“The museum was always lorded over you as an inner-city kid, especially if you’re from a public school in Baltimore,” says Hamza Walker, associate curator and director of education at the Renaissance Society. Looking at objects from distant cultures as a child, he says, he’d often find himself wondering what to think. “What am I supposed to learn from this goddamn spoon, or this marble bust, or this Brueghel painting? What is it trying to say? Maybe I wasn’t getting anything, but even an antagonistic stance can be healthy.” He didn’t know about Chinese culture or African culture in these periods. “But I wondered, can I unlock what is held within this carved spoon? Maybe not, and that’s OK.”
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Walker joined the Renaissance Society staff in 1994, after working at Urban Gateways and Chicago’s Public Art Program and cocurating exhibits at Randolph Street Gallery. His current curatorial effort, “All the Pretty Corpses,” juxtaposes eight artists whose work reflects goth culture; Walker writes in his catalog essay “that the dark side may well be upon us, and that ours is an era of Good versus Evil.” He calls Kacy Maddux’s elegant, bizarre drawings–showing humanlike shapes with organs but no heads–posthuman, suggesting that they question the head as the seat of consciousness. John Espinosa’s sculpture 150 % consists of two stuffed deer fused with hairless black “shadows” of their bodies. They lock “antlers” in an explosive angular form between them. Social themes are prominent, as they have been in most of Walker’s shows. Steven Shearer did an Internet search for “death metal bands” to find words to rearrange for his Poems, two ten-foot-high all-text wall paintings. Walker says that Shearer’s “incredibly crude phrases, like ‘suck my unholy vomit,’” are “inversions of positivist spiritual values, a response to the idea that the Christian right has a monopoly over moral values.” Two of Sterling Ruby’s three large faux-agitprop panels, installed at the show’s entrance, include texts mysteriously advocating for “the amorphous law” while the third includes images of genitalia.
Working with artists is the “high” of curating, Walker says–“discussing the larger world with them, and art as a place where we might try to make meaning and sense of the present. I have a deep belief in museums as a place where we reflect on what and who we are. The present may or may not achieve legibility through its art, but even a failure would be saying something–that the present is incredibly heterogeneous and may not make sense to us.”
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