In SAM’s Poke in the Eye: Art of the West Coast Counterculture, Xenobia Bailey’s Work Shines
By Jas Keimig
A dirty toilet made of muddy-colored ceramic. A hot pot that licks back. A sculpture that reimagines James Ensor’s 19th-century painting of Christ moving through a crowd as a procession of plaster clowns.
These are some of the ways West Coast artists in the 1960s and ‘70s rebelled against the cool, abstract, Pop Art, and minimalist principles that prevailed in the East Coast art market at the time. Eschewing color fields and angular edges, artists in the Bay Area and Seattle like Howard Kottler, Patti Warashina, Clayton Bailey, and Bruce Nauman looked to surrealism, humor, and craft arts to make their works which were categorized as “funk art” due to their irreverent, anti-mainstream nature.
Using works mostly sourced from their collection, Poke in the Eye: Art of the West Coast Counterculture at the Seattle Art Museum ponders these artists during that period and pushes against the limits of the funk art designation. The term “funk art” came from curator Peter Selz who, in 1967, used it to describe a group of mostly white, mostly male artists largely working in ceramics at his seminal show at UC Berkeley. While these artists never felt they were working in concert with one another — as counter-culturalists are wont to do — the designation stuck.
"But the funk Bailey uses to describe her work is inherently generative and personal, imagining and building a world from scratch. In this context, funk is a life force for the underserved Black community rather than a quirk."
“This work – to the extent that it’s been talked about at all – has been largely miscategorized as the ‘funk art movement,” said Carrie Dedon, SAM’s associate curator of modern art and curator of Poke in the Eye. “The premise of this show is to take a broader view and counter what has been categorized as a movement.”
Thus, the show introduces artists who have not been considered canon for this nebulous movement. One delightful addition is painter Robert Colescott, whose colorful and cheeky takes on famous works and themes center Black culture. In Susanna and the Elders (Novelty Hotel) (1980) — his comical interpretation of the Biblical story of a young woman leered at by debaucherous old men — Susanna steps out of a sticky hotel shower as three men (a Black and white janitor, and the artist himself) ogle her naked body, a comment on Euro-centric beauty standards.
Susanna and the Elders (Novelty Hotel),1980, Robert Colescott; Rustic Pine Entertainment Center,1979, Fay Jones. Courtesy Seattle Art Museum.
Another welcome addition is celebrated Seattle painter Fay Jones, whose work doesn’t so much rely on humor as it does the dreaminess of her subjects. In Rustic Pine Entertainment Center (1979), Jones focuses on four people on what appears to be a dancefloor. There’s a gauzy emotional layer to the painting, where the relationships between the figures are difficult to ascertain and open to interpretation. While it doesn’t fit neatly in the borders of “funk art,” Jones’s embrace of colorful, figurative art throughout her career often placed her at odds with dominant, East Coast abstractions.
However, the most interesting intervention in Poke in the Eye’s reshaping of the funk art narrative comes in the back gallery where fiber artist Xenobia Bailey’s work occupies the entire space. Her exhibition-within-an-exhibition, A Childhood Dreamscape in the Aesthetic of Funk Almost Deferred, aggregates over thirty years of her intricately crocheted work ranging from clothing to tents to imagined furniture pieces to elaborate headwear.
Bailey’s practice extends her ideas of Afrofuturism and funk – real funk – into the tangible sphere, drawing heavily from her childhood in the Pacific Northwest and the Black experience in America. Known for her detailed headwear featured in Do the Right Thing and The Cosby Show, funk undergirds every aspect of her creativity. And to her, “funk art” means something quite different from what artists on the West Coast were working with.
Staff and press preview of ‘Poke In The Eye: Art of the West Coast Counterculture’ at Seattle Art Museum on June 17, 2024. Credit Chloe Collyer.
“The funk aesthetic or Funktional Design is living a dream in a nightmare because that's what it's like when you go into a Black home. Creativity is active. They're living a dream in there, but when they step outside, it's a nightmare,” said Bailey. “You have to be able to create that dream in your home or your imagination.”
Born in Seattle in 1955, she grew up in the Yesler Terrace Projects and 26th and Helen St., where she and her siblings spent time making their own toys, drawing pictures of family photographs, exploring the Museum of History and Industry, and playing in their neighborhood backyards and bushes with the encouragement from their mother. “We had a richness to our life because of that creativity,” she reflected. “I didn’t know that then, but that’s what it was.”
“The funk aesthetic or Funktional Design is living a dream in a nightmare because that's what it's like when you go into a Black home. Creativity is active. They're living a dream in there, but when they step outside, it's a nightmare,” said Bailey. “You have to be able to create that dream in your home or your imagination.”
As a college student at the University of Washington, Bailey applied her curiosity about the world to theater, designing costumes and masks for the storied Black Arts West theater in Madrona. In 1974, she moved to New York where she attended the Pratt Institute and studied industrial design. After graduating in 1977, Bailey worked as an art instructor at Greenpoint Cultural Society in Brooklyn where she met master craftswoman, Bernadette Sonona, who taught her free-style crochet.
“[Sonona] said, ‘Don't follow patterns because sometimes patterns are written wrong. What you need to do is just study the stitches in the image associated with the pattern and then you will be able create whatever design you want,’” remembered Bailey. “I applied what I learned in industrial design along with my African-American aesthetic of funk and I incorporated that into my crochet brand.”
A crocheted garment in A Childhood Dreamscape in the Aesthetic of Funk Almost Deferred by Xenobia Bailey at Seattle Art Museum.
Credit Chloe Collyer.
Over the last five decades, Bailey has bloomed into an artist adept at translating history and imagination into her crocheted works. That sensibility is on full display in Poke in the Eye.
In the center of the room sits “[Tent]” (early 2000s), a psychedelic and vibrantly patterned tent made of single-stitch crochet. The handmade structure references big-tent revival churches as well as the Shoseian Tea House in the Washington Park Arboretum, where she and her siblings used to run around as kids. There’s a sanctity imbued to the tent, with red butterflies circling the top.
On either side of the tent are works that reference Bailey’s history as both a costumer and industrial designer. On the left side of the tent is a configuration of garments Bailey designed, incorporating cowrie shells and beads, in fastidious, brilliantly hued crochet cotton and acrylic yarn. And in a plexi-glass case to the right of the tent is Lifestyle vignette (2018), a small-scale study of Bailey’s imagined crochet furniture in her signature Funktional Design style. Decked out Black Barbie dolls are situated throughout, reclining on neon-colored couches, sitting in neutral-toned ovular chairs, and resting on kaleidoscopic rugs.
Close up image of Lifestyle vignette by Xenobia Bailey; credit Chloe Collyer, courtesy Seattle Art Museum.
Along the walls of the exhibition are images from her “Vacant Chair Series” which are photos of chairs draped with crochet afghans purchase online by the artist, like her mother used to drape furniture in the home that she purchased from the local Goodwell against a blue background. Each blanket has its own unique design incorporating unique and complex patterns and vibrant colors. She made the series during the COVID-19 lockdown, dedicating the piece to the souls lost, and newborn soul’s during the pandemic. Not only does the work reflect the homebound times of 2020, but also speaks to Bailey’s childhood.
“My mother would bring furniture pieces home that was given to her from her domestic job’s, but the furniture they donated was usually French provincial. That just didn't go with our aesthetics,” said Bailey. “So my mother would just take second hand quilt’s and crochet afghan’s and drape them over the furniture pieces. That's where the chairs came in. It would appear like an animated sculpture piece. My mother turned the house into a sanctuary gallery.”
Despite best intentions, there’s a fundamental disconnect between the rest of Poke in the Eye and Bailey’s featured gallery. The funk art the exhibition mainly centers itself around is somewhat reactionary, featuring work that goes against the mainstream and defines itself in the space of the unexpected. “Funk,” here connotes difference, “anti,” underground. But the funk Bailey uses to describe her work is inherently generative and personal, imagining and building a world from scratch. In this context, funk is a life force for the underserved Black community rather than a quirk.
“My funk and the funk from my community is about survival and living a dream in a nightmare. That's what my funk is about,” said Bailey. “It was always about survival and maintaining the little bit of Africanness that we can, especially since we were severed from everything, our culture, our people, our language, everything. So this is a way of building that culture up in North America when you don't have anything to build with. …and using that imagination with whatever materials are available.”
POKE IN THE EYE: THE ART OF THE WEST COAST COUNTERCULTURE
June 21 – September 2, 2024
Seattle Art Museum
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jas Keimig is a writer and critic based in Seattle. They previously worked on staff at The Stranger, covering visual art, film, music, and stickers. Their work appears in Crosscut, South Seattle Emerald, The Seattle Times, i-D, Netflix, Variable West, and The Ticket. Jas also co-writes Unstreamable with Chase Burns for Scarecrow Video and serves on the advisory board for Missing Movies. They won a game show once.
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