Review: ‘Call and Response’ at the Carlos Museum is gorgeous, profound

“Call and Response” is the first Atlanta show I know of that takes seriously all the simultaneous levels on which we encounter objects in a museum of art and archaeology.

Credit: Photo courtesy of the Carlos Museum/Mike Jensen

Credit: Photo courtesy of the Carlos Museum/Mike Jensen

On one level, they were made by long-dead cultures and object creators. They have a history, and that history includes what the cultures thought about the objects they or their ancestors made.

On another level, objects belong to the descendants of the cultures that created them. They “speak” to specific communities in ways they do not speak to others.

On yet another level, objects are always more than “mere objects” because we the viewers have different reactions to them — aesthetic, religious, psychological and more. We share this capacity for relationship with objects with almost all human beings, even though each response is, on some level, unique to each person.

This is not an easy thing to wrap your head around. “Call and Response” tackles the problem in a variety of ways.

The installations in the show’s five galleries are individual responses to five separate objects — one per gallery — but the response involves more than one person’s reaction and input.

Credit: Photo courtesy of the Carlos Museum/Mike Jensen

Credit: Photo courtesy of the Carlos Museum/Mike Jensen

One object is a Mende mask from Sierra Leone. Worn only by women, it is used in ritual dances to the present day. Olufani chose it in part because of his discovery of his Mende origins through DNA samples. He video-documented the dance itself and the responses of three American women also of Mende descent and responded creatively to the mask in a wall-spanning work.

Another object is a set of ceramic dog sculptures used in ancient funerary rites in the Colima region of Mexico. Julio Medina, assistant professor of dance and movement studies at Emory University, responded to the objects because of his family connections to Colima and because the dogs’ funerary function inspired him to pose them next to an altar honoring his recently deceased grandmother. He also created a video honoring his grandmother in which he dances in the realm of the afterlife as he imagines his ancestors pictured in it.

Credit: Photo by Felipe Barral & IGNI Productions

Credit: Photo by Felipe Barral & IGNI Productions

In the adjacent gallery, the dominant feature is a funerary portrait of a woman from ancient Palmyra, a city and state between the Roman and Parthian empires in what is now part of Syria. Ruth Allen, the Carlos Museum curator of Greek and Roman art, created a brief historical survey of Palmyra in wall text and photographs and solicited responses from four Syrian refugee women living in Atlanta.

In four individual video interviews, the women respond to the funerary sculpture as a portrait of an ancestor who was and is like themselves, meeting challenges that now include residence in a new place that offers safety from dangerous circumstances.

Credit: Photo courtesy of the Carlos Museum/Mike Jensen

Credit: Photo courtesy of the Carlos Museum/Mike Jensen

Then comes a gallery in which the object is a symbol-laden 19th-century map of a sacred mountain in India that practitioners of the Jain religion ascend during an annual festival. Worshippers in the Jain temple in Norcross, Georgia, ascend that mountain in spirit through rituals involving a symbolic map. Emory University Associate Professor of Religion Ellen Gough provides video documentation of both ceremonies and a touch screen through which visitors can learn more about the ceremony.

Last and in some ways most emotionally complex is a stele from ancient Egypt. It contains a letter from a daughter to her deceased mother, asking for her continued motherly protection from her place in the afterlife. Melinda Hartwig, curator of ancient Egyptian, Nubian and Near Eastern art, has added an adjacent table where visitors can write notes to any deceased person with whom they feel a connection.

Credit: Photo courtesy of the Carlos Museum/Mike Jensen

Credit: Photo courtesy of the Carlos Museum/Mike Jensen

The Carlos Museum objects from which these curators felt the call come from five very different parts of the ancient or not-so-ancient world — the traditional Mende mask and Jain map could be considered part of contemporary Mende and Jain culture.

But all five objects, and the people responding to them, either the commissioned curators or museum visitors, are situated in today’s Atlanta.

Visitors can respond to “Call and Response” on many levels, one of which is a new relationship to physical objects in today’s dematerialized, digital world. Each visitor comes from a different community and set of personal assumptions, and each is likely to take away a different lesson — not the least of these would be a fresh realization of how universal the appreciation of the beauty and the value of physical objects is.

Across the planet, these objects ground communities in the present while connecting them with the past. Here in Atlanta, they can also connect people with different cultures that might seem at first to have little in common. For all these reasons, “Call and Response” is a profound and extraordinary exhibit that deserves our attention — and at least one visit.

ART REVIEW

“Call and Response”

Through June 22 at Michael C. Carlos Museum. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, noon-5 p.m. Sunday. Adults, $10; seniors and ages 6-17, $8. 571 S. Kilgo Circle NE, Atlanta. carlos.emory.edu

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Jerry Cullum’s reviews and essays have appeared in Art Papers magazine, Raw Vision, Art in America, ARTnews, International Review of African American Art and many other popular and scholarly journals. In 2020, he was awarded the Rabkin Prize for his outstanding contribution to arts journalism.

Credit: ArtsATL

Credit: ArtsATL

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