Photo credit: John Edmonds
The Milwaukee Art Museum’s collection contains a lot of family pictures. Hanging in its galleries are assorted works dedicated to the theme in its many iterations. A tour might include a late-18th-century portrait of a pair of brothers in matching black suits and powdered wigs. The boys are shown with the accessories of lofty social status: books, musical instruments and, of course, a badminton racket and shuttlecock. Then, there’s a quite charming 1885 genre painting of a mother and child who share an Oriental carpet-draped sofa with another family—a watchful matriarchal cat with her kittens—in a well-appointed bourgeois living room replete with a potted palm. An acquisition of MAM’s founder, meat-packing magnate Frederick Layton, it reflects those fin de siècle values (before the ennui set in).
If one wanders a gallery or two, one finds more scenes of old-world familial bliss: a Westphalian village fete under Linden trees or the alternative family of monks in their brotherhood. In the Haitian Gallery, there’s a Vodou (a.k.a. Voodoo) version of Catholicism’s Holy Family: the mother spirit, Erzili, with her retinue of pregnant mothers-to-be, all with a defined linea nigra.
Speaking of holy families, in the museum’s lower-level photo gallery is queer black photographer John Edmonds’ montage of 11 images, entitled Holy Family. It’s arranged in the manner of a Renaissance altarpiece and consists of portraits of gay black men and women. It’s a part of “Family Pictures,” a special exhibit featuring the works of nearly a dozen African American photographers. The show is of particular LGBTQ relevance for its inclusion of two queer artists: John Edmonds and Lyle Ashton Harris. In the exhibit’s exploration of the spectrum of family structures from blood relations to the “close knit,” their works recognize the validity of our alternative family.
The queer take on the theme expands the concept of family into a realm most LGBTQs will easily recognize, namely a family by default. It’s the circle of friends and lovers (some fleeting, others enduring) who provide us with those natural familial comforts and companionships that our natural families often can’t—or won’t—afford us. Some define it as our “logical family” versus our “biological family;” it’s particularly prevalent in communities in which homophobia prevails.
Edmonds’ Holy Family confronts gender norms and offers a certain emotional intimacy with his subjects. They look at you. The individual portraits reveal beauty, generational diversity and the calm of body topography as ways of expressing the discreet empowerment that defines our unique family.
Harris’ work is a multi-screen slide installation, the Ektachrome Archives (New York Mix). Taken from 1986 to 2000, the formal and candid images consist mostly of portraits, but others are snapshots of events and random views. You stand among them as a participant. Like Edmonds, Harris shows the diversity and dynamics found in the multicultural context of queer life. His photos reference AIDS, the LGBTQ diaspora and the African American community with a focus on identity, sexuality and class.
A special In Conversation event with John Edmonds and MAM exhibit curator Lisa Sutcliffe sponsored by Cream City Foundation takes place Thursday, Jan. 10, at 6:15 p.m. The exhibit closes on Sunday, Jan. 20. For more information, visit mam.org.
