Pushing All the Right Buttons

Moments of embarrassment are about history: Surely it8217;s impossible to go back and undo them? Bill Hayes tells us, in his book Five Quarts, that during WWII, when blood donors were being desperately recruited, African American blood remained unwanted. Can you undo that policy? No? But you can8217;t erase it from memory either.

That you land yourself in this trap is fortuitous, because then you slide into the re-claiming of an African-American history in Amalia8217;s work. It speaks not only of the artist8217;s skill, but of the rich contribution of a community that, in the past, often remained marginalised. Buttons and other accessories serve as Amalia8217;s tools in her archaeologist avatar, enabling her to excavate deep and find another story.

Amalia born 1949 is a well known artist, art historian and curator in the United States, who focuses on aspects of portrayal and representation from the perspective of African Americans, particularly women. Her imaginative show, Boxes, Buttons and Blues, currently showing in Washington DC, is the most comprehensive one till date. Her use of materials8212;buttons, burn marks from irons8212;are soaked in stereotypes of the feminine domain.

Her war-cry series, 8216;Three Cheers for the Red, White and Blue8217;, from the 1990s, is hypnotically powerful. Instead of referring to the endured violence of the decades, the talent, music and rebellion of iconic black women singing the blues is celebrated here. Amalia creates a patchwork of cyanotypes blue printed photographic images and the American flag on thin quilts, re-enfranchising these women by using well-recognised photographs of them.

But it8217;s also not all that straightforward. Amalia often manipulates the images, sometimes to the extent of minimal recognition, although the music they created is now what we would confidently call music that has originated from the United States. They seem to be 8216;the other8217; of Hollywood8217;s adored femmes fatale during the same period. They were branded and Amalia picks up the brown marks from a hot iron, creating a strange parallel between them and other women facing routine household accidents.

The most moving section is where photographs of child performers mimick catwalking adults. Catwalking originally was a means of mimicking masters, and the children in turn mimicked adults. Photographs from this echoing labyrinth were sold as postcards, which have been enlarged, the children and their spaces painstakingly adorned with hundreds of buttons, guilded in the manner of Slavic legends.

Amalia undertakes several robust enterprises as an arts practitioner. She exhumes the dead when she manipulates a photograph. She is a cartographer when she dexterously maps out communities and re-plots terrain. But it is her voice as a commentator on the human experience that makes her art compelling.