Adrian Burrell Explores the Difficulty—and the Promise—of Escaping Black American History

Seph Rodney, Art in America, January 26, 2023
At the entrance to multidisciplinary artist Adrian Burrell’s first-ever solo show, currently on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José, in California, hangs a piece titled Modernity Blues, a flat section of wood crating festooned with azure neon tubing that spells out the exhibition title, “Sugarcane & Lightning pt. 3,” and fills the gallery with its hue. (The implied parts one and two are, respectively, Burrell’s ongoing archival research into his Black ancestors’ struggles in the American South, and a forthcoming book detailing his discoveries.) Dated 2022, like all the works included, this wall panel bears a stencil specifying a cargo limit of 63,400 pounds—a strong hint that the freightage Burrell hopes to convey is enormous.
 

Further along the same wall hangs Family Ties, a ring of nine resin masks in varying shades of blue, from a lilting sky hue to cobalt, all modeled on members of the artist’s family. The masks are positioned above several pieces of correspondence framed in white-painted wood. The letters are copies of originals that have been digitized and preserved by local archives in Louisiana, where part of Burrell’s family still resides. In one set of documents, dated 1931–32, Mrs. Anthony Gerard of Loreauville, Louisiana, petitions the pension board in Baton Rouge on behalf of an ancestor of Burrell’s, a formerly enslaved woman then “over a hundred years old.” She was the wife of Zenon Simon, also formerly enslaved, who died “without ever having received any pension or reward from his Slavery.” One letter ends: “I assure you if she can obtain any pension as reward it would be highly appreciated, as she is very poor old and crippled. She and her old husband has been our life long neighbors and were good darkies.” Even this faltering attempt to lift someone up is burdened with disdain.