Black Confederacy: Textile Works by Larry Owens
Through May 27
Cheekwood Museum of Art
1200 Forrest Park Dr.
For information, call 356-8000 or visit www.cheekwood.org
On April 17, Mississippi voters elected to keep the state flag that features the stars and bars of the Confederate flag prominently in its design. Predictably, advocates—mostly white—of the Mississippi flag hailed the decision, while the opposition—mostly black—vowed to fight again another day. Larry Owens is one African American, though, who thinks it’s time to move on as far as the Confederate flag is concerned. In fact, the reason Owens, a Nashville tailor by profession, says he created 19 different textile works inspired by the Confederate flag is to diffuse tensions between black and white Southerners. “I’m actually trying to speak more to blacks and say that we need to quit arguing over a flag flying over this state or that state,” he says. “After all, our ancestors are the ones who built the South and if anyone owns the Confederate flag, we do. As an African American and a direct descendent of slavery, I think we have as much right as anyone to be proud to be a Confederate, having been born in the South and under that flag.”
To communicate his point of view, Owens set out four years ago to reinvent the traditional Confederate banner using materials and symbols that reference black Southern history rather than white. The project began when one of Owens’ employees mentioned to him that her son, then one of the few black students at David Lipscomb High School, had noticed the proliferation of Confederate flags waving from car antennas at the school. The conversation spurred Owens to create a Confederate flag for the woman’s son using multicolored African Kente cloth (a colorful, tightly woven fabric made on 5-inch looms), instead of the traditional red, white, and blue fabrics. Word about the Afro-centric Confederate flag spread and Nashville gallery owner/photographer Carlton Wilkinson asked Owens to create a similar one for him to wear on a jacket. Other commissions followed. For the past year, Owens’ flags have been on display at two venues in Atlanta; but a current exhibition at Cheekwood marks the first time all of these textile works have been displayed in one space together.
While the first flag Owens created was a relatively simple variation on the original Confederate design, subsequent works feature more sophisticated compositions and materials as well as more overt symbolism. In several flags, for example, he uses cosmetic cotton balls as the stars and edges the crossed bars of fabric with tiny gold chains. In others, he replaces the stars with car-wash tokens, bullets, and tiny images of the African continent. In yet another, the flag is suspended from a tree branch by tiny hangman’s nooses.
The common denominator among all the flags, though, is the use of traditional African fabrics. Some flags feature insets of mud cloth, a batik-like fabric in which mud is used to create the patterns; others use Kente cloth. “The idea behind using different fabrics is to show that slaves came from different African tribes,” says Owens. “I also border every flag in these fabrics as a way of showing that all mankind goes back to Africa, because that’s where human life began.”
In his most recent creations, the artist has begun to experiment with materials other than fabric. His piece entitled “Still Slavery (Millennium Bondage),” for example, is constructed almost entirely of metal. A shiny metal field is crossed with weathered metal stripes to create the basic Confederate design. Half-dollar coins, eagle side up, are used for 12 of the stars. The 13th star, however, is represented by a coin bearing the likenesses of George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington. “It’s a coin that was only minted between 1949-1953,” says Owens. “A Clarksville preacher first showed it to me and told me he always carried the coin with him to prove that blacks have been used on American money. Since he had two of the coins, he insisted I have one and I told him it was going to go at the very center of this art piece.”
Owens feels that by integrating African materials and symbols of slavery into the Confederate flag design, he is offering an expression of what the Confederacy means to blacks today. He’s aware that not everyone agrees with him: “At the gallery talk I gave at Cheekwood, some blacks walked out, but so did some whites,” he says.
His next flag may provoke even stronger reaction. “I called the Ku Klux Klan’s phone number and ordered 13 of their insignia to use as the stars,” says Owens, of what will be the 20th flag of the series. “Now, I’m trying to get my hands on some Florida ballots with dimpled chads from last year’s presidential election to use as the stripes.”
