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Prophets and Storytellers
John Haberin New York City
Christopher Myers and Frieda Toranzo Jaeger
Umar Rashid and Jumana Manna
Christopher Myers singles out activists from many nations as prophets and storytellers. He does not know the half of it.
The artists at MoMA PS1 might well admire his lofty goals, his global reach, and his knowledge of history. In fact, they share them, and they, too, are telling stories. Frieda Toranzo Jaeger may seem fixed on an extraterrestrial future and art-historical past, but her mind is clearly on gender, race, and liberation now. 
Umar Rashid knows enough to return with confidence to lessons from an actual revolution that gave rise to Haiti as an independent nation. And Jumana Manna takes those lessons to heart when it comes to scarcity, climate change, and politics in Africa and the Middle East.
You say you want a revolution
What is a prophet but a storyteller—one with a talent for convincing others that the stories they tell themselves will come true? Christopher Myers singles out just six of them, but with more than enough stories to their credit. They lived from the early nineteenth century to the present one and from Virginia to China. They spoke for people as diverse as Native Americans, Christians, Africans, and Maori. Myers is himself a storyteller, and he wants to tell their stories, too, as "The Hands of Strange Children."
He is at his best when he does, but as stories with no obvious beginning or ending. At first, I fear, one might see only icons instead. Wovoka, Nongqawuse, Nat Turner, Hong Xiuquan, Te Ua Haumene, and Alice Lawkena all have works to themselves, close to life-size. They appear in stained glass and dyed fabric that bring out their many colors and their pride. Rays of light radiate a man's forehead, feathers and the ends of a bandana from a woman's. She raises her arms above her head as well, for a commanding stride.
Their backgrounds should tell you something: they lived under colonialism or outright slavery and fought against it. For those like me who did not know their stories or even most of their names, the gallery supplies a "glossary of characters." It identifies them as "revolutionary prophets," all but one a religious leader. Turner, too, it turns out, was a preacher. They appear alone, though, as if preaching only to you.
Plainly Myers is a mythmaker, too, of a much-needed but duly fashionable variety. Diversity in art can be as uncritical and uplifting as what it has begun to replace, as with "The Glamour Project" and Kehinde Wiley. Tapestry as painting and an heir to native traditions has grown so common that I hesitate once more to mention it, although Myers has something to contribute. Sewn edges enable flat colors and decorative patterns to impinge on one another, taking their subjects into physical or psychological depths. His stained glass rests in front of gallery windows, bringing out the light. Still, you have not begun to hear stories until you come upon a diorama, in a room to itself at back.
You may associate a diorama with a single unfolding narrative—or, alternatively, a panoramic perspective that carries the eye in every direction. Here the work curves forward at left and right, placing the viewer at its center. It becomes a story that the eye can enter anywhere but not so easily find its place. What is that white ship or fortress at left, the sailing ships at center, or the sole ship with a person of color lashed to it at right? What is a zebra doing here, what is on fire, and are the skulls frightening or just something for the living, like a dance cotillion, to overcome? They belong to entire histories, of the slave trade, and to deeper myths, but what is past and what is still to come?
And whose stories are they? Do they exist in the mind of the black woman reading to children or the enormous book in her hands? Nothing supplies the answers, and nothing in the solo portraits will look as simple once you ask. One figure kneels as if unable to lead, her head surrounded by interlocking strips of suggestive symbols—including a snake, a crab, a black hand, and an eye. Turner himself lies on his back, exposed to the elements or to something worse. Not all strange children become prophets, and not every revolution has a happy ending.
Retreat to New York
One has an unexplained fondness for the Northern Renaissance, but with its garden of earthly delights transplanted to a public swimming pool. The other recounts Third World history, but his Zulu Nation has "retreated to the Bronx." The first loves fancy cars, but as a prelude to space travel. The second brings KFC to his Caribbean picnic, in the futuristic city of Novum Eboracum. In other words, both are an unholy mess, and their art is every bit as silly as it sounds. Still, they have serious themes of past and present oppression.
Such is diversity in art now, a time of anime and graphic novels. It may not be altogether coherent, but who needs coherence when you can follow the course of history and have some fun? You can, that is, with Frieda Toranzo Jaeger and Umar Rashid at MoMA PS1. Rashid may even gain in ingenuity and coherence as his novel unfolds. Start, though, further back in time with Toranzo Jaeger. Her art history and futurism have a single impulse, as "Autonomous Drive."
Toranzo Jaeger looks to artists like Lucas Cranach and their paintings of Venus and Sappho as a model for a lesbian feminist art now. If she is praying to a higher goddess, she also likes how they set altarpieces over several panels. Her constructions may look clumsier than a Renaissance triptych, in one case with a diamond at its center. Yet she likes, too, that her hinges are showing. For her, it is just the first step toward the engineering marvel of a BMW, a Tesla, or the spaceships of tomorrow. She also sees hybrid cars as emblems of hybrid genders and African American art.
If that sounds lost in space, she is taking the long view, like Onyeka Igwe in Africa itself. She relies on bright tones and embroidery at a time of hybrid tapestry and painting, with a bow to quilting and folk art. She gives Sappho plush seating and covers a "cyber-truck" with flowers. She also cuts off her compositions, so that it gets hard to know when she has left planet earth. Laugh all you want, but look to the skies. For a more earthly narrative, you always have Rashid and "Ancien Regime Change."
The artists divide a wing neatly between them, so take your pick. Rashid does indeed turn history into a graphic novel, with humongous titles in place of hand-lettering. They may not bear repeating, but his flat colors do, multiplying into active participants in fancy colonial dress. If a few come with buckets of fried chicken, they deserve a treat now and again. His history also grows more provocative, with a focus on Haiti's war for independence, and more convincing as Haitians like Myrlande Constant and the Afro-Caribbean diaspora head north. Rashid had already looked to the "Kingdom of Harlem" in 2017, and Novum Eboracum is just Latin for New York—after a Roman settlement in Britain that eventually became York.
Antiquity here also has room for the Guyana Girls, and Rashid gives it further credence with fake antiquities in drawings and priestly vestments. He tries his hand at eighteenth-century formal portraits and Persian miniatures as well. It is asking a lot of history or the viewer, but bear in mind that colonial wars were brutal and real. Rashid's hero "escapes in a Ferrari whilst . . . Black and White Jesus look on in awe and terror." I am, for once, with Jesus.
Finding sustenance
The first murder was a family affair. It was also a conflict between two ways of life in civilizations yet to come. Abel was the herder of sheep and Cain the farmer, the tiller of soil—and both bases for community were in time to displace the more rootless, chancier lives of hunter gatherers, taking what nourishment they can find. Could that be the fate of displaced peoples on a threatened planet today? Jumana Manna asks just who will survive, as "Break, Take, Erase, Tally."
Sure enough, Manna's two hour-long films are about two forms of sustenance. Wild Relatives from 2015 tracks the fate of seeds scattered to the winds. They begin in fields of plenty and live or die in passing through the lab. Her latest, Foragers, concerns just what it says—those who gather from a land that they cannot call their own. It takes care, including care for the earth and for one another, and the families at its center have been at it for a long time along with their dogs. True to her theme of good eats, the old man calls them Cookie and Carob.
Of course, the tale of Cain and Abel has other things in mind, too—right and wrong, the origins of a lasting stain on the human race, sacrifice, and truth to an all-seeing, inscrutable god. Manna has her moral lessons as well, about "the slow violence of industrial agriculture" and the persistence of those who care. As a Palestinian, she can easily imagine a stateless existence on inhospitable soil. Her show's very layout poses a choice, with each film to one side of central rooms for sculpture. She calls her plinths and assemblages khabyas, for an already vanishing form of grain storage. Their name means "the things that hide" from a fragile existence.
For all that, she does not come across as a crusader, and villains are hard to find. Those who tend the orchards, their fruit, and their seeds pronounce them good, and the lab itself looks like its brother's keeper—a place for study, preservation, and dissemination rather than breaking, taking, and tally. The land, too, seems lush in color and in its bounty, from the fruit trees to hills covered in wild flowers as far as the eye can see. The foragers with their dogs might almost be hikers out for a sunny afternoon on a gently challenging slope. The sculpture looks downright cute as well, with windowed slabs that tilt and swell. They might just as easily be cartoon characters as preindustrial architecture.
Everything for Manna is interesting, in itself and for its role in sustaining life. The earth and humanity alike are endangered by politics, economics, and climate change, the subject of "Coal + Ice" at Asia Society, but both seem likely to last another day. She shares MoMA PS1 with further morality tales about colonialism and race, from Frieda Toranzo Jaeger and Umar Rashid. They, too, have their cartoon features, as does a cuddly four-armed totem by Poncili Creación in the museum's two-story gallery, if only for a few weeks. She also overlaps "Life Between Buildings," a show all about garden cities. Its patches of green in bleak surroundings looks more plausible in Manna's Middle East.
Her long, slow films take good care in themselves. Still, no one is likely to sit through them both, making any moral or even a narrative hard to find. (I ducked in and out, back and forth, so take my criticism with a grain or seed or salt.) The sculptures are lighter still in narrative or in weight. They become cylindrical in a second room, as containers for true preservation, like those of the black potters of South Carolina at the Met. Still, the films are moving in their promise, and if it die it may yet bringeth forth much fruit.
Christopher Myers ran at James Cohan through April 2, 2022. Frieda Toranzo Jaeger and Umar Rashid ran at MoMA PS1 through March 13, 2023, Jumana Manna through April 17.