Grief Belongs Here: Tavares Strachan’s “Black Madonna” Series

by Brit E. Schulte, 2024-25 Modern and Contemporary Art Fellow, Blanton Museum of Art

I stand, or often sit on a folding stool or on one of the benches in the European galleries housing Tavares Strachan’s Black Madonna series. Typically I visit one of the pieces, walking around it three or four times before standing in front of it for a long while — I’d estimate around 5 or so minutes. Sometimes I cry, sometimes I sketch, sometimes I clench my jaw and fists, sometimes I stare, trying to see the core of the sculpture (this is materially impossible, at least so far for me). I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve done this. Most of the time I visit all three sculptures. Sometimes I gravitate toward one and stay there with it — no, with them. This part of my ritual is fairly brief. What takes more time is waiting for others to visit the pieces, then quietly waiting for their initial attraction to transition…usually into awareness or appreciation, then either horror or sadness, sometimes disgust, maybe rage, but most of the time it arrives, a heaviness that I believe to be grief. In these moments, a few people are communing about tremendous loss, violence, and death, but also about mothering, holiness, and Black life. Together. Quietly grieving. Strachan’s use of precious materials calls us in. His demand to reckon with murder fixes us to the spot.  

Strachan’s work, in the broadest terms, is about memory. It collides at the intersection of technology, science, and art. His Black Madonna series is only one facet of his works currently on display at the Blanton. For his current exhibition, Between Me and You, he’s also reimagined the Contemporary Project gallery, filling it with a meadow of rice grass that forms the Ghanaian Adinkra symbol Mmere Dane, or “time changes,” which represents impermanence. At its center stands a ceramic sculpture. I’ve visited this gallery several times, but I return to his Black Madonna series with a religiosity. I know in part it is because of my community organizing experiences. I can still remember what Virginia Davis’ voice sounded like at rallies, and on calls; I remember her smile and her tears over the years of working to free her son Troy Davis from death row in Georgia. Likewise, I can see the photographs and drawings of her son, Prince Alim Bantu Akbar, that LaJuana Lampkins handed me during a demonstration. And if I close my eyes and concentrate, I can return to a wood-paneled meeting room in a church on the south side of Chicago and see Stephon Watts’ mother, Danelene Powell-Watts, circulating flyers, demanding justice for him. 

When I think hard about motherhood, I think about how Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes “techniques of mothering that extend past limits of household, kinship, and neighborhood, past gender and racial divisions of social space to embrace political projects to reclaim children.”¹ She’s referring specifically to the organizing work of a southern California-based grassroots formation called Mothers ROC (Mothers Reclaiming Our Children), whose work aimed to free their children from incarceration on what the mothers considered false or exaggerated charges. That being said, Gilmore is citing this example not only to share historical accounts of the (organized) struggle of mothering, but also to share how practices of mothering or motherhood can be held in common — how they can impact us, and how grief can transcend many societal boundaries and galvanize communities to act. I think about all of the labor and care and fear and burdensome resilience that mothers/Mothers (whether biologically or as chosen family), especially Black and cash poor mothers, embody. Strachan visually grounds this thinking for me.  

Strachan’s ongoing research project, The Encyclopedia of Invisibility,² returned me to Katherine McKittrick’s “rebellious method” toward knowing/feeling/relating to Black livingness.³ I went back to Dear Science and Other Stories (Duke University Press, 2021) and, in doing so, found this beautiful summation of McKittrick’s rebellious Black method from scholar Dina Georgs:

To sit with metaphor is to be moved, to decode, to reach for understanding (not fix and solve). When we sit with metaphor, we are open to ‘unanswerable curiosities’ which in turn might inspire creative capacity.⁴

Dina Georgs

I see a rebellious method across Strachan’s artistic practice, pulling audiences, us, toward maligned histories, feared spiritualites, and horizons of liberation. 

When I confront the realities of grief, I think about how Cindy Milstein opens their edited volume, Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief, by saying:

We are, at present, swimming in a sea of grief. That sea includes death, but it is also so much larger, encircling all sorts of sorrows. In a better world, many of these disappearances would be avoidable, even unimaginable. For now, given the loss-filled waters we inhabit, how to better navigate through them, and without drowning? How to shift course, veering closer to a more humane self and society?⁵

CINDY MILSTEIN

This text directly challenges the USian notion that grief should be inherently private, individual, and lonely. Instead, the intimate yet earnest writing, by addressing tragedies — from Fukushima to occupied lands, incarceration to eviction, AIDS crises to border crossings, and racism to sexual violence — confirms that our practices of mourning can pry open spaces of conflict, empathy, and solidarity. I’ve revisited this volume many times over the years, it has helped me clarify what bearing witness and holding space mean beyond buzzing phrases that catch virality briefly, but whose meanings are worthy of time, deep thought, and reflection. It came immediately to mind when Strachan’s works were installed back in November. 

Being fully present to feel, not only with a work of art, but the people I’m physically sharing gallery space with as well as the themes, stories, lives, and realities that the artwork itself represents — this has become my practice of grief communion. Tavares Strachan’s artistic practice has cleaved open viewing within the museum space for grieving, to consider history as a living and dying thing, and to be with other people. I invite everyone who visits to explore developing their own grief ritual with these works (during the precious time we house them), and others that call out to you. 

There is another work of Strachan’s I see whenever I visit, one that also gives me pause. It’s a part of the Blanton’s collection and exists as a part of three sibling works. I’ve gone through a lot of different emotional responses to this piece — it’s brought me comfort, made me smile. Lately it has felt bittersweet, and I’ve even directed some anger toward it (though the artist and the work don’t deserve it). It consists of neon light tubes and requires two transformers to work. Its light is unmissable; set upon a dark, inky wall, a luminous affirmation emanates toward you when you step or roll out of the elevator and onto the second floor. There, overhead, spelled out in curved glass, the phrase “You belong here” glows bright yellow. When we look up, we are experiencing electrical currents colliding with the atoms of noble gasses discharging into light, and we are also experiencing an artist’s message, a promise. A reminder that you, in all of your glorious messiness, belong here. Your grief, your love, your rage, your joy — all of it belongs and should be seen, felt, heard, and appreciated, even as it may be ignored, obscured, silenced, and derided. A declarative so obvious, so inclusive, it ought not feel so tenuous and threatened.  

Tavares Strachan: Between Me and You is on view November 9, 2024–June 1, 2025 at the Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin.

FOOTNOTES

¹ Gilmore, Abolition Geography, p. 408
² “This over 3,000-page opus documents people, events, and ideas that didn’t typically make it into mainstream encyclopedias. Through this project, Strachan questions the construction of historically canonized narratives that marginalize or obscure others while bringing unseen histories and important stories into the light. A version of the Encyclopedia will be on view in the exhibition.”
³ Thank you, Dr. Simone Browne. 
⁴ Dina Georgis, “Dear Katherine” 
⁵ Milstein, Rebellious Mourning, p. 10