oil paintings in which he renders Black bodies in exquisite, striking detail, forewent his typical medium for ink jets and wooden frames in a mixed media art piece titled Heirlooms and Accessories. In it, he repurposed Beitler’s photo, using it as the background upon which he superimposed ornamental frames, carefully selecting three of the women who gazed back at the camera and positioning them inside three distinct antique necklaces. Contrasting external, aesthetic beauty with historical realities, Marshall’s work illustrates the ability of objects and accessories to communicate shared, generational histories and, as artifacts, act as portals to a collective past.
Heirlooms and Accessories fundamentally turns the power of witnessing into a tool of corrective surveillance, using omission as a means to refocus our gaze. Marshall does not solely portray Black victimization: rather his work embodies a distinctly subversive ethos, a shifting of awareness to the perpetrators of racial violence, rather than those who historically suffered under it. Marshall simultaneously acknowledges and subverts the historical desire to view mutilated Black bodies with impunity, shifting the visual syntax of the photo in a way that inverts historical patterns of surveillance. By focusing on three women and deemphasizing the rest of the scene, Marshall is not engaging in historical erasure, but rather shifting the gaze of the viewer to focus on the individuals who historically suffered no punitive consequences for their role, active or passive, in racial terror.
Heirlooms and Accessories, 2002. Retrieved from https://studiomuseum.org/collection-item/heirlooms-accessories
In shifting the visual paradigms of the photo, Marshall transforms its message of black suffering into one of white culpability, emphasizing three white women and their enablement of racial terror. It was the innocence and purity associated with white women, and a perceived transgression of that norm, that enabled the 1930 Marion lynching to occur in such a violent, explosive manner. In Heirlooms and Accessories, the historical sanctity of white womanhood is recast with an emphasis on the destruction it enabled. To highlight this heightened accountability, the contours of the lockets’ chains, while initially appearing arbitrary, are strategically arranged to frame the hanging bodies. This forms a subtle but ingenious reference to how lynched Black men such as Shipp and Smith were “framed” by white women who accused them of sexual assault. But it is the women’s shocking apathy in the face of murder, their lack of shame and fear, that Marshall truly wants to comment on. “Everyone who’s present at that event is an ‘accessory’ to the crime,” Marshall said in an interview, alluding to the title of the work.
Marshall’s work also reflects on the implications of the unsettling reality - both historical and contemporary - of individuals being turned into objects. The lynching postcards industry of the early 20th century, in which images of lynchings much like the one Marshall used were mass-produced and widely distributed as collectibles, places the spectacle of Black death in a timeline stretching back generations. It also exemplifies the grossly dehumanizing manner in which Black people were turned into souvenirs: objects of both repugnance and fetishistic obsession. Similar to how white onlookers saw the hanging Black bodies as curiosities to marvel at, Marshall’s work quite literally turns the white women into objects of interest. The use of a famous lynching postcard as the background places this work within a tradition of radical Black resistance and anti-lynching led by pioneers such as Ida B. Wells, who led a journalistic barrage against what she termed “our national crime” - the lynching of thousands of Black men, women, and children in the U.S. Like Wells, Marshall is bearing witness to racial violence with his work, using the power of images to reframe the past and present. His work, in calling to mind images of the past, blurs the lines between art and reality, history and modernity. Here multiple dimensions of temporality converge to produce the complex intersection of time in which the past, present, and future become increasingly interchangeable.
Further along the lines of time and duration, the lockets themselves, as heirlooms from generations past, embody a tension between the transitory and the enduring. The work as a whole is characterized by dichotomy, evoking past and present, the ancestral and the immediate, and the unbreakable connections between them. Specifically, Marshall aims to bring to light the social capital that comes with being a descendent of people who were able to perpetrate violence without fear. “The power to inflict that kind of violence is also an heirloom that is sort of passed down,” Marshall has said. If the heirlooms are interpreted figuratively, as a metaphor for privilege passed down amongst generations, the piece also reflects on how generational power structures become naturalized and strengthened over time. The grotesque history of these accessories may fade away in our consciousness, much like in the work, but will never be fully erased.
The background, with its shadowy, barely-there silhouettes and faded figures, is decidedly ghost-like. This places the pendants, with all their external beauty, into a continuum that, however faint, continues to haunt their existence. In this regard, the work is a commentary on the hidden histories of hand-me-downs, and the power they hold in carrying on the phantoms of the past. In this work, Marshall excavates the hidden, often malignant legacy behind heirlooms and fashionable objects which, though they may be timeless in their beauty, also act as reminders of racial trauma. It is not just the objects themselves, but the genealogies that they carry, that hold a darkness that cannot be separated from their past.
The chains of the necklaces themselves possess a kind of uniformity, much like a traditional family lineage would, the interlocking structures calling to mind the interconnectedness of generations. Notably, while the two chains on the periphery are unbroken, the one in the center is ruptured. As such, it evokes much of the symbolism of dismantling oppressive systems: it connotes freedom and individuality. This nod to a broken shackle could signify breaking down cycles of generational trauma alluded to by the work as a whole: thus Marshall is seeking redemption in a long history of racial violence. He is also possibly advancing the hope that one day the cycle will be broken, that one day generation trauma and generational privilege will cease to subject us all to the past.
Yet the phantoms of the past are hardly irrelevant today. The same truths revealed in Heirlooms and Accessories are palpable in 21st century America in which Black Americans wear knees on their necks instead of jewelry. Marshall’s emphasis on a historic gaze feels incredibly relevant to a movement that is fueled by a massive relearning of the past as it relates to our present realities of racial violence. In a nation which has always been desensitized to Black death and suffering, only which now circulates videos of deadly police encounters instead of postcards, and in a time when silence is increasingly viewed as complicity, Marshall’s piece invites renewed critical appreciation and reflection, a provocation for us to self-reflect on our own silence in the face of Black death.
The faintness of the background can also be read as the psychological distance America retains from its past, manifested in its failure to grapple meaningfully with the legacy of its historic injustices, despite the present material reality of racism. Marshall takes the power of seeing and uses it to shape our understanding of time and history, an incredibly resonant technique at a time when we ask ourselves why injustices that have been relegated as hallmarks of history are still ever-present. With the power of historical hindsight at our disposal, it is what, and who, we choose to focus on that determines our relationship to the past. Specifically, whether we remain tethered to cycles of complicity or can finally begin to break the chains of continued injustice which have been forged in the flames of racial hatred against Black Americans. Marshall proves that heirlooms and accessories are more than merely objects of beauty, but repositories of personal and political history which shore up stories from the past and inform the present, and in doing so, he has challenged sanitized historical narratives and reconceived how we grapple with the racial terror of our past.
