Pittsburgh-based artist Alexi Morrissey, like many Americans, never learned the excruciating details of the slave trade in school, “What we were taught was slavery was bad, the Yankees went down there and beat those bad Southern devils and ended slavery. And that was it.” Schools do not teach that the entire economy of the United States was built on slavery and that capitalism was born out of the mass implementation of free labor.
His current project, “Have You Seen Me?” addresses this untold history of the slave trade. The project takes the form of the milk bottle. Each porcelain bottle is printed with a graphic of a fictional dairy farm on one side. The other side is printed with a picture of a person and the words “Have you seen me?” Inspiration is drawn from the missing persons campaign of the 1980s that placed pictures of missing American children on the back of milk cartons. However, Morrissey’s milk bottles feature an image of an American slave. He notes that while the original missing persons campaign gave hope that the person would be found, we know that the slaves he features will never return. There is no hope for a better life.
Above: “Have You Seen Me?: Green Dairy”, front and back views, Alexi Morrissey.
Limited Edition of 50.
Each layer of “Have You Seen Me?” brings another level of meaning to the artwork. There is the medium, porcelain. There is the form, a milk bottle. And there is the message, a person kidnapped and forced into slavery. Morrissey uses porcelain because it is one of the most fetishized materials in the world. Think of your grandmother’s china cabinet full of porcelain dishes that are never used. Morrissey’s choice of porcelain is tied to this fetishization and due to porcelain being made available to the middle class during the height of the slave trade. The milk bottle form serves two purposes. Firstly, it functions as a familiar consumer product. The second function, as a household item, stems from this familiarity.
One thing that makes “Have You Seen Me?” different from other art works and other memorials is that it is made for personal home use. The bottles are not meant for the gallery space. “It is up to normal people, you and me, to bring what they know to the project. And what they know is that nine people got assassinated at a church in Charleston, Martin Luther King was assassinated, there was slavery, there were plantations…” Morrissey continues, “memorials are not about the maker. I’ve chosen this art form that I can disappear from. I don’t make the memorial to slavery; it is audience generated. When people take the bottles into the home they are making the memorial.” Having each bottle act as a private memorial adds to the reality of an absence of public slavery memorials.
Above: “Have You Seen Me?: Valley Farm”, back view, Alexi Morrissey. Limited Edition of 50.
Photo Credit: Larry Rippel
Morrissey is the first to point out that he is not an expert on the black experience. “My grandmother’s name was Blanche White…that’s White White,” he jokes. He grew up in the Irish neighborhoods of Boston. His introduction to the arts and to his role as a white male in society came when he was just a teenager participating in graffiti art, “The longest and most established [graffiti] crews in Boston were Puerto Rican and African American, but since I was white I could be taken on as an apprentice if I would steal paint. No one followed me around the hardware store, so I could steal the paint.” Morrissey says that there is no way he can form arguments about race “as eloquently as Ta-Nehisi Coates.” He does not like the term “white ally” because, he says he does not have the authority or the point of view to enter into that conversation. “I’m a heterosexual white male,” he states, “and I’ve lived with this gaze my entire life.” We cannot refute that “Have You Seen Me?” is part of the current American discourse on race, if only because the history of slavery allows White Supremacy and White Privilege to exist today. However, Morrissey he does not intend “Have You Seen Me?” to be his addition to the race discourse. Rather, it is a way for him to understand the history better and to act as a memorial.
Above: Project Translators Abi Ibraheem (top) and Barnabas Agwuocha (bottom)
“Have You Seen Me?” is constantly growing and progressing. Morrissey works with translators to create Yoruba (translator Abi Ibraheem), Igbo (translator Barnabas Agwuocha), and Wolof (forthcoming) texts for the message on the back of the bottles. The translators do not act as employees but rather as collaborators, as each translator adds his or her input to the message. The name on the bottle is not the slave’s real name because the slaves’ real identities have been lost. The translator, accepting that this image might be of a person from Senegal and not Nigeria, comes up with a name. In this way, the real slave becomes an actor in the fictional story told by the bottle. However, it is the personalization of the bottles that creates a link to the true history of the slave trade. These slaves were individuals with names and personalities and families.
The portraits Morrissey uses come from historical advertisements or runaway slave notices. Undoubtedly, a white person drew the original portraits. This part of the history is often ignored. These people did not commission their portraits; they were made with no regard to the individual in them. Morrissey appropriates the use of their portraits in advertisements and uses the first person question, “Have you seen me?” to shift the perspective. The question is not “Have you seen him? Have you seen her?” it is “Have you seen me?”.
Above: “Have You Seen Me?: Happy Day”, front and back views, Alexi Morrissey.
Limited Edition of 50.
“Have You Seen Me?” was previously on view at the 2014 Pittsburgh Biennial and at the Warhol Museum as part of the Exposures exhibition. Milk bottles can be purchased on www.milkbottleproject.com to bring into the home as part of the personal slavery memorial.
The post The Milk Bottle Project: A Memorial to Slavery appeared first on AADAT Art.