Nell Gottlieb, Codex: Map of my childhood, 2020. 48” x 76”. Gouache, oil pastel and dirt. Photograph by Nash Baker.
Visit This Exhibit
January 12-May15, 2022
Open Wednesday – Sunday
11 AM – 4 PM CST
Accessibility
This exhibit is located throughout the Museum. It begins on the first floor, and is wheelchair accessible. An audio tour along with images of the installations on the second floor are available for those who are mobility impaired.
Reveal and Restore: Difficult History Through Art
On display January 12-May 15, 2022
Opening Reception January 29, 2022
In the artist’s own words:
Reveal and Restore: Difficult History Through Art focuses on the Wallace House, once a plantation, and today owned and programmed by Klein Arts & Culture. In the specificity of this place, we can view the arc of the American South from the conquest of the Muskogee Creek Nation to enslavement and the rise of the cotton economy, through emancipation, reconstruction, and the rise of Jim Crow, to the present time in which Black and white descendants of the place have come together to create a new narrative.
The exhibit speaks to my own journey as a daughter of the South and as an artist. It includes work I made about growing up in Birmingham AL during segregation and Jim Crow that brought me into discussions about the appropriation of Black experience and pain. The majority of the work presented relates to my experience of childhood summers spent in the ancestral home with my grandmother, in which I absorbed the ideology of the Lost Cause, took “mud baths “ in the red clay, swam in the creeks and found arrowheads in the fields. The ancestors were clearly present in the house and in my ideation. One column on the 2nd floor porch had names written in pencil from a long-ago house party, including that of Henry Walthall, whose role as Ben Cameron (the little Colonel) in Birth of a Nation was the stuff of family legend. It was subsequently painted over, becoming a secret of the house, joining the hiddenness of the house’s foundation in enslavement and violence.
In March 2021, I gave a talk for the Houston Chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women: Building for Social Justice: Reversing a Family Plantation Legacy. I described how my experience growing up in the Jim Crow South had influenced my art and then, in turn, my work with the Wallace House influenced my art practice.
About the artist
Nell Gottlieb works in multiple media to reexamine her coming of age, white and female in the Jim Crow South. Her ongoing project, Nostos Algos, considers the pain of returning to the South after a long absence, while confronting the racist mythologies and complicated legacies of the region. Gottlieb recently completed the Block Program of the Glassell School of Art at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and she has studied with many artists and craft practitioners in the U.S. and in Europe. She has shown her work in national, regional, and local juried shows and has two works in the Hobby Airport Collection. She serves as past-president of ClayHouston, has been on the board of the Visual Arts Alliance, and is a member of the Texas Sculpture Group. She holds a BA and MA (psychology) from Emory University and a PhD (sociology) from Boston University. She is professor emeritus of public health education at The University of Texas at Austin, where she taught from 1980-2011. A native of Alabama, she moved to Texas in 1980.