Set and environmental designer Natsu Onoda Power has curated an installation to heighten the audience’s experience of George C. Wolfe’s play, The Colored Museum, offering a provocative taste of the experience to come.
Exhibits in the Robert and Arlene Kogod Lobby and within the Victor Shargai Theatre correspond to exhibits (scenes) within the play itself, inviting audience members to consider one of the central questions of Wolfe’s play: What portion of the past heals you and what portion of the past suffocates you?
“It’s incredibly tricky, exploring that complicated combination between power and pain and brilliance that it seems to me a sort of extraordinary triad that is African American culture: I can’t live inside yesterday’s pain but I can’t live without it.” —George C Wolfe
In the Kogod Lobby:
“Photo Session”
Mixed Media
Fashionable, effortless, objects of envy—the figures of “The Photo Session” represent one extreme solution to the contradictions of Black existence. Our research for this production included this image as well as this image from the holdings at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
“Permutations”
Mixed Media
The absent figure, whose egg this is, represents what George C Wolfe calls ”The healthiest aspect of African American culture; full of wonder at [a] surreal event.” Wolfe spoke extensively about the scene in this 1993 interview with Charles H. Rowell in Callaloo Magazine
In the Victor Shargai Theatre:
“Git on Board”
Mixed Media in metal, wood, and human bodies
The artist integrates the very bodies of the viewers into their multimedia installation, inviting the question of who is watching whom, how much identification is possible across the exhibit / exhibited divide, and how each party will navigate the space between them.
“In many respects, the central character of the play is the audience. At each performance, some people come out laughing, others crying…. The best houses are half-Black and half-white; there’s a dangerous tension that has to resolve itself in laughter.” —George C. Wolfe, in a 1986 interview with The New York Times
Portrait of George C. Wolfe
Photograph on wood
“Somebody has chopped up pieces of my pain and put it on display against white walls and the wrong kind of light, so that when I go searching for my reflection, the scattered images make me feel incomplete. But if I can learn to love my contradictions and discover that there’s freedom inside the pain and madness, then soon I will discover that these scattered images together form a picture full of power and magic, and this power and magic is alive inside of me.”—George C. Wolfe, unpublished epigraph to the script called “Prelude to The Colored Museum”
“Cooking with Aunt Ethel”
Metal and Wood
“So much of the imagery of the archetype has been co-opted by white culture and turned into a stereotype that we end up throwing out certain symbols and imagery that have a tremendous amount of power and that have a more ancient cultural context to them simply because they’ve been corrupted by white culture.” —George C. Wolfe.
Wolfe spoke about his use of “silhouettes” in this 1993 interview with Charles H. Rowell in Callaloo Magazine
“The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play”
Mixed Media, upholstery, and photographic print
“Lorraine Hansberry is a wonderful playwright and A Raisin in the Sun is a wonderful play, but every February all the regional theaters discover black people because it’s Black History Month and they pull out Raisin in the Sun. I want to remove these dead, stale, empty icons blocking me from my own truth.” —George C. Wolfe.
“Lala’s Opening”
Photograph printed on plexiglass
Image of a figure from the long line of Black Americans who have found a version of free life in Paris. In this as other exhibits, Wolfe invites his audience to consider the cost of shedding a past to find a future.
“There is more freedom in one square block of Paris than there is in the entire United States of America.”—Richard Wright
“Symbiosis”
Plastic
This work investigates the sacrifices necessary for corporate success and the process of conforming to the contours of corporate success.
“The Hairpiece”
Mixed Media in Wood, Synthetic Hair, and Make Up
This exhibit and attendant scene highlights Black hair’s ability to form meaning due to its malleable nature and ability to shift and hold creative symbolism.
Link to “Strands of Inspiration,” blogpost from the National Museum of African American History and Culture about artworks that explore the role that hair plays in the artists’ own Black identities. Link to the Museum’s holdings related to hair.
“Gospel According to Miss Ron”
Neon and Plastic
Miss Ron—the missing figure of this exhibit—is Wolfe’s exploration of “the relationship between power and pain and how somehow it’s essential before people can claim their power.” Inspired by mid-1980s Snap! Queens, the cast and production team of Studio Theatre’s The Colored Museum took inspiration from sections of Tongues Untied by the incomparable Marlon Riggs. This section is called “Don’t mess with a Snap Diva” and includes a demonstration of the “Grande Diva Snap”.
“A Soldier with a Secret”
Mixed Media in Fabric and Metal
Many historians characterize the life of a Black soldier as “fighting on two fronts”—the opposing army on the field, and the pressures of racism and racist violence at home. The cast and production team of Studio’s production of The Colored Museum explored the holdings on Black military service during a field trip to the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Here are a few of the virtual holdings: “Defining Freedom,” on the role of Civil War veterans in Reconstruction-era policies; “We Return Fighting: African American Experience in World War I,” and “Giving Dap: Symbols of Black Power in Vietnam”
“The Party”
Mixed Media
“What [everyone at the party] has in common is that dynamic between power and pain and brilliance. The mask they choose to wear may be different, but they all are bound by those three dynamics. Because the culture is bound by those three dynamics. And when we try to reduce it to something simplistic, we end up losing.”—George C. Wolfe