David Boatwright, known for his murals around Charleston, considers himself a “Southern artist.” He makes narrative acrylic paintings that often include quintessentially Southern symbols like alligators and Spanish moss alongside pop culture motifs like Coca-Cola cans and pin-up girls.
With his latest show in the Aiken-Rhett House, That’s All Folks! he offers 13 paintings which were nearly all created for and inspired by the Aiken-Rhett House and its history.
If the walls of the 1820s era house museum could talk, they’d tell two distinctly different tales: one of urban life in antebellum Charleston through the eyes of the powerful and wealthy governor, William Aiken Jr., and his wife, and a totally different story from the perspective of enslaved Africans who maintained their house, property and way of life.
Boatwright’s paintings make many nods to the “as-found” preservation approach of the house, which includes furniture, architecture and finishes that have not been altered since the mid-19th century. His site-specific paintings take inspiration especially from the Aiken family art collection and how the many portraits on the walls do not represent the enslaved individuals who lived there.
“Most of the subjects in (my) paintings start off with images of the family portraits and artworks,” Boatwright said. “At the same time, it is impossible to not be aware that the quality of the family’s life was in large part derived from the labors of the enslaved population, so I felt the need to acknowledge that.”
Artistic acknowledgement
One work in the exhibit exemplifies this concept in a direct way: a six-foot tall painting titled “Dorcas and Harriet,” displayed in the house’s double parlor. Boatwright used archival images plus his imagination to inform the portrait, which depicts Harriet Lowndes Aiken standing beside and at equal height to Dorcas Richardson, one of the enslaved women that accompanied Harriet to her new home when she married Aiken in 1831.
Behind the two female figures, there’s a chipped blue and white china plate, and further beyond that, a house with what appears to be spirits of the enslaved floating above it. The motif brings to mind the diagrams that show the inhumane living conditions that enslaved Africans endured during the Middle Passage.
“That’s the overarching premise, to acknowledge what went on here,” Boatwright said.
Another painting honors Leonard Norris, based on a daguerreotype taken when he was an elderly, freed man, with a forlorn expression on his face.
“He wasn’t a household slave here, but in Arlington, Va.,” Boatwright explained. “But of course, there are not many photographs from that era, and this one kind of knocked me out.”
Across the room from this portrait, an enslaved Confederate soldier wears a name patch, calling to mind the coveralls a mechanic in 1960s America might wear, his name reading “True.” The juxtaposition of modern moments among antebellum inspiration results in a show of complex paintings that seem to say many things at once.
Boatwright’s sense of whimsy brings a sort of levity to the show’s dark subject matter. Examples: hands reaching from beyond the painting’s plane to offer you a cold drink, a woman basking in the sun next to an alligator and a happy puppy barking in the foreground of a cotton field.
Narrative impulses
“To me, a successful painting has to work on several levels,” Boatwright writes on his website. “It should have elements of humor, or sexual tension, or a political sense or all three, and it must be painted in a way that supports the subject.”
Instead of approaching the canvas with a preconceived idea of what he wants the painting to mean, Boatwright said, he starts with the “germ of an idea” and responds intuitively to his figures and the world they exist in. In addition to his work as a painter, Boatwright is also a documentary filmmaker, and the impulse to narrate drives everything he creates.
“I start with the figure and then I think about letting a story form, loosely … People invariably ask, what does it mean? For me, nothing I put in there is random. (It comes from asking) is this honest, is it authentic? Is it right for the figure, the character, does it say something about the character?”
Boatwright’s vast and nostalgic visual vocabulary uses elements of advertising culture, which (at least partly) explains why Coca-Cola cans appear in multiple works. The symbol might also point to a statement on exploitation, and how we frame it — historically and literally.
Most of the paintings in That’s All Folks! include a painted frame on the canvas, with a tattered, run-down effect just like the physical frames in the house.
Meanwhile the painting that welcomes viewers into the exhibition is a black-and-white sort of title card, referencing Boatwright’s love for film, and including diverse references — from a James Brown-esque figure to a baton twirler. The title itself, That’s All Folks!, hints at what Boatwright wants his viewer to get from the show: a sense of how universal the human experience is. His own portrait appears multiple times in the paintings, reiterating that it’s his own personal insertion of narrative on the complex history of the space.
“I’d like for viewers to feel the political nature of the subject in this space, and have a sense of the humanity that has passed through here. And then, honoring that … I also want it to be beautiful, and a little humorous if it can be. (It’s about) the human story; the beauty and the pain.”
That’s All Folks! is on view now through Nov. 11. Included with daily admission to the Aiken Rhett House Museum. Learn more at luckyboyart.com and historiccharleston.org.
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