Keeping it Real The Art of Willie Birch

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Keeping it Real The Art of Willie Birch By Renae Friedley I first interviewed Willie Birch in December 1996 for an article that appeared in the January/February 1997 issue of the Gulf Coast Arts &

Birch, a very talented and outspoken artist, frequently appeared among the pages of the GCA&E throughout the years that I published the magazine.

1 Keeping it Real The Art of Willie Birch By Renae Friedley I first interviewed Willie Birch in December 1996 for an article that appeared in the January/February 1997 issue of the Gulf Coast Arts & Entertainment Review for the opening of an exhibit at the Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans. Birch, a very talented and outspoken artist, frequently appeared among the pages of the GCA&E throughout the years that I published the magazine. In the January/February 2004 issue, he was featured as part of an article on the opening of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in August The opening exhibit at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art was entitled The Story of the South: Art and Culture, and included works by such noted artists as Elemore Morgan, Jeffrey Cook, Howard Finster, Eudora Welty, Benny Andrews, and Willie Birch. During Hurricane Katrina, Birch evacuated to New York. Fortunately, some friends took his work from the studio on Villere Street in the 7th Ward to Dallas, so everything was saved. He came back to New Orleans after Katrina when he was asked to attend a meeting at Tulane to discuss using the culture of New Orleans as a means of transforming the city. The Porch 7th Ward Cultural Organization grew out of those meetings. The Porch is a cultural organization committed to the Seventh Ward area in New Orleans. It has organized arts workshops, theatre groups, and an arts festival. In 2005, his work was featured in a book entitled Celebrating Freedom: The Art of Willie Birch. It was published in conjunction with the traveling exhibition Celebrating Freedom: The Art of Willie Birch, which was organized by the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans. It is a beautiful table-top book that includes eighteen renditions of the people of New Orleans such as Mardi Gras krewes and parades; Martin Luther King Day festivities; family celebrations; Sunday rituals; baptisms; and jazz funerals, and highlights the talents of this outstanding artist. Birch is the featured artist at the Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans in an exhibit entitled Willie Birch: Looking Back , which opens October 2 and runs through October 30, The exhibit brings together paintings and sculptures dating from 1978 to 2003 that focus on both the celebratory nature of the people of New Orleans as well as stories of their everyday life. He is also one of the artists included in an exhibit at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York entitled Global Africa Project, which opens November 17, 2010 and continues until May 15, The exhibit features the work of over 100 artists working in Africa, Europe, Asia, the United States, and the Caribbean. He will also be part of an exhibit that opens at the White Columns Gallery in New York in January The work of Willie Birch can also be found in museum collections as well as public and private collections across the country, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

Birch returned to New Orleans after Katrina, and his studio on Villere Street, because he says, I live here. It is part of what makes Birch who he is. New Orleans has its own way of expressing itself.

2 Birch returned to New Orleans after Katrina, and his studio on Villere Street, because he says, I live here. It is part of what makes Birch who he is. New Orleans has its own way of expressing itself. New Orleans is about feeling. Through that feeling you capture the feeling of what is in the culture, he says. His latest works focus more on the vegetation of New Orleans, which is a break from his previous work that features people as they go about their daily routines. My backyard has become this playground. The light is so unusual in this city, and you add the clouds. Louisiana is so beautiful, and yet you can forget that if you are here because of all of the other problems, he adds. Following are the articles as they appeared in the Gulf Coast Arts and Entertainment Review. January/February 1997 After nearly two decades in the North, Willie Birch returned home to New Orleans. Since his return over two years ago, Birch has been working on a body of work that reflects the people of the South and their customs. This work has been shown at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in North Carolina, the Luise Ross Gallery in New York, and last May at the Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans in an exhibit entitled In Search of Heroes, Part II. This is about New Orleans. It s about the blues, it s about roots, and coming out of the art of the Congo. Southern tradition like storytelling symbolism the idea here is metaphor, says Birch. This body of work springs forth from a well that is deep within his soul. Birth decided to move back to New Orleans when he realized that the type of imaginary I began to deal with in New York was more reflective of what my experience was of growing up in New Orleans and that s when I decided to try and get somebody to give me some money to do a body of work dealing with growing up here [New Orleans] and after four tires, I got the Guggenheim. With the money from the Guggenheim Fellowship, Birch created a memory series. I came back to New Orleans specifically to do pieces which were based on my childhood memories of growing up here. That body of work was shown at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in North Carolina in The next body of work was entitled In Search of Heroes, Part I, which appeared at the Luise Ross Gallery in New York in November and December This exhibit of sculptures was full of the talismans and symbolism of a return to roots. Most of the pieces were covered with an appliqué of shells, feathers, bones, and bits of broken glass and mirror, much of which was dug out of the artist s backyard at the home he is renovating in New Orleans. When I saw this house, I said this is the house because here is so much memory back here. So much memory in terms of indigenous people, in terms of people who came here, that I knew this was this was the place that I wanted to create out of. The trees in Birch s backyard have bottles hanging from their gnarled branches. People have always been protective of trees in Africa. A tree represents the soul of humanity, so trees are very special. So when Black

3 people came to this country, they planted trees for the people who had died on their way here or they made bottle trees. Bottle trees are to keep away evil spirits. So when I bought this house, understanding all those concepts, I decided to not only make a bottle tree, but I want this whole yard one day to be a bottle yard. The living room of the house is full of art work in various stages of completion. I don t have the slightest idea where it goes from here. I m just playing with roots and feathers. All I know is these things keep coming out, he adds with a laugh. I just play with ideas in terms of type of imaginary At this point, that s all I can do is play. The pieces in Birch s new work are appliquéd with rocks, shells, numerology, colored glass, Royal Crown Cola bottle caps, and other objects of symbolism. But it s not just glass, he says. They have to transcend. They have to make metaphor for me to be able to use them. If they don t do that, then they are just a piece of glass. I wanted to do something around specifically New Orleans because I felt that in doing the memory series, I was still drawing off a lot of New York, but after being here, and beginning to understand what was indigenous to here, the colors began to change. You know, like New York is full of grays, whereas in New Orleans you got to deal with greens, and earth colors. You got to deal with umbers. And, instead of doing a jazz series, or something on jazz, I decided to do something on the blues. The sculptures are made of brown paper that is treated with an acrylic polymer emulsion to make it sturdy and water resistant. Each sculpture is then painted with acrylic paint. I love people who want to go up to my work and want to touch it and they know it s paper, but they just can t believe that something this beautiful, that looks this durable, could be brown paper. And then that s all about social commentary too in terms of forcing people to question what s precious because that s an issue. In the art world paper cost less people pay less for paper than they pay for canvas. But again, I m challenging that. Now whether that means financial rewards, I doubt it, but the point is when you buy my work, you are going to buy it because you really think it is something you need to have its value cannot be measured in terms of the material it is made of alone. Birch s work is reminiscent of folk art each piece tells a story. I always wanted to tell stories and that s not true when you deal with art as it has been presented coming out of Europe particularly the art of New York. It s about fracturing. It s about cutting up the whole. So it s not about keeping a narrative, which is what my work is all about. He found that this desire to tell stories through his art was also part of his past. There s a book on the Mardi Gras Indian and all of these I ve seen since I ve come back. I grew up where there were two [sets of] Mardi Gras Indians there were the ones that told narrative stories on their costumes which are Uptown, and then there were the Downtown Indians like Tootie Montana who were more abstract. So I m looking at these Indians costumes and I looked at the work that I d done, and suddenly it all made sense. I realized that this doesn t all come out of some vacuum. Sometimes you can t you can t even understand why you wanted to do the stuff like this, but the point was as artists, I think you always have to trust yourself and if it feels right, it s fine even though you don t know where it s coming from. But when I got back to New Orleans, then I saw where it was coming from. So storytelling is just a natural part of my existence, and I accept that and to me it s how can I tell it where it s not redundant and it s not boring to me, whereby it s exciting. That s the only thing that I ask out of myself in terms of how I work, that I m honest with my art. The art object must have its own voice. I cannot impose my will. My ego is secondary, it s not about me. I am just the instrument needed to tell the story. Since his pieces depict Black people, and reflects much of their history, Birch feels that some white Americans have a problem with the work. Too many are not interested in narrative, because the story is a very brutal story. However, I got a story to tell, and my story is about as American as you are going to get. If you look at the art that is expected, it s not objective art, and I believe there s a reason for that. A lot of it is done very, very well, but it does not tell a story because that story is a very, very painful story. It is not America the beautiful. Birch is currently working on a series of paintings that focus on the uniqueness of New Orleans. These paintings show the street musicians and the tap dance kids of the French Quarter as well as a Jazz funeral and a street vendor. The new paintings will be part of an exhibit, along with some of the sculptures, in a show in Dallas in November.

4 Birch is fortunate to have reached a level in his life where he can pretty much do what he wants. I figured out a way that if I wake up tomorrow morning and I say all right let s start painting, it s not something I have to think about, I just do it. I m trying to get people to understand I don t know what I m what I m going to do next it just comes and it flows and I love it, and unfortunately I m one of the few people who can do that and I seem to be gaining more support which is probably what it s about. January/February 2004 Featured in article on the opening of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art Willie Birch is probably considered one of the most controversial artists of the South, and is definitely one of its most outspoken. I m who I am, he says. I m a person who has invested a certain amount of my life in this endeavor and I have a right to say what I feel about what I do. Birch s paper mâché sculpture of a woman sitting on top of a stack of suitcases while hold a child in her lap is part of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art s collection. I am constantly challenging society. That s my job as an artist, he adds. Constantly challenging what we see and how we see it. That s what I do. I don t even have to think about it consciously anymore because the type of things that I am interested in are always on the edge. That seems to be a part of me. So now it s about how can I create this in a way that is reflective of the history and also give it a place and a dignity within that time frame so that people will have to deal with it. You can t just deal with it as something that you throw in the garbage can. Part of my training is creating that kind of esthetic piece, but also creating that social/political content that creates these metaphors; these other ways of seeing beings. Like the piece at the Ogden. I saw that lady with that kid in the bus station in New York City. I don t know where she was going, but I call the piece Going Home. She didn t have on the yellow dress.but she was reading this book and I thought, what a positive image. I can take this even further. So, what do I do? The idea of Margaret Walker came into my head. Anybody who knows what Margaret Walker s book is about, they know that is an important book. First of all it s written by an African American about the South and it is probably the most unread book because of the social aspects of how it deals with the South from an African American perspective. That was unheard of when that lady wrote that book. So that book to anybody who has read it resonates and at the same time the dignity and the beauty of the little girl and the mother and the Nanny doll, which for years, in terms of my generation we would probably shun that doll because it has a Mammy like quality about it. But today my grandchildren will look at that doll as something that is very, very beautiful. I am constantly challenging those buttons, he continues. In twenty or thirty years that piece will just be seen as a nice piece. And hopefully the idea of how I put it together, the idea of the paper, the idea of paper as social commentary, and the idea of what is precious in our culture. All of those things are in that piece because the idea.i mean who is supposed to buy a paper mâché piece made out of brown paper, although it is made with nice materials and all that so it will hold up, who will pay $15,000 dollars for that? In my understanding of what I was trying to do, particularly when I did those paper mâché pieces was that it was a slap in the face of what we consider precious. I m saying that people make things precious and people keep things that they think are valuable. It s not whether it is gold or silver or bronze, those things if it isn t relevant to existence or my experience, then I m going to shun it. Now if it s say gold, or whatever, then I m going to keep it and value it. In terms of imaginary, we keep imaginary because it is an integral part of our survival and when that no longer exists, we throw it away, we push it to the corner or we put it in the basement. So paper to me was going against the art establishment in the sense of what s precious. When it sits in here (the Ogden) it gives it a whole new value, the Museum redefines it because Roger Ogden thought enough of the piece that he thought he had to have it, and then he puts it in a museum setting and it changes the whole context of it. So, the idea of this piece making these metaphors and kids understanding that they don t have to make things according to the given rule, that if they are themselves and they understand the history of what they are doing, and they understand the power of themselves in terms of their creative instincts and ability to be individuals, they have the power to do great things.

5 Birch is using the paper as a metaphor. He creates art depicting people who society might consider throwaways, like street people or people of poverty, creating them in paper, also something that we throw away, and then says now I m going to put this price tag on this and if you value it enough to purchase it, now take care of it. The point was that there was a magic and inventiveness and a metaphor that you had to relate to beyond the fact that it was paper and paper just happened to be the material that was used to extend that language, he continues. We need to understand that this process (art) is nothing but a language. We need to try to communicate. We are communicators, that is what artists do we make art out of chaos. So in that process, there is going to be some setbacks, there is going to be whatever, but you must continue to communicate. Understanding that to a large degree, the public in general doesn t understand, but you like to think that at some point that you will have people who are interested enough in what you are doing to find out why this dude who has an MFA, has lectured at Yale and Princeton, and so called pretentious colleges, why would he create something out of paper? So that is the missing point in terms of the dialogue. No one is asking the artist the serious questions as far as I m concerned, but that is where the public must be educated so that they realize that I am challenging them that if they buy this art, they just can t buy it, they also have to protect it if they think it is valuable. We are only here for a short span of time. So if that piece is valuable, if we put a value on it, then we have to take the ownership to make sure that it survives. If it is important enough for us as a cultural being, then the ownership is on us. I have done what I am supposed to do. So we are going through all of these different levels, and will people finally catch up to it, I ve moved on. Renae Friedley Renae Friedley is the former publisher and editor of the Gulf Coast Arts & Entertainment Review, She is now attending Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia for a BA in English Literature and vows to return to New Orleans soon!

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