Kohler Art Center Exhibit Celebrates “Fiercer Love”

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Two things immediately strike visitors about artist Andrea Chung’s new exhibit at the John Michael Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan. Neither is subtle, nor are they what they may at first seem.

The first is the exhibit’s title, “if they put an iron circle around your neck I will bite it away.” The second is the recurrent imagery of life-sized arms and hands reaching out from cabinetry mounted on the rich, blue walls within the multi-room installation, or up from blue sand within a planter-like stone pedestal. Some are holding talismans, but all are extended their full length in the museum’s Victorian-style setting as if seeking to grasp something just beyond their reach. 

The museum’s press materials note that Chung, a San Diego-based artist, seeks to “confront the legacy and trauma of slavery from the perspective of an Afrofuturist utopia.” The artist, of Jamaican/Chinese and Trinidadian descent, acknowledges the overriding influence of slavery’s horrors in the exhibit. But there is an unusual twist to the story her imagery is telling.

The exhibit’s explicit title draws from a line in Beloved, author Toni Morrison 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about an enslaved Black woman named Sethe who, on the verge of her recapture after escaping, kills her daughter rather than let her become enslaved and subjected to the horrors and degradations Black women faced. In the novel, a spirit then begins visiting Sethe that goes by the name “Beloved” who allegorically may represent Sethe’s daughter, her mother, or perhaps the spirits of all of slavery’s victims.

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“Was it murder, or was she saving her daughter?” Chung asks. “She wants to bite the iron circle away from her daughter’s neck. Can you imagine a fiercer form of love and sacrifice?”

Desperate Grasp at Freedom

As for the arms and hands, crafted by the artist from her own and another women’s appendages, they may represent the desperate grasp at freedom. But in most cases, they are the hands of the midwives, women who helped the enslaved Black women give birth and care for the newborns. The tradition was called “catching babies”, and the hands and arms are attempting to make those catches.

“Enslaved women did not have access to traditional medical care and relied on midwives to help them give birth, or sometime perform abortions on women who didn’t want their children to grow as slaves,” Chung says. “Granny midwives taught white doctors how to deliver babies, and modern-day obstetrics based on what they learned from those midwives.”

That said, Chung notes that U.S. mortality rates for Black infants are still among the highest in the world compared to other developed countries. Black infant deaths are higher than any other racial group and more than twice that of white infants. “That comes largely from not listening to Black mothers,” she adds. “There’s a long history of medical racism in this country.”

Despite the dark overtones, Chung sees her installation as a place of healing, one that honors midwives and celebrates birth, rather than death. A terrarium in the exhibit houses lives plants, herbs like those used during birthing practice, alongside there several paper-pulp fertility statues. There are even wall-hangings that celebrate the Drexciya, a mythological amphibious Black race said to have evolved from mothers pushing their children overboard from the slave ships so they wouldn’t have to grow up in slavery. The blue walls echo the overwhelming influence of the ocean.

“Despite the history of slavery, I want the exhibit space to be a healing space where visitors can come and reflect on what they see and feel,” Chung says. “I don’t want them to treat it like a diorama, which objectifies other cultures. I want them to contemplate the questions I am asking. I know I will learn from their responses.”

Andrea Chung’s “if they put an iron circle around your neck I will bite it away” opened January 28 and will be on display through October 1 at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, 608 New York Ave., Sheboygan. Details: jmkac.org.