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The idea for this show grew out of the dismantling racism work I have been doing with my church, Grace Episcopal Church in the South Loop, for the past five years. Through this work, I searched for a way to merge my interests in landscape and race.
I gained focus last August, shortly after returning to Chicago from my family reunion in New Orleans, the city where I was born. I began to research the history of the sugar industry. It was a way to delve into my family history as well. One of my ancestors left France and settled in Louisiana in the 1770’s. His son acquired land and slaves and started a sugar plantation in the early 1800’s. It functioned as a family enterprise until 1892, when the Mississippi River flooded and swallowed it whole.
One cannot separate the history of sugar cultivation and the history of the United States. Columbus introduced sugar cane to the New World on his second trans-Atlantic voyage in 1493. In his book Sweetness and Power, Sidney Mintz writes, “…Spain…pioneered sugar cane, sugar making, African slave labor, and the plantation form in the Americas.” He continues, “England fought the most, conquered the most colonies, imported the most slaves…, and went furthest and fastest in creating a plantation system. The most important product of that system was sugar.”1
Although Arabs introduced sugar cultivation into the relatively dry Mediterranean basin before 1000CE, sugar cane grows most easily in hot, wet climates. The taste for sugar in Europe expanded at the same time Europeans pushed further into the New World. Each event was a function of the other: the rising demand for sugar spurred European acquisition of land on which to grow it; greater production of sugar increased its availability, which increased demand. Because sugar cane is a labor-intensive crop, the Atlantic slave trade grew accordingly.
In making these paintings, I relied on my visual and kinesthetic recollections of the thick, humid air in South Louisiana, skies heavy with portentous clouds. All depict either cane fields or sugar kettles, the large cast iron pots in which the pressed juice from the cane was heated and crystallized. These impressive kettles exist all over Louisiana, as evidence of the perilous working conditions of slaves in the sugar industry, and as beautiful landscaping objects. My grandfather used one in his garden as a pond.
I had completed most of the paintings for this show by the time Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. I had just begun the last three, all of them sugar kettles.
Rage and grief took root in my body as I saw images and read stories of the devastation of New Orleans, as my family scattered all over the South in search of refuge, and as people grew frantic when the help they so desperately needed did not arrive for several days. I shook like a leaf when I realized how the factors in the paintings (race, weather, land and water) came together so catastrophically in those cruel days. Even though I have not lived in New Orleans since I was five and was nowhere near the hurricane, seeing what has happened to my people in the city of my earliest memories has shaken me to my core. I am no longer the same painter I was.
The remaining three paintings changed. The kettles had been inert, passive. Vapor started to rise, as if the potency of vast wealth and brutal oppression generated from within these kettles, the womb from which our country emerged, has created a chemical reaction, reaching skyward in a prayer for forgiveness and hope.
I would like to thank the following members of Grace Episcopal Church, whose intelligence, love and support allowed these paintings to come into existence: Craig Bivins, Steve Carrelli, Kim Callis, Ted Curtis, Michelle Dahlenburg, John Dally, Chris Forbes, Babs Haggenjos, Cliff Haggenjos, Wendy Manning, Deirdre McCloskey, Pat Moseley, Chipo Nyambuya, Deb Pyne, Darrion Roebuck, Charles Sterner, and Stuart.
1 Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power, (New York: Penguin Books, 1986) 32. Mintz, 38.