A Transformative Century: Black Queer Ecstasy at Art Galleries at Black Studies at UT Austin

James Russell·
AustinVisual Art
·

It’s doubtful that a mystic Carmelite nun was the inspiration for scientists at the German company Merck when they developed 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, also known as ecstasy and molly, in 1912.

Nor is it known whether Saint Teresa of Ávila took a predecessor to the drug that gave her feelings of ecstasy, euphoria, pain and sweetness that she described in her autobiography as “one cannot possibly wish it to cease, nor is one’s soul then content with anything but God.”

What is clear is that had Phillip Townsend not learned about Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s marble sculpture The Ecstasy of St. Teresa, where an angel’s bow pierces her heart and leads her to collapse, we may not have been gifted with the new exhibit Transcendence: A Century of Black Queer Ecstasy, 1924-2024 on display at the Art Galleries at Black Studies at The University of Texas at Austin through May 9. (Artwork in a third venue, the Visual Arts Center, came down on March 8 to accommodate graduate art student exhibits.)

Townsend is an instructor and the curator of the galleries. What makes the space different is that it is not affiliated with the College of Fine Arts but instead the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies in the College of Liberal Arts, showing how art is part of the fabric of every discipline.

With scant scholarship and few exhibits to lean on, he’s created a new framework for considering how to talk about ecstasy transcending psychedelic or religious experiences.

“Ecstasy is one of those things that hasn’t really circulated within public discourse in a way that the general public is familiar with,” he said.

So, no surprise: “The first thing people asked me about the show was, ‘is this about people taking ecstasy?’ And of course I’m like, ‘no, no,’” he said. “But I didn’t want to shy away from these physical and mind-altering states. That has to be included with any conversation about ecstasy.”

The 59 works of art and ephemera cover a transformative century for art and society, with the emergence of new media such as photography and video overlapping with the struggle for Black and queer recognition. Divided into seven themes, his approach includes art that connects to the crux of the show (objects by Black and queer artists), how ecstasy is conveyed (by Black but maybe not queer artists) and the relationships between the artists and subject.

“When I think about this notion of ecstasy and transcendence, it doesn’t make sense to create a chronological framing for the experience,” he said. “As Bernini’s work has shown us this, these experiences of ecstasy and transcendence are just part of being a human and has existed since our existence. It didn’t make sense to try to create this chronology as if artists are building off other artists.”

Troy Montes Michie, who was born in El Paso, created a new piece for the show, the mixed media painting Half High (Traces in Ecstasy) (2024). In it, a drawing of an ancient bust covers the top of a naked sculpture with a close up of a hand of presumably a female statue covering the stomach. Drawn in is a sleeping person.

“It’s incredible and responds to the themes of the show perfectly,” Townsend said.

It engages with Richmond Barthé, whose bronze bust Head of a Dancer: Harald Kreutzberg (c. 1933), appears in the section Portraiture, and peripherally with one an edition of the magazine FIRE!! Devoted to Young Negro Artists printed in 1926. Zora Neale Hurston, who was a contributor to the magazine later wrote an ode to Barthé, excerpts from which Montes-Michie includes in his piece. The inclusion may be a stretch. But broad connections are foundational to the show’s themes, which create a framework for future shows and push the viewer to rethink about types of art. Among the 12 works chosen for the theme Portraiture, for instance, are Barthé’s bust alongside Mickalene Thomas’s photograph Afro Muse #5 in Black and White (2005). It’s a small yet bold photograph of a woman with seductive eyes, a stone cold face and an unbuttoned shirt with her breasts exposed.

By including sculpture along with media more traditionally aligned with portraits expands people’s engagement with the genre.

Barthé and Kreutzberg were driven by emotion, as was Beauford Delaney, whose Untitled (1960) appears in the show. The pioneering abstractionist’s paintings are full of drama. “He used color and was thinking about human emotion and expression,” Townsend said.

With 3:33 pm “This Might Be A Light Worker You Know” (2019), Damien N. Davis rebuilds his childhood homes while considering illicit desire, strong emotion and being out and queer. Davis’s large sculptural work adds to another result of ecstasy of liberation and fulfillment. It is among the subjects in Black Queer Futures, a small selection of new works by younger artists. “These artists are thinking about spaces and different planes and alternative ways of imagining themselves existing in a space where they could live their fully self-expressed lives,” he said, perhaps setting the stage, too, for future exhibitions.

—JAMES RUSSELL

James Russell

James Russell is the former Fort Worth-based web editor for the Gay and Lesbian Review and a writer contributing to D Magazine, Fort Worth Weekly and Next City.