Alfred Mac Adam: Terry Adkins: Works on Paper

A modest show of prints and drawings by Terry Adkins (1953–2014) at Paula Cooper Gallery is a belated homage to the artist. Adkins worked in myriad mediums—sculpture, music, film, and installation—but regardless of the material he used, he always employed synesthesia. Defined as a physiological disorder, synesthesia relates to perception, when one mode of perception (sight for example) opens the way to other sensorial modes (hearing, smelling).

As an aesthetic synesthete, Adkins connected art forms, as in his most famous piece, Last Trumpet (1995). The installation is composed of four eighteen-foot-long horns that the artist incorporated into a musical performance in 1996, played by a quartet called the Lone Wolf Recital Corps, which Adkins also founded. The horns are simultaneously sculptures to be seen and instruments to be heard “on the scale at which I thought angels would play them,” as Adkins once noted. That apocalyptic note is intentional and important because so much of Adkins’s art is about loss: vast losses like those of homeland and heritage experienced by slaves brought to the New World, or more intimate losses, like those entailed when a flower is cut from a stem. Art salvages memories, personal and collective, but only when it is perceived by those who can endow it with ephemeral life.

The first piece in this show is undated and untitled, rendering it somewhat of a mystery. Untitled (Black, curved abstract) (n.d.) consists of a black shape made in ink and is vaguely anthropomorphic, like a portrait bust. The “head” at the top of the drawing is replicated at the bottom, as if to reinforce the idea of two identities. Taken as a whole, the work recalls a divination tray in the Yoruba style, decorated with the face of the messenger god Èsù to assure communication between the priest and the gods. Adkins’s enigmatic image takes us in many directions at the same time, to many pasts and to diverse identities.

Nine etchings of twenty-seven from his “Djuka Suite” from 1997 are also on view. Again, Adkins works his ars combinatoria: Djuka is a colonial Dutch term that referred to Black people who escaped slavery and formed free communities in Suriname and Guiana; at the same time, it is an archaic spelling of yuka, a style of Afro-Cuban music. The etchings contain fragmented bodies partially obscured by cloth-like patterns, Black bodies simultaneously free and not free in their exile but accompanied by music, reminding us that all New World music, from jazz to rock and roll, is inconceivable without Black influence. Adkins makes this point in poignant fashion in one of the individual prints of the series which represents a drum, the heart of African music. The entire suite is a tour-de-force, successful as both a commentary on a shameful racist past and as a formal artwork independent of any sociopolitical statement.

The next incomplete series consists of pages from a translation into English of Paradiso, Dante’s third canticle in the Divine Comedy. The eight examples here, apparently done on random pages from the book, and in no particular sequence, constitute Adkins’s meditation on the impossible, climactic moment when Dante has a vision of God. Human language cannot express that instant, so Dante resorts to visual metaphors:

In the profound and clear ground of the lofty light appeared to me
three circles of three colors . . . and the one seemed reflected by the other
as rainbow by rainbow, and the third seemed fire breathed forth equally
from the one and the other.

Adkins literally eclipses the words with geometric figures, ellipses that fluctuate in color and number, as if to echo Dante’s kaleidoscope.

This idea of replacing words with images reappears in Adkins’s most profound reflection on race, inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1899 sociological essay, The Philadelphia Negro. The study was Du Bois’s pioneering, statistically based analysis of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward, at the time a Black enclave. Du Bois moved into the neighborhood, distributed detailed questionnaires about life in the community, and carefully documented his findings. When Du Bois was granted honorary professor emeritus status by the University of Pennsylvania in 2012, Adkins deployed his synesthetic talents to honor him. The Philadelphia Negro Reconsidered (2012), a portfolio of eighteen silkscreen prints, translates the study into visual images. Du Bois’s words become a street map where the locales of businesses and residences metamorphose and the Seventh Ward is transformed into Adkins’s intuitive system of patterns and colors.