By Emily Williams
It has been nearly six months since the white-walled entrance of the Birmingham Museum of Art greeted visitors.
With the date of the reopening set for Oct. 6, BMA senior curator Emily Hanna, who is curator of the Arts of Africa and the Americas, and Hugh Kaul Curator of Contemporary Art Hallie Ringle are working on a new exhibit to greet future visitors.
Wall to Wall: Merritt Johnson, presented by PNC, will be the inaugural iteration of a project that invites artists to create works to be displayed on the typically blank walls of the museum’s lobby and cafe.
Johnson, the first featured artist, will set the tone of what is expected to be a continuing project with a collection of pieces inspired by the land and water of Birmingham. The art will be high-resolution images of Johnson’s paintings, blown up, printed onto vinyl and papered onto the walls.
“It was really Hallie’s vision to do this sort of amazing, immersive experience with Merritt’s paintings,” Hanna said, “doing a kind of wallpaper out of the paintings.”
Johnson, an artist of Native American heritage based in Sitka, Alaska, isn’t new to the BMA. The museum has a couple of pieces of her work in its collection.
What sets the Wall to Wall presentation apart is that the display features works inspired by Birmingham for Birmingham.
“As you pass through the halls to the gift shop, you are surrounded … floor to ceiling by these giant paintings,” Hanna said. “Then you get to Oscar’s cafe and you see the panorama of the (Cahaba) lilies and you see the panorama of nature.”
In preparation for the exhibit, Johnson was able to fit in a trip to Birmingham just before pandemic lockdowns set in.
The curators escorted her on a journey to the area’s natural environments – including the Cahaba River, Red Mountain and Moundville – and introducing her to local environmentalists such as Charles Scribner of Black Warrior Riverkeeper.
Johnson also made a point to visit the city’s harsher landscapes, such as the 35th Avenue Superfund site, a site polluted with lead, arsenic and benzo[a]pyrene.
“She wanted to see those extreme differences in the land, how it’s been treated and the fallout for people who live near and around sites where the land has not been treated well, or the water,” Hanna said.
The opportunity to be intertwined with Johnson’s artistic process from start to finish is one of the “wonderful perks” of Hanna’s job.
“To be with her every step of the way was just stupendous,” she said. “It is an experience that, of course, we always try to offer that back as broadly as we can to the general public.”
The curators typically achieve this by coordinating events in which visitors are able to hear from the artist in person at a reception or presentation. Hanna and Ringle are still trying to figure out how to achieve a similar opportunity remotely using Zoom.
“Merritt is so passionate, she’s so thoughtful, and she is really one of the most generous artists I’ve ever worked with in terms of her willingness to talk about her process and her ideas and answer questions,” Hanna said.
Johnson offered up many of her own words to help the curators create comprehensive descriptions and explanations for her works.
“When they enter the lobby, (visitors) are going to see that moment when we were looking at the Superfund site,” Hanna said. “It was kind of a dreary day.
“The site is surrounded by a modest chain-link fence, nothing to much … keep people out and certainly nothing to keep the pollutants from getting to people. Yet … she has depicted that site with a sort of mountainous form behind the fence and then these floating dots that represent the movement of elements in the air that we can’t control.”
Fences are a recurring theme in Johnson’s work.
“Fences are all about people imagining that they can keep things or people or nature separate by way of a barrier,” Hanna said. “It never works. You can’t keep the flow of air by way of a fence. You can’t keep water. Nature wants to move and it will move.”
The fences are also a reference to the labels that are used to keep people apart – race, ethnicity, gender and so on.
Exhibitions Waiting in the Wings
In addition to Wall to Wall, the museum has four other exhibitions lined up to share with visitors once the doors reopen.
The contemporary art exhibition “All Things Bright and Beautiful” takes a look at themes of power and agency, primarily through pieces from the BMA’s collection.
“An Epic of Earth and Water: Clare Leighton and the New England Industries” explores Leighton’s process through 12 wood engravings Leighton created for Wedgwood.
An exhibition of nearly 60 objects, “Ways of Seeing: Buildings and Monuments,” highlights the unexamined spaces of the built environment using rarely seen works from the museum’s collection to illuminate the relationship between artists and architects. This also will include an exploration of how monuments are seen by and affect members of the community.
Finally, “Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle” includes iconic modernist art from Lawrence’s 1954-56 series of paintings called “Struggle … From the History of American People.”
The works show how women and people of color helped shape the founding of the United States.
Commentaries on social and political issues, as well as art as universal human expression, are a running theme throughout the lineup.
“We have art from every corner of the world and, ultimately, people go through many of the same things,” Hanna said.
“All of that is here and I hope that what’s here can encourage people, bring them solace or joy or humor – whatever would lift them up in that moment,” Hanna said. “That’s what art is, it’s an expression of what we go through as human beings. I hope people will find that when they come back, because it’s all here.”
While the public awaits the Oct. 6 reopening date, there are ways to connect and engage with the museum’s collection. The museum’s website, at artsbma.org, provides a variety of digital offerings, including virtual exhibitions, art projects and meditation.
In addition, for those who are able to give financially, museum officials note that the organization needs monetary support now more than ever because the pandemic has resulted in large funding reductions.
