Are the flowers that bloom in the spring the same as those that died in the frost? “The Baptism,” a video artwork featuring a poem by Carl Hancock Rux and directed by artist Carrie Mae Weems, opens with that parable. We are not the same nor are we different, the flowers say: “When conditions are sufficient we manifest and when conditions are not we go into hiding.”
Months into a dark winter. A year into a pandemic. As the nation surpasses 500,000 covid-19 deaths and as the refrain of victims of violence and brutality grows longer, there is hope in Rux’s words.
It is a simple idea but complicated in practice. When conditions are sufficient, flowers bloom, activism flourishes, people come together, change happens. We grow. We live. When conditions are no longer sufficient, we must wait. For the thaw. For the spring. For a vaccine. For the winds of change to return.
Over the summer, during the height of the reignited Black Lives Matter movement, the civil rights giants John Lewis and C.T. Vivian died on the same day. In a year of immeasurable grief, it might be cause for expounding on the transience of life; the loss of two irreplaceable leaders when we need them most. But Rux and Weems’s work, a poignant tribute to Lewis and Vivian, takes a different approach. Commissioned by the Lincoln Center, the work is on view at thebaptismpoem.org.
Rux, who also is a novelist, playwright and musician, said that while writing the poem, he kept returning to images of a young Lewis on his family farm. In his unsentimental and moving poem, Lewis is “a sharecropper’s son,” and Vivian, a “boy from Boonesville.” The miracle of their lives is in their commonness. The 11-minute film is a eulogy grounded not in individual virtues, but in the collective spirit for change and the call for justice that shone particularly brightly in these two figures.
“The Baptism” is about “always becoming” — even in the moments of withdrawal, even when that becoming is invisible to the human eye. Weems, Rux’s friend and collaborator, pairs the sentiment with fast-forwarded X-ray footage of flowers growing. One bud climbing on top of another, stumbling up stairs to the sky, a race to nowhere — sped up, these skeletal forms burst into being with a life force that usually remains unseen.
“We are never born; we never die. We transition,” Rux recites in the video. And so, too, do the leaves on the trees, the buds in the weeds and the movements in the streets.
In an interview with the Lincoln Center, Rux recalls his parents teaching him that there is one civil rights movement, but one with many iterations. Harriet Tubman was a part of it, Lewis and Vivian were a part of it, and Black Lives Matter protesters are a part of it. The video poem looks at civil rights with this sweeping approach, weaving protest footage from the 1960s with that from 2020.
Weems’s work has always been political — even if not overtly so — but in recent years, the photographer, multimedia and installation artist has become more directly involved in on-the-ground action. She is the director of Social Studies 101, a public art collective that gained nonprofit status in 2017. The group recently launched a signage campaign in Syracuse, N.Y., where Weems is based, to draw attention to the disproportionate effects of the coronavirus on people of color.
In other video works, including “Imagine If This Were You” (2016) and “People of a Darker Hue” (2017), Weems juxtaposes images of violence against Black people with images of peaceful protest. In the latter (from which she borrows imagery for “The Baptism”), Weems chronicles victims of police brutality — first by listing their startlingly young ages, then their heartbreaking relationships, and finally by name.
Weems is best known for the “Kitchen Table Series,” photographs of herself and a rotating cast of characters in front of a long kitchen table beneath a single, dramatic light source. In the 1990 work, the table becomes a stage for exchanges of love and disdain, camaraderie and conflict. Through the images, the artist reveals the narrative possibilities of the domestic space and captures the breadth of emotion within four walls. She finds the universal in the up-close.
The visual language in “The Baptism” does something similar. Notice how at the beginning of Part 2 of the poem, we see Rux’s hands before we see his face. Notice the recurring close-up image of hands clasped before Weems zooms out to show us the broader context — a group of demonstrators gathering on the National Mall the night before the 1963 March on Washington.
Hands “baptized in blood,” hands reaping the soil, hands “swelling” — Rux’s words conjure vivid pictures of these instruments of work and creation. As he narrates the poem, his own hands appear as if almost separate from his body. They rest on the table like washed tools laid out to dry. “I am not me; I am watching me,” he says. This could be read as an allusion to death, but there also is a sense that Rux, too, is somehow outside of himself, as if he has given up his hands to the collective.
At one point while reciting the poem, Rux, referring to Lewis and Vivian, asks us to consider “these two men as one building.” It’s a strange comparison, but buildings still stand long after their occupants and purposes have come and gone. They — like powerful ideas, like movements — are meant to be inhabited.
A virtual screening of “The Baptism” and a panel discussion with Carl Hancock Rux will be hosted March 7 through Emory University, Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre Company and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Collection at Morehouse College. For more information, visit eventbrite.com/e/art-meets-activism-john-lewis-ct-vivian-and-the-baptism-tickets-140367989435.
