To Speak Between: The Art of Renée Stout
by: Phoenix Savage | posted: Mar 4, 2009
To speak between the visible and invisible worlds is a trait of clairvoyants, priests and priestesses, Shakers, mystics, readers, and root workers. Renée Stout’s art also speaks between the worlds. Stout, raised in an extended working class family in the Liberty Heights area of Pittsburgh, came of age during the music era commonly known as Funk. Stout notes that “Funk is Black.” Listening to the sounds of George Clinton, the Bar-Kays, Rolls Royce, and Chaka Kahn, while pondering the inner workings of Renfrew Street, influenced Stout’s art from the beginning.
Renfrew Street was within walking distance from Stout’s childhood home. “It was a street that you could take as a side street, [a] short-cut from one section of the neighborhood to another,” she says, like a jam session taking one far from the melody line. “It was during one of those detours that I discovered a yard that had a strange installation of embellished dolls and stuffed animals in it.” The mysterious nature of Renfrew Street serves as metaphor regarding the function of Stout’s art, a short cut between worlds in the development of vessel/revelation dynamism.
Renée graduated from the predominantly African-American Schenley High School in 1976, completing an engineering internship her senior year. By 1980, however, Stout had taken her own path, completing her studies in Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University, despite her parents’ insistence that she study engineering. Being the first in her family to attend college, Stout explains, “naturally they wanted me to study something that they felt would guarantee that I would have a better life then they did.” As was a customary thought of the day, her parents comforted themselves with the notion that perhaps their daughter would not have to worry about making a living at being an artist, because college would provide an opportunity for a suitable husband. Stout has remained single and successful.
Not finding the art opportunities she was looking for in her hometown, Renée Stout landed an artist-in-residency at Northeastern University in Boston. At the conclusion of her six-month residency, Stout settled on building an art career in nation’s capitol. Stout worked at a Montessori school during the day, and on her art during nights and weekends. Eventually, a gallery became interested in her work and offered her a one-person show.
Stout’s early exhibitions created the right amount of buzz and momentum that an artist needs to carry them to the next step. By 1991, Stout held a solo exhibition simply entitled Recent Sculpture at B.R. Kornblatt Gallery, which became the first gallery to represent her works. Between 1987 and 1991, Stout exhibited in no less than seven group showings, one of the most significant being Black Art--Ancestral Legacy: The Africa Impulse in African American Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas, in 1989. Stout followed up the Dallas tour de force with another seminal group showing, Gathered Visions: Selected Works by African American Women Artists, Anacostia Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., in 1990. The institutional backing of these two exhibitions notwithstanding, Stout’s mixed media sculptures stood out in a crowd of nearly 50 artists in the Dallas exhibition and nearly a dozen women in the Anacostia exhibition.
Stout’s fusion of cultural iconography culled from both African American folk traditions and African spirit carvings produced to date one of Stout’s most acclaimed exhibitions, Astonishment and Power, at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., from April 28, 1993 to January 2, 1994. Astonishment and Power paired Stout’s art with Kongo Minkisi applications. (Kongo Minkisi sculptures are indigenous spiritual figures crafted in what is presently the Democratic Republic of the Congo.) The cosmological relations of the BaKongo between the living and the dead are at the heart of Hoodoo, an African earth-based religion. Scholars such as Robert Farris Thompson and Wyatt MacGaffey have contributed greatly to the relationship between Hoodoo and BaKongo traditions.
Stout’s Art
In Astonishment and Power: The Art of Renée Stout, published by the National Museum of African Art in Washington, D. C., Michael D. Harris wrote, “perhaps it was the creation of Fetish No. 2 that signaled the transformation of Renée Stout from artist to alchemist, from visual poet to priestess.” In the evolution of Stout’s works, the series of sculptures that comprise Fetish No.1 through Fetish No. 4 play “transformative” role for Stout as an artist. In order to Speak Between, one must be willing to serve as a conduit, very much like Renfrew Street--a channel that connects divergent parts of the whole. The art of Renée Stout has also served as a conduit inspiring artists with the permission to create works honoring the Black vernacular aesthetic.
Stout’s sculptures are Hoodoo-derived workings; highly individualized, and not always well understood. In the folk traditions of Hoodoo Brazilian Candomble; Cuban Santeria, Haitian Vodun and New Orleans Voodoo, the seer serves as a conduit between worlds, speaking between, in order to mediate on behalf of the living. The spiritual practice evolved as it came to North America through the transatlantic slave trade; the cultural geography, religious and social interactions between the enslaved populations and planters directly influenced the ingredients employed in the syncretism of spiritual beliefs and mores. In many ways, it was a reaction to the hierarchy and God/devil dichotomy in Southern Christian theology.
“Hoodoo is by far the most misunderstood cultural phenomena within black North American culture, by both blacks and whites,” says Stout. “When I first became known as an artist in Washington, D.C., it used to hurt my feelings when people in the community [could not] understand my work and expressed that they were afraid of it. I was hurt because I thought I was communicating something about our history, and aesthetic that we could celebrate and be proud of. For a lot of people, I was digging up and exposing something they had been working hard to bury and keep hidden.”
Her process
The power in Stout’s art takes a narrative form, much like the work of African American writer Charles Chestnut’s Conjure Woman and Gayl Jones’s The Healing. Stout employs decidedly Hoodoo motifs: tied bags that evoke a concealed mystery; cryptic writings, some discernable and others purposely jumbled as to confuse evil spirits; the use of human hair; the incorporation of found objects and the use of soil from grave yards. Stout is a keen observer of her surroundings, listening for ambient sounds that percolate into visual ideas, and collects a scribble wall full of notes, drawings, contact information and fragments of ideas that may inform her sculptures.
Central to Stout’s work is the development of thoroughly dimensional characters that she refers to as her “alter egos.”
“For the past several years I had been creating whole bodies of work around first, Madam Ching and then Fatima. I would create whole installations that represented their interiors with furnishing and objects that belonged to them. It hit me one day that the alter ego Fatima was the vehicle that helped me work out a lot of personal issues, so I guess you could say she functioned (and still functions) as an interlocutor,” says Stout.
Stout’s initial usage of her body as an object for the creation of the art is fully realized in Fetish No. 2, and continues today as she inserts herself as Fatima into the tableaus created to act as containers, just as her three-dimensional works operate. Only now, the containment is within the photograph. Stout does not aim to be mysterious, rather, she allows mystery to unfold and reveal itself, as if to celebrate its discovery.
Stout’s current usage of the photography medium feeds the mystery, with the darkroom process acting like a vessel, and the developed photograph a revelation to the viewer; a mediumlike dual function similar to Stout’s sculpture. Like Maria Campos-Pons, Carrie Mae Weems, and Lorna Simpson, Stout employs her human body as a proactive agent to convey humanity in her works. For centuries, African American artists have worked to exercise the denied visibility through the visible--the vessel/revelation dynamism.
Stout has perfected a methodology that honors her story, and calls the viewer toward humanity and revelation. The works of Renée Stout have shown in over two dozen group exhibitions, and nearly as many solo exhibitions. Stout’s art appears in the collections of nearly three dozen museums from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. with an endless list of private collectors.
Interestingly enough, Stout’s work is absent of scent, perhaps that is why, to unwind she writes perfume reviews. Just another way that Stout honors the fullness of her human experience.
