Reverberation
Newport Art Museum, 2020
–Francine Weiss, Curator, Newport Art Museum
I approached Call and Response thinking of it as a conversation between present and past, and it was important to me to have that conversation be with an underrepresented voice from the Museum’s collection. The title of Claudia Widdiss’s Sculpture, Hearing Impaired, caught my attention immediately.
Widdiss’ sculpture is of two nude female figures, one crouched and one standing, with their hands covering their ears. I began my response to Hearing Impaired by making graphite rubbings of its surface. This inherently haptic process signifies a specific time—I am here—that galvanizes presence in our surroundings and a moment of reflection on the past. I used those preliminary rubbings—overlapping, flipping and arranging the imagery physically in my studio and digitally on my computer to plan a composition. I found that by mirroring and overlapping the crouched figure just slightly, the hands that had once been covering her ears looked like they were reaching out to embrace the now-mirrored figure before her, and built my composition around the embracing women.
In the midst of all this, I had the opportunity to speak with Widdiss by phone, and hear the story behind Hearing Impaired directly. The resulting installation is a visual reverberation of our conversation. For her, Hearing Impaired was in response to being a black woman living through lies of constantly being told what wasn’t possible, what she couldn’t achieve. I wanted to elevate, support and amplify the power and possibility of her women, and arrived at these four ceiling-to-floor columns as a symbol of strength and stability.