“…come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.”
-Lucille Clifton, Won’t You Celebrate With Me (1993)
Growth is a journey, not a destination. As we grow, our responsibilities change. Many of us will learn not only how to better care for ourselves but also how to care for others: children, aging parents, or loved ones. Women often undertake this labor of love, and usually privately, presumably because our gender demands our sacrifice. So, we engage in this work, which is ceaselessly demanding, humbly, and with rare requests for assistance. It is easy to lose oneself while caring for others. Finding the balance is the most grown thing you can pursue.
For over 30 years, Angela Carole Franklin and Chevelle Makeba Moore have led independent and active careers as professional and accomplished artists. In the later years of their lives, for matters neither could have predicted, the stuff of growing older and empathy, they each have become caretakers for those ailing in their families and have also taken time to heal ailments that manifested in themselves. Throughout it all, it has been their art practice that provided a platform to process the difficult years and make sense of themselves again after decades of self-sacrifice and service.
Curated by Schroeder Cherry, Franklin and Moore’s work is featured in Getting to Grown, the latest group exhibition at the James E. Lewis Museum of Art. Produced with deep love and exquisitely intricate detail between 2023-2024, each of the artists’ compositions is intuitively channeled and deeply moving.
Golden flowers crown her head. Her hands hold a lace bowl of homes and dreams. She walks the road alone but undeterred.
By exhibiting mixed-media works that review the beauty and sorrows of life, Franklin and Moore champion the courageousness of the human spirit and the power of women who are often more Atlas than Cinderella, charged to hold the weight of worlds piled on worlds, gracefully and without complaint. Despite all they have survived, the vulnerability and beauty of their art explicate the trumpeting testimony of their lives.
Franklin uses found objects and sewn textiles to memorialize transitioned siblings and civil rights icons, and honor the small victories of rest. She delicately culls personal, national, and international histories to assess the complexities of Black women’s lives and the beauty she has found in her travels. Scraps of fabric, precious heirloom jewelry, and keepsakes intentionally dangle from the figurative forms in her compositions as well as the worlds they occupy. One could easily mistake her work for quilts, but the technique she employs distinguishes her style from quilting traditions and aligns it more closely with the process-oriented mixed media approaches of collage and assemblage.
In “Cause The Bus Was Too Yellow” (2024), Franklin presents a profound homage to voting and women’s rights activist Fannie Lou Hammer. Golden flowers crown her head. Her hands hold a lace bowl of homes and dreams. She walks the road alone but undeterred. The scene depicts a moment when Hammer was pulled over while trying to take a group to register to vote. The police could not find a reason to give her a ticket, so they gave her a citation indicating her bus was too yellow.
Franklin captures the audacity of this interaction by highlighting Hammer’s bravery and enduring tenacity despite it causing great harm to herself. “Cause The Bus Was Too Yellow” is part of a larger series of works inspired by James Baldwin entitled Then You Read. Franklin reminds us that there is a long history of violence perpetrated against women who stand up against injustice, and though these revelations are despicable and disturbing, they are not unprecedented. Learning this history empowers us not to repeat it. This is the power of education.
In another notable work by Franklin, “The Delicate Balance of Her Breast, That Mind and My Heart” (2023), the artist documents the loss of her two sisters—one from breast cancer and the other one from dementia—and her own deteriorated emotional state. Franklin depicts herself clutching a bruised heart; one sister holds her head, and the other her afflicted breast.
The landscape-oriented textile hangs from a painted beam level as if to emphasize that the weight of it all, at that time in their lives, was literally hanging in the balance. When the mixture of alcohol, glycerol, ethylene glycol, and water inside of the beam level is balanced, it is referred to as reaching its “spirit level.” Franklin offers this work as an affirming meditation on the power of faith; if you can tap into your “spirit level,” you can push through even the most disparaging times.
Thick strata of varying paper types, mixed media, and paint create worlds within worlds for her characters—more spirit than flesh—to occupy.
Unlike Franklin, who creates larger compositions, Moore works within the intimate dimensions of 12×12 wooden square panels that are laden with textural, material, and emotional density. Thick strata of varying paper types, mixed media, and paint create worlds within worlds for her characters—more spirit than flesh—to occupy. In most scenes, death hovers like a specter in the form of a black crow, flying and perched, an open-beaked caw like the omen of Poe and Black Southern folklore.
Like the recurring crow Moore situates as protagonist and antagonist, she too has witnessed ceaseless waves of death and mourned dear and devastating losses. It has always been the art that has kept her here, mind fixed on processing the worlds within worlds between life and death and producing awesome provinces from what she envisioned to keep herself whole. The stuff of grief and miraculous revelation.
In “On Behalf of a Grateful Nation” (2023), Moore honors the life of her brother, a heroic veteran turned paraplegic in the violence of the Persian Gulf War. He is standing upright in a graveyard, his back to our vantage, looking out and beyond the shadowy figures, crows, and scrawled resonant matrices, towards a portal to the next realm, fixed in the seat of an upside-down chair. An outstretched hand reaches towards him from above, his tombstone adorned with blushing flowers in full bloom. Here, Moore depicts her brother and the world he occupies as transfixed and transfigured by meta-dimensional reflections of spacetime—the collapses of materiality that countless stories of old tell us is the process of our corporeal form returning to spirit.
In another work by Moore, “Laundry Meditation and Nothing Else” (2024), a blue-black woman with skin glowing like midnight and huge healing hands hugs herself and the fading body of a lost child. The child’s body is behind her, turned away from our gaze towards the world beyond where his mother mourns him. The woman could have magic in her mouth, but a somber countenance locks her in static sorrow. Moore has created a series of works that honor mothers who have lost their sons to gun violence. This work acknowledges them and the validity of their anguish.
Franklin and Moore have developed sacred and undeniably potent styles that evidence their mastery of material and narrative approaches to figuration. Getting to Grown is a powerful homage to those they have loved and lost that will surely immortalize their dearly departed for many generations to come.
Getting to Grown is currently on view through March 14, 2025 at the James E. Lewis Museum of Art (JELMA) at The Carl Murphy Fine Arts Center, Morgan State University
2201 Argonne Drive, Baltimore, MD 21251.
There will be a reception Sunday, March 2 at 2 pm-3 pm; and an artist talk Wednesday, March 5, 2025 at 11 am at JELMA.
