Museum Turns Down the Heat on Current Racial Segregation: Review of Gillian Laub’s “Southern Rites” at the Asheville Art Museum

Have you noticed how cool the temperature is in an art museum? That’s because the art is dead there, and if you don’t keep it cool, everything will begin to stink.

The Asheville Art Museum currently exhibits “Southern Rites,” by Gillian Laub, a show of photographs about the ongoing racial segregation of a certain place in South Georgia, where a certain kind of onion is the reigning crop. As we learn in one of Laub’s photos, it’s a place where road signs preach to you about God while pitching the glory of their onion burgers.

Laub’s show is a work of photojournalism that exposes that particular place’s racism by focusing on the fact that the schools there held racially segregated proms up until roughly 2010. Not only were there separate proms for white and black students, but students in first grade and up elected a set of black representatives and a set of white representatives for homecoming. As a work of photojournalism, Laub deserves praise for gaining the confidence of the brave people who were willing to speak up and allow themselves to be photographed for publication.

Laub’s disturbing visual story of a white supremacist realm in twenty-first-century America makes for strange viewing in the precise climate of the Asheville Art Museum. I expect art museums, though predictably cool, to bear some relation to the spirit of art—its freedom, its intellectual courage, its passion for truth. My expectation is often disappointed.

I am aware that art museums have financial pressures and political pressures to deal with. Sometimes, things just don’t add up. Laub’s exhibit is one of those times.

“Southern Rites” is an intellectual muddle. Although the title, “Southern Rites,” might tell you that its story is one that characterizes the southern United States, Laub admits she focused on only this particular place in South Georgia. No information is provided about the prevalence of racial segregation in any part of society in the South or anywhere else. In a nod to white nationalism’s presence in the North, an exhibit panel weakly states, “the scars of slavery and the legacy of segregation and race-based violence continue to limit the opportunities and hopes of many African American youth in the American South and throughout this country.” In fact, the organized killing of African Americans is not a legacy but a current and active practice far and wide across the country.

Laub knows white supremacy is a violent and current-day practice, and her exhibit includes the story of Norman Neesmith’s killing of 22-year-old Justin Patterson, a friend of several of Laub’s photographic subjects. As a white man who killed a black man, Neesmith served one year in a probation center. By the time the museum patron reaches this part of the exhibit, the climate seems not to be so cool. You’re living in whiteville, the air is stifling, and your legs feel heavy. So when you meet Norman Neesmith, it’s a struggle to remain standing, and your tears are welling.

And yet Laub asks us to focus on the rituals of teenhood in this onioney place, thus the “Rites” part of “Southern Rites.” One exhibit panel coolly begins, “Adolescents participate in elaborate coming-of-age rituals in myriad ways,” a statement that surely rings with the detachment of the anthropologist. She shows us in photos the special fingernail styles, the costumes of celebration, and the dancing. But if this racially segregated prom was a ritual, Laub utterly fails to define her framework for understanding ritual, to describe the ritual’s rules or who enforced or benefited from them. Can we not expect her to explore whether the ritual itself could have served the white residents’ urge to suppress black youth, an urge perhaps rooted in the white community’s ongoing opposition to federally mandated school desegregation? Could she not have explored how the black youth reinterpreted the ritual to serve their own urges?

Most of Laub’s photos are of the black residents of the place, and yet their presence is muted because the black voices are stifled in this exhibit. In the wall tags you will read time and time again the white folks’ ideological view of racial segregation. A white teen proclaims, “If I want to show the rebel flag, I’m going to, because that’s my heritage.” On the other side of the fence, you will read white teen Anna Rich’s statement in a school essay, “I find it ridiculous that the students at our school can find in themselves the barbaric (or, should I say, the pre-Civil War/Rights) mindset to keep the proms segregated.”

The black voices here have no such freedom to assert ideology. The danger to their very bodies reduces them to saying essentially, “We just want to be with our friends,” and, “We just want to stop getting killed.” As a student named Kera says, “It’s stupid that they won’t let us dance together.” And Keyke, looking back on her high school days at age 24, says, “I thought I’d move away for good. But I came back because this is home, and it was too hard to be far from my family. Black Lives Matter and all of the recordings of police brutality and the killing of unarmed Black men has been eye-opening for the country. The rest of the world is finally seeing what we’ve been dealing with forever.”

Laub quotes an elderly woman in a local church as saying, “Life is a lot better than in our cotton-picking days. We knew our place and we stayed in it. Our lives depended on that. Each generation it gets better. But when my cousin Betty’s grandson, Justin Patterson, was killed and the man got off, that was like the old days.” Laub and the “Southern Rites” curators provide no interpretation, but I will: “We have to keep to the place that the white people allow us, or they will kill us.”

Not only do the black voices in the exhibit feel drained of all resistance to injustice, Laub herself seems uninterested in black resistance. She might have tapped into black scholarship and black activism while she was in Georgia, but it seems her reach could not extend to Atlanta, where she might also have found black youth who have fled the place. As a consequence, the strongest ray of defiance to that place’s totalitarian whiteness comes from a small display case featuring Stacey Abrams, Georgia’s voting rights activist and candidate for governor, although Abrams’ fight does not directly bear on the subjects of Laub’s story.

Art museums, including the Asheville Art Museum, can be frigidly cool places. The chill is sometimes deepened when the museum asks things like, “How was the artist using formal elements to convey information in this piece,” when the artwork that they point to describes an incident of cruel and painful injustice, an injustice that, as yet, has barely been answered. The temperature drop in these moments is simply unbearable.

Along with this exhibit, you can buy a coffee table book of Laub’s exhibit photographs in the museum’s gift shop. The asking price is $50.00. If you visit the exhibit, and you’re still standing, and you go to the gift shop and pick up the book to leaf through, be careful. Someone at the front desk may ask you, “Isn’t that a beautiful book?” 

Let’s see how this plays if the exhibit takes up residence in Atlanta.