Artist Renee Stout explores artistic dualities

Contemporary African-American artist discusses history and spirituality

Artist Renee Stout's work is at once mysterious and accessible, mystical yet rooted in reality. For these and many other reasons it is fitting that she named the second of her two talks, which took place last Friday "Dualing Dualities."

Stout opened her talk by telling how, as a child during museum trips, she used to ponder over the ancient Egyptian exhibits in which no explanation was given for the objects displayed. In contrast, Stout's slide presentations were set up as conversations.The packed audience was encouraged to ask questions and make comments. Stout told the personal, historical, and fictional stories behind many of her pieces.

Telling stories, whether verbally, as during her presentation, or representationally through her work, is something that Stout feels she has to do. Revealing herself isn't easy, though. "I have this fear of being misunderstood so sometimes I give too much information." Her current direction is to learn how to "pare down [and just] give the essence. Just like poets." For Stout, "making art is about creating beauty." She seeks to deal with what's going on in her community while "trying to put a face on spirituality."

As an African-American woman, Stout said she has "felt rich, full of experience, and loved" yet she also recognizes societies' harsh realities. She believes in art as healing and said, "I'm always trying to find order in the chaos, that's why I make art."

"Duality" plays itself out in Stouts' work in the form of tugs between the feminine and the masculine, the African and the African-American, spirituality and the truth embeded in history, ancestors and the living. Assistant Professor of Art Johnnny Coleman described her work as enveloping "call and response." In looking at Stout's work, the fuzzy line society imposes between these seeming "dualities" is blurred further.

Stout creates sculptures and installations out of found and donated objects as well as her own self, "I love that make-do aesthetic." For example, she has used old doors, fences, manequins, furniture, computers, photos, fabric, beads, feathers, dirt, coffee grounds, paint, as well as her own hair, finger nails and words in her pieces.

Stout said she has fun while making her work which can be described as many-layered, very detailed, carefully crafted. Even though her art-making is very much a process of self-exploration, Stout said she is able to give up her work to the public. "The finished product is for the viewer. Everything I need I get through the process."

Stout was originally trained as a painter. The photographic-reality of her early paintings of household objects and scenes of her hometown of Pittsburg evolved into her current style of "metaphoric" sculpture because she found painting too restrictive. Stout declared that she "unlearned structure and learned energy" while working at a Montessori school with young children after moving to Washington, D.C. in 1985.

It was at this point that Stout began to strongly identify with the Congo tradition of making "menkisi," or objects which can be used to heal, contact ancestors, and ward off evil. Making menkisi is how Stout helps herself explain and understand her own problems as well as societal problems she lives with in her D.C. neighborhood.

Stout wants to deal with what's going on in her community in her work. In speaking of freedom fighters such as John Brown who inspire her work she said, "As long as society has the imbalance it does there's gonna be someone to step up to the plate and say 'we've had enough'."