Carletta Carrington Wilson: Object Lessons

 

 

 

 

 

 

Carletta Carrington Wilson’s large exhibition at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art. “Carletta Carrington Wilson: Object Lessons” highlights all phases of her career!! It closes on Sept 20. The Museum makes a perfect day trip with a bus to downtown Seattle, a beautiful ferry ride and a short walk to the museum. She will be in the gallery on August 26 11-1

 

 

In the large window on the outside of the Bainbridge Museum of Art, Carletta Carington Wilson created a  three story  insatallation. If you look closely you can see the word Utopia spelled in giant letters ( It is hard to see in this photograph- the golden squares contain the letters. I sketched it in on the right))

 

Going upstairs in the gallery we are greeted by a poem called “Lessons of Possession” It begins

“To make sense of the possessive tense it is crucial to understand that the object of an object is to be had held kept adhered to by right of possession . . .”. All of it is an ironic but heartfelt  statement about slavery.

 

The main exhibition gallery downstairs creates a dazzling effect with multi colored fabrics, but as we approach the individual works we see there is much more at stake than aesthetics.

 

The works divide into distinct series: “Constellation of shadows and leaves” (2006) the “Mingus Series” (2008) the “Book of the Bound,” (2011) in honor of slaves who could not read, “knot my name haint my house” ( 2015), “kNot free, kNot human,” (2023).

 

 

 

Wilson is a poet as much as a visual artist, and her wonderful sense of the multiple meaning of words flows through all of her art.

She creates stunning aesthetic objects to  educate us to the horrors of slavery. In this case the escape of a female slave

 

 

 

These are two works from the field notes series: “wrap my right hand tight” and “woke fore day”. We see the collage  of many fabrics plus cotton and black lines running across made of woven fabric that evoke a wire fence or chains or confinement

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On one wall hangs “the knotted line  of cloth cord, thread, bones, wire.  These tangled  knots speak to the mixture of blood lines among slaves and the impossibility of tracing ancestry.

 

Another pair of hanging works “resist dying” describe both the technique and the action; below it is a “blood knot,” a tangled rich red colored cloth.

 

 

 

 

There are six examples from the” Book of the Bound” series. above is one of the most powerful., actually called “Book of the Bound,” tightly closed with chains.

 

One of the covers is made of bones attached with lace called Abduction

Others emphasize cotton, as above “Forget me not”.

Some are covered with beautiful fabrics. Carrington Wilson uses fabric as the means of suggesting the connection of trade, money and the “thread-bare body”:  the wealth of the traders was based on the bodies of the slaves.The fabrics throughout the exhibition are  decorative but painted with words that speak to the slave trade. Because European slavers often traded fine fabrics like silk and velvet in exchange for bodies, Wilson believes the stories of their bodies remain in the cloth.

Her collaged covers become a song to those who could not fill these books with their stories.

 

  

 

In this example we see an ad saying “speaks good English, French and Dutch” and an image cut out of an ad of slaves carrying a big piece of wood.

 

 

“I am bound to go” Here you see a mother and baby elephant inserted as well as an image of two whie youths inspecting a nexklace on an African boy

 

 

Letter to a Laundress. It has two texts, the large and the small

Here it says “mothers of the blue blue waters who hungfrom these knotted lines”

 

 

“Letter to a Laundress,” a letter to her great great grandmother, dominates the exhibition as a poem and a series of 1930s photographs mounted on fabric and hanging from a clothes line . Written on the photographs are descriptions of steps in doing laundry and one large word : Wash, Soak, Starch, Wring, Boil, Pin, Rub, Scrub, Hang Press.

 

 

The WPA photographs of Laundresses reveal the different background of the women, some are wearing rags, others are in dresses and heels. As she worked on the project Carletta became deeply aware of the connection of hanging laundry and hanging people, lynching.

“You taught her well they say she had the touch too wrinkled soiled shirts made them like new especially collars and cuffs”

Carletta made the point that sometimes these women were doing laundry for the man who lynched her husband.

 

 

 

“What to do with foul language, rank stench, some shadowy shame remais even after all that scubbing”

In these two examples you see differences in dress that suggest one woman is better off.

 

 

 

The layers in Carletta Carrington Wilson’s words inscribed and pasted onto these art works give voice to the silent women of the photographs. If you want more discussion of “letter to a Laundress” see my blog post

Carletta Carrington Wilson’s “letter to a laundress”

 

 

 

 

“Joe’s House” from the series “knot my name, haint my house”

We see a simple house evoked with collage on its walls.

 

 

 

In addition the exhibition includes recent work such as No Way Out, 2026. An ironing board covered with black fabric and bearing a vertical row of red x’s’ is paired with two irons painted with red hand marks.

 

 

 

It is a powerful statement as a postlude to the Laundresses. The x’s represent the signature of illiterate people but may also be a reference to writing in blood. The title and  shrouded ironing board perhaps  suggests that doing laundry can only end in death.

 

 

 

Carletta is standing under a paper garland made by visitors who have written  on pieces of paper clling out to the distant slaves

 

 

An installation view of the exhibition suggesting its coherence and beauty. The many works come together as a powerful statement about slavery and a testament to Carletta’s strength as both an artist and a poet.

 

Here is another blog post about Carletta.

Carletta Carrington Wilson “Unchain My Heart”