In His Element

Willie Birch of the Seventh Ward says: “I believe that it’s the culture here that will do the most to bring us back.”

By Bill Sasser, OXFORD AMERICAN

Four paintings in a series: A house lies skewed in the middle of an empty Street, its clapboards turned into undulating waves by the chaos of wind and water. A burly guy dressed in pleasure-club regalia offers a raised hand and a big smile, a second-line shout-out seeming to hang over his velvet fedora. A police officer behind crime-scene tape tallies bullet casings in front of a row of shotgun houses as blue lights swirl. A subtropical riot of flowers and vines curl upward from a quiet backyard.

Composed in black, white, and infinite shades of gray, these acrylic and charcoal paintings by the artist Willie Birch hang together not only as works of art but as stories of a time and a place. The wrecked house is a tribute to an uncle who lost his home in the flood. The second liner is Birch’s neighbor, “Big Ed” Buckner. Etc. That it is no longer apparent which scene came first—devastation or a Sunday-afternoon celebration—is statement itself on life in this epic, manic-depressive city of the most ecstatic highs and darkest lows. And as always in New Orleans, crime scenes and mesmerizing beauty often bleed into the same frame.

Two shows of Birch’s art ran last fall in crucial New Orleans venues—one at the Contemporary Arts Center of pre-Katrina work titled “Celebrating Freedom,” and a second at nearby Arthur Roger Gallery drawn from post-flood inspiration called “Home Sweet Home.”

“When anyone brings up the Contemporary Arts Center, I always tell them that I know all about that building—when I was a young man, just before I left New Orleans, I was mopping those floors when it was still a warehouse for K&B drugstores,” says Birch, now sixty-five, who as a teenager took part in sit-ins and Civil Rights demonstrations in New Orleans. “As a young artist back in those days, that was the job that I ended up with in this city.”

Contrary, sometimes cantankerous, given to bold gestures and visionary statements that mix the erudition of a college professor with the braggadocio of a Mardi Gras Indian chief, Birch has, in many ways, come full circle since Katrina.

For eleven weeks starting in November, Birch will be among eighty artists featured in Prospect. 1 New Orleans, the largest international art biennial ever held in the U.S.

In a city still rebounding from disaster, Birch sees culture as pivotal to its rebirth.

“This is one of the few places that artistically is still untapped—the visuals here are crying to be made into something that’s very unique,” says Birch. “Young artists ask me, ”Mr. Birch, if you were me, where would you move?” I would move to Berlin, or I would move to New Orleans.”

For Birch, homecomings to New Orleans have been as important to his journey as when he first left the city where he was born.

The son of a housekeeper, Birch grew up in the Magnolia public-housing projects. His creativity and interest in art were first recognized by C. Maxine Holtry Daniels, a teacher who used an inheritance to start a free art program at the YMCA. The program inspired Birch on a course that would take him to the Maryland Institute of Arts and into the New York art world.

His breakthrough in New York came in the mid-’80s with a series of papier-mâché sculptures that explored black identity and culture- work that for the first time combined his fine arts background with a newfound interest in folk art.

The sculptures were inspired by a visit home to New Orleans, when he viewed a fifteenth-century papier-mâché crucifix on display in St. Louis Cathedral. “Some part of me is always searching for metaphor, and paper became metaphor to me for what is fragile and what is wasteful in this culture, and the idea of challenging what is considered precious,” Birch explains. On the same trip, he also discovered for himself such Southern folk artists as Sister Gertrude Morgan, David Butler, and Howard Finster. A sculpture called “Pig Crossing the Highway,” made from bubblegum by Nellie Mae Rowe, particularly fascinated him. “It was this little hideous piece, and it was beautiful!” Birch remembers. “Me being from New York, where the idea in art is always that the ugly is actually beautiful, I could relate to this, and as an African American from the South I got the spiritual aspect of why she made this piece.

“In New York, everything is about analyzing how marks are made—the process. I’ll drag my ass across a piece of paper if I have to, to make the marks I want, but I care far less about how I do it than the stories my art is telling…. Part of the beauty of [New Orleans] is that things may be hard, but it-doesn’t stop you from understanding the beauty of life at any moment. Here you learn to take a disadvantage and turn it into an advantage, to improvise with what you got. My own story is like a fantasy in terms of New Orleans—I’m from every place I shouldn’t be for someone who”s doing what he’s doing.”

In 1993, Birch won a Guggenheim Fellowship to create a body of work about growing up in New Orleans. After travels in Africa, Spain, and Latin America to experience the cultures that gave birth to his city, he turned an old shotgun house in the Seventh Ward into a studio. New Orleans had become a hotbed of folk and outsider art and Birch soon visited Barrister’s Gallery in the French Quarter, where owner Andy Antippas presided over a subterranean den of local self-taught prodigies. Birch was blown away, particularly by the work of Roy Ferdinand. Like Birch, Ferdinand came from a rough New Orleans neighborhood. But unlike Birch, he dropped out of high school and he would never live outside of New Orleans.

Using poster-board and whatever art materials he could buy at drugstores, Ferdinand drew the crime scenes, gangstas, and all too common mayhem on the street around him. He also drew portraits of the everyday folks who live in the same neighborhood—smiling grandmothers, ministers performing baptisms, harmlessly hustling eccentrics, young black Madonnas with children in their arms.

“I looked and said all this training of mine is full of it!” Birch recalls. “These cats were making work that was real, Roy’s in particular.”

Beyond the autobiographical, near-documentary subject matter of Ferdinand s work, Birch perceived a style that was intrinsically New Orleanian: a natural primitiveness of skewed perspectives and flat primary colors, with Cubist elements and African patterning. “I realized there was something here that was not in my academically trained experience. I had to go to school to learn all of these things he came up with through his own invention and inconsistencies.”

A tragic figure, who could be by turns wildly funny, disarmingly charming, and utterly self-destructive, Ferdinand died of cancer in 2004 at age forty-five. “Roy’s work frightens a lot of people, but he was one of the artists I feel closest to in terms of trying to say something about our existence—something about his madness and form forces you to see things in different ways,” remembers Birch. “He was very inventive, particularly his crude black continuous line, his repetitions and angles that have an almost syncopated rhythm. I was constantly looking for a way of drawing that was uniquely New Orleans and Roy was a pivotal point in me developing that.”

After all his world-traveling, Birch decided to stay put in New Orleans and, at fifty-five, he abruptly dropped the papier-mâché sculpting that had defined him.

He initiated a series of oversized color portraits of everyday black New Orleans—people who were often misunderstood or ignored by the larger culture. A few years later, he shifted to black and white, which he sees as a metaphor for the city’s often stark divisions. “I was looking at these kids on my street, these little gangbangers and druggies, and they were all wearing black and white,” he remembers. “I looked around and realized that visually this whole city could be thought of in terms of black and white, and it behooves me to try to break that down, to get people to talk about what I would call ”systematic racism.” How do you force all the poor people into a certain area and give them inferior schools, and then they shoot and kill each other and you wonder why? That’s a situation that’s been created.”

Birch began combining the images in diptychs, triptychs, and quadtychs, lending a narrative to what has become his ongoing visual epic of black New Orleans.

His new work is suffused with such “African retentions” as rhythmic patterning, mythological references, and numerology. Layers of acrylic paint, charcoal, and fixative swash lend his black-and-white paintings an almost tactile quality.

“We live in this city where color is abundant, so as an artist who’s always gone against the grain I wanted to force people to see the color themselves, to make them active participants,” he says. “If you look at all of these rich layers of gray, they’re full of color.”

From the stoop of his front porch in the Seventh Ward, Birch can witness both the promise and darkness of the re-emerging New Orleans. Last summer, a teenaged boy was shot and killed across the street from his house. A week later, fifty children graduated from the summer arts program sponsored by The Porch, a community nonprofit he founded two blocks away. Birch says, “What has happened here with Katrina has been unprecedented and it needs to be recorded not just by journalists and historians, but artists.”

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