George Washington Carver exhibition explores his influence on artists

Historically, the relationship between black Americans and the American South—both in the arts and in the world at large—has been reduced to one of oppression and servitude, with little attention given to creative and scientific innovation before and after emancipation.

The California African American Museum in Los Angeles hopes to change this limited understanding with its current exhibition, “Endless Worlds: The George Washington Carver Project” (on view through March 2), which is presented as part of the Getty Foundation Part of PST ART opens this fall. exhibition initiative. The exhibition gave George Washington Carver a belated break not only for his scientific prowess but also for his less famous work as an artist. The exhibition, co-curated by CAAM executive director Cameron Shaw and independent curator Yael Lipschutz, aims to show how Carver’s creative thinking drove his technological advancements.

Carver was an innovative scientist and educator who was born into slavery and became famous in the early 20th century for his numerous agricultural inventions, which were often deliberately unplanned by the self-proclaimed “people’s scientist.” Patented. Carver was ahead of his time with his pioneering plant-based approaches to medicine and engineering that prioritized sustainability over profit, and his research on peanuts and sweet potatoes, organic fertilizers, clay-derived dyes, and crop rotations So did the applications, and these methods are now considered fundamental to agriculture. Modern farming and conservation practices.

To realize this exhibition, Lipshutz and Shaw combined archival materials related to Carver’s scientific legacy with the work of contemporary artists. Long before Getty announced “Art Meets Science” as the theme for this year’s PST ART, Lipschutz had conceived the approach to “demonstrate just how revolutionary and forward-thinking George Washington Carver was,” Shaw said . When Lipschutz brought the idea to CAAM, Shaw agreed because it “epitomizes CAAM’s shared mission of focusing on African American history and contemporary art.”

“Endless Worlds” features works across a variety of mediums by 29 contemporary artists, including Kevin Beasley, Sheila Pree Bright, Charles Gaines Charles Gaines and Noah Purifoy, whose artworks are on display alongside rarely seen exhibition materials from four archives: Tuskegee University, Alabama; Carver a professor there for nearly half a century; the Tuskegee National Park Service; the National Park Archives in Diamond, Missouri, where Carver was born; and the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. (Carver developed a very close relationship with Ford, which looked to Carver for ideas on biofuels and sustainable practices in the auto industry.)

In collecting these works, we can see how important a touchstone Carver was to generations of artists. The exhibition opens with a collaboration between sculptor Karen Davis and painter Henry Taylor, who created a sculpture of Carver in Davis’ signature white plaster next to a Taylor-esque Science of Kale painting, “Call Her Green” Plant (2024). Commissioned by CAAM for the exhibition, this joint work recreates a famous 1892 photograph of Carver at his easel as an artist. Nearby are several text-pictures by Judson Powell about Carver’s legacy, including “Let Nothing Block My Sunshine,” “The Art of Where Science Meets Spirituality” and “Wow: The War on Waste.” Linda Dunya Rebetz’s Once upon a time there was a gardenis a machine-generated artificial intelligence video trained on now-extinct African plant specimens, recalling Carver’s reputation as an important conservationist, while Julie Buehler and Terry A. Works by Dekins and others reflect Carver’s dedication to mycology and color research.

Throughout the exhibition, we see some of Carver’s artistic explorations. Known for his uncanny ability to identify any plant he passed, one wall showcases his few botanical paintings and drawings of flowers, plants, cacti and surrounding landscapes, rendered in pastel tones. Nearby is a conversation about knitting practices that spans centuries, with knits woven by Carver, who learned the craft from his adoptive parent Mariah Watkins, alongside Diedrick Brackens Brackens’ tapestry Open the grave beneath your heart (2018). Shaw said the pairing is meant to show how today’s artists can draw on ancestral knowledge in their work, just as Carver did a century ago. “Carver was an innovator, but he was building on what others had taught him, especially what Black women had taught him,” she said.

Carver was also a conduit for the dissemination of knowledge to the public, publishing popular bulletins (40 of which are currently being viewed) that served as guides on specific aspects of agriculture, such as “How to Grow Peanuts,” “How to Build a Broken Soil,” or “Saving Wild Plum Crop.” His school on wheels, the “Jesup Wagon,” traveled to share soil and plant samples with members of the black farming community. New York artist Abigail Deville recreated Carver’s wagon, Jesus bless (2024), serves as the centerpiece of the exhibition. The artist created the painting using a 1900 Studebaker wagon she purchased on eBay from a Northern California owner, then covered the wagon with broken mirrors, rope and burlap. Dwyer painted and soaked burlap iron red, which she calls a “humble, rough material,” a nod to the fossil-rich soil of the Black Belt where Carver works. “I try to find the inner spark or life that exists in the remnants of that object,” she said.

For DeVille, Carver’s carriage, still in use in Alabama today, is “a lasting legacy of his ingenuity” and embodies “the urgency of spreading a message, and the importance of the black community.” A system that is able to thrive outside of white supremacy, rather than entirely dependent on open space. “

Color plays an important role in another work on display, Black space patent (2024), by Amanda Williams, who spent years researching and recreating the specific shade of blue that Carver developed in the laboratory. The visual artist affectionately renamed it “Innovation Blue.” Williams began researching black patent holders in post-Reconstruction America about three years ago when she stumbled upon Carver’s Prussian Blue recipe, which was unique in that it relied on large amounts of iron and the soil around Tuskegee Rich in iron. Williams tells us that because blue does not occur naturally, it “inherently has value, both because of the mystery and beauty of the color itself and because it has been synthesized in some way.” art news.

She worked with University of Chicago chemists to replicate Carver’s 1927 patent, which, according to Williams, was “very obscure and needed some explanation.” They eventually modified the formula so that they could be scaled up to produce the paint in large quantities. At CAAM, Williams painted on the gallery walls innovation blue; Hanging on the wall are samples of Carver’s original powder paint.

Carver’s Prussian Blue was one of the few inventions he patented, and he saw its economic potential as a self-sustaining way to fund his research at Tuskegee. Williams also thought about how artists like Yves Klein patented his International Klein Blue in 1960, which she considered “masterful” [way] Making sure he goes down in history as a blue owner. With this in mind, Williams set out to “redefine ownership of blue as a color,” adding: “Ownership of imagination is very important.” I want to use this blue in a way that achieves this goal. I have a history of using color to call out injustice and make us question things we take for granted, but this really wanted to center on joy and happiness. “

Hana Ward’s contribution to the exhibition explores Carver’s relationship with the natural world through an interpretation of his biography. Her floor lamp, I found you in a flower (2023), recalls the trauma of being forced to be separated from her mother during slavery. Ward said she was sold against her will to another family and “never came back.” “I can imagine [that loss] Will make you look for it in everything. He used to go out into the woods behind the house at four in the morning and talk to the plants, and that’s how he made that connection, but I think the motivation would come from that desire. “

In “The Endless World,” both curators and artists hope to bring Carver’s story to a wider audience. Carver was a black man born into slavery during the Civil War who made significant scientific contributions to American industry.

“he [made] So many discoveries … but I think his contributions to consciousness and our understanding of knowledge and truth have been completely overlooked,” Ward said. “I’m excited for this to be recognized one day. “