It was Eleanor’s birthday yesterday and we found ourselves at the Turner where they were hosting an exhibition called We Will Walk:

Not the kind of exhibit I’d normally get a kick out of but it’s probably the best one I’ve been to in a really long time. Here’s the official line:

We Will Walk – Art and Resistance in the American South is the first exhibition of its kind in the UK and reveals a little-known history shaped by the Civil Rights period in the 1950s and 60s.

It brings together sculptural assemblages, paintings and quilts by more than 20 African American artists from Alabama and surrounding states. The artists represented in the exhibition lived through the Civil Rights struggle and its aftermath, often in conditions of poverty. This art is characterised by the remaking and reuse of materials through necessity, custom, culture and innovation as well as a vital connection to place and nature. The exhibition also features Civil Rights music and documentary photographs that reveal the links between the art and its context.

I didn’t think I would enjoy it simply because my roots don’t lie anywhere near Alabama… but maybe that was the point. I don’t normally have my eyes opened by exhibitions (I guess you can see one too many) but this one is well worth talking about.

I came away with a new found respect for how, when people need to make art as a means of self-expression, they will find any means necessary - no matter what colour their skin. You can get very used to pressing some buttons at amazon to have supplies delivered as fast as humanly possible… and that can take away exactly how urgently you need to create to the point that you might be creating for the sake of it.

When the work you did on the back of a cardboard box over 100 years ago can move a man who’s not from your culture with no real understanding of what you went through, you really did something right.