Jimmy Friday

by Gean Moreno

The late Barbadian poet Kamau Braithwaite contrasted pebbles and monuments. In post-plantation societies, he proposed, there were something like pebble languages, inventive modes of expression that emerge among ordinary folks and imbue the places where they live not only with meaning but also rebellious possibilities in the context of imposed social relations. Of course, to speak of ordinary folks in post-plantation societies is to speak of complex cultural relay points and the silting of often incommensurable histories, and to know that the vibrational heat that arises out of their exchanges has often provided cultural and affective shelter in the face of institutional abandonment and disparagement. Braithwaite found pebble languages in those natty betterments of metropolitan languages that are often called creole, patois, dialect, and slang—languages that should be recognized as future languages. That is, the languages of viable futures beyond algorithmic fetishization, singularity dreams, total surveillance, etc. Braithwaite deftly incorporated (and added to) pebble languages in his poems through bold phonetic innovation, unexpected spelling, and structurally breaking up words. But through enjambment, the graphic layout of his pages, and his font selections, he tells us about another kind pebble language, one that is more visual than verbal or auditory. I don’t quite want to call it “fragmentary-reiterative collage” and just leave it at that, even if such a designation would do in a pinch. While his approach has to do with collage, it has as much to do with the semiotic and affective elasticity that repetition, stressed by improvisational flourishes, can generate. And it also has to do with how this capacity to push signifying structures to be more than it seems possible they could be is inseparable from the very economy—both economy of means and real economic contexts—it sprouts from.

Artist Jimmy Friday infuses his works—collages he began meticulously assembling with mass media images culled from magazines in 1976 in the back room of the junior college library of his native Tulsa where he worked as an aide—with a pebble language that has a commemorative streak. Or, if you prefer, he teaches us that beyond the dominant modality of the monument as grandiloquent, overbearing, and overwrought in ways that disavow all the pain the commemorated subjects of our colonial histories often generate, there may be other keys in which monuments can be deployed, other arrangements for other kinds of heroes. We can call what Friday does monumentalizing from below, if by that we mean a strategy to build commemorative structures to highlight events and individuals, from Sojourner Truth and Rosa Parks to Jackie Robinson and Malcolm X,  who have forced the very course of colonial historical inertia to detour, to stall, to face crisis, to be forced to reinvent itself on the way to coming closer to coming apart.

Having invented a nimble formal creole for the monument, Friday often returns to a particular place and historical occasion: the Greenwood District. He commemorates not only the horrific massacre of May 31, 1921 during which rabid white mobs descended on the prosperous Black neighborhood, killing hundreds and burning thousands of homes and businesses, but also the resilience its survivors displayed in the holocaust’s aftermath. His works also recall the triumph of “Black Wall Street” as it rose to prominence at the turn of the century in the very heart of Jim Crow America, when more than ten thousand residents lived at one of the first epicenters of Black commerce and wealth. Often through harrowing juxtaposition, Friday tells the history of the Greenwood District in such a forcefully clear and compelling way that it cannot help but serve as an allegory for the tragic undertow of our post-plantation history, brimming with injustice and missed opportunities, as well as for the small victories of self-determination and unwavering resilience that are part of its past—and certainly its future.

GEAN MORENO

Gean Moreno is the Director of the Knight Foundation Art + Research Center at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. He has curated exhibitions dedicated to the work of Terry Adkins, Hélio Oiticica, and Ettore Sottsass. In 2017, he served on the advisory board for the Whitney Biennial and in 2018 served as an advisor to the Creative Time Summit.