Sardines : Sabbatical

By McArthur Binion

[Text from from a proposal written in 1999.]

My family was part of the massive migration that many African Americans made in the 1950s from the agriculturally devastated South to the industrial North. We moved from Macon, Mississippi to Detroit, Michigan in 1951 after my father secured a job in an automobile plant. There is no doubt I would be a different person than I am today if we had not made the move. Yet, I feel I carry with me much of the mores and sensibility of a sharecropping southerner.

As I mature as an artist, I am increasingly interested in developing work that reflects and exposes my life and my family's history. In the 1960s and 1970s, as a young emerging artist, these autobiographical concerns often embarrassed me. I embraced the universality of formalism. But as I teach and speak to students, I find myself advising, even imploring them to make work from what resonates emotionally for them, that is, to examine that which is most familiar, to work from the heart. Curiously, I have begun to take my own advice. Exploring leavings and beginnings, the fresh and the stale, the tradition and the fad, the legacy and the revision, have become my chief content concerns. (Nonetheless, my structural approach remains rooted in abstraction.)

Thus, I have been doing paintings and drawings based on the house where I was born. The house had three rooms that sheltered 11 people. There was no running water. A wood stove provided the only real heat. My brothers and I started picking cotton at age four. Even so, our story is by no means unique. It is fairly typical of the African-American experience in the U.S. for a good part of the last two centuries. And, of course, this economic and cultural circumstance arose as a direct result of our nation's long commitment to slavery and its all too brief focus on undoing what essentially amounts to an American form of apartheid. My work, however, is not overtly about injustice or anger. It's about describing the experience (sometimes nostalgically, sometimes aesthetically, and sometimes critically) of so many people who moved reluctantly or were moved forcibly, packed into houses and before that into the bowels of slave ships. Like animals some say; like sardines say I.

I want to juxtapose my "migration work" to the cultural production of the African Diasporan population of Lisbon, Portugal. It was not the New World, but the Europeans who began the practice of burning villages and kidnapping West Africans from their homelands. As a result of being one of the early colonizers of African countries, Portugal has long standing black communities and cultural practices. As an American, I know my history is linked inextricably to Portugal, but I know very little beyond that. I want to visit, experience, and grow to understand these communities and see how my work will respond to a cultural environment with which I share a similar history. One particular aim is to connect African retentions, both here and abroad, as they relate to the black experience in the Diaspora.

The intuitive connections continue. Portuguese cuisine relies heavily on the sardine. I am a cook and love the quality as well as the packaging of the small fish. There is the sardine analogy to those African captives packed into the lower decks of the slave ships during the Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. I am the middle child of eleven. All this makes me feel a very direct connection across hundreds of years, to the early appearance of Africans in Europe and the so-called New World. I want to "draw" those connections more clearly, with greater knowledge and experience. While I do not know yet, and cannot until I get there and begin doing the work, exactly how the results will appear. One thing seems certain: this sabbatical will produce very exciting work.