Andrea Tosten - photo: Doug Land
There is a new collection of art showing as part of Dallas’ Cluley Projects under the title, GRIFFE, that you need to see. And when I say that, I don’t mean it in a ‘Hey, you might wanna check this out” sense. I mean, you need to make a concerted effort to get yourself to the gallery and see this show.
I am not someone who believes that every piece of art needs to be provocative, or force us to probe for its layered meaning, or even illicit deeper conversations. But I am also not disappointed when they do, and these selected works from Andrea Tosten most certainly provide all of the above in the best possible way.
Talking with Ms. Tosten, you get the immediate feeling that you are speaking to an academic, a genealogist, a sociologist, and a constant seeker of knowledge who just happens to share the results of her research and study in the form of art, instead of publications and academic journals. Like me, Andrea is a woman with roots in Louisiana, and knows that the history of most of the people from that part of the world is often…complicated. Those complications feature heavily in her quest for better understanding of herself, her relatives, and in the collection itself.
Andera's video installation (partial) - PLEASE DON'T DRIVE ME, 2022
GRIFFE is a title and term that many will not know, but it is integral to the work on display. In her self-description of the show, this passage immediately caught my attention: “I am fascinated by the individual words that are used as names for [people of mixed backgrounds] because they point to a strange type of “math”. These names came into wide use between 1582 and 1859 and eventually declined in usage. For instance, griffe is defined in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as 1) a person of three-quarter black and one-quarter white ancestry.” The idea that our daily vernacular once contained myriad descriptions of human beings to such a level of specificity is a little chilling, to be sure, but no more so than the many insensitive and derogatory terms that are sadly still in use today. One of my favorite pieces in the show incorporates a collection of these strange terms, that were used to describe the percentages of different ethnicities in a person’s historical bloodline.
Andrea told me about a collection of essays that her father introduced her to, one of which was written about a distant relative of hers who attempted to get her race on her birth certificate changed from “Black” to “White” but was denied by the Louisiana government because her great-great-great-great grandmother was an enslaved black woman. Were this story part of a historical anecdote from a distant, misguided past, it would still seem deeply inappropriate and racist, but it wasn’t. This happened in 1982.
Through these and many other tales that are woven into her history, Andrea Tosten says that she aims to recontextualize and conceptualize her Catholic upbringing, background, and her place in history through letterforms, paper, and sewing. GRIFFE captures them with grace, layers of meaning, and certainly begs the viewer to have deeper, more meaningful conversations.
YOU HAVE TO TAKE IT APART, 2021
EPISTOLARY PAPER QUILT, 2017
CREOLE OR NEGRO, 2022
PATOIS PANGRAM, 2019
GRIFFE runs from through March 19, 2022, Cluley Projects, Dallas, TX (curated by Nell Potasznik-Langford)
or visit Cluley Projects for more informaiton
Article & Photos: Mouty Shackelford
