Joe Light
Hobo # Birdman
June 11 - August 1, 2020
Joe Light
Hobo # Birdman
June 11 - August 1, 2020
Institute 193, Lexington
In 1988, Joe Light attached two plastic placemats—one featuring an image of the U.S. Capitol, the other, a quaint scene of people ice-skating on a frozen pond—to a sheet of plywood, forever positioning the cheap reproductions between the painted renderings of his archetypal characters: Hobo and Birdman. The assemblage, titled Hobo # Birdman, is now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a fitting home for a painting that serves as Rosetta Stone for Light’s philosophy. The didactic large-format illustration can be read like a sentence from left to right: the Hobo, traveling with his worldly possessions contained in a small knapsack, is forced to navigate both nature and the structures of society in order to achieve enlightenment, personified by the Birdman. It is the perfect summary for Light’s life as both vagabond and unlikely prophet of a generation forced to reckon with the profound paradoxes of both secular and sacred African American responses to centuries of psychological and economic subjugation.
Joe Light’s life and work were characterized by a fundamental need to communicate. After his release from prison in 1966 and a self-proclaimed conversion to Judaism, Light began writing divinely-inspired messages on sidewalks, overpasses, and concrete walls around Memphis—a blending of graffiti, evangelism, and proclamation of his newfound faith. In the early 1970s, Light’s writings took the form of painted signs hung in the yard of his home. Soon thereafter, he began painting the house itself, beginning with the shutters. Those earliest images of flowers and hobos evolved into a slew of characters and images that populate his later works, but the Hobo and Birdman maintain a position of privilege within the artist’s visual hierarchy. Their position of dominance is simply stated by the artist: “Hobo and Birdman are my reality.”
The Hobo represents humanity at the beginning of life’s journey. Painted in multiple colors over time, the figure depicts not one, but all races, referring not only to the artist’s multi-cultural heritage but to the diversity of the human race. He most often appears lost in nature, surrounded by rivers, flowers, and mountain ranges, scenes replete with both beauty and potential danger. Birdman, the antithesis of the Hobo, is the visual manifestation of nirvana, an image forged from an experience Light had in prison. Alone in his cell, Light heard a voice and addressed it directly: "If you're God, prove it." He said, "Step up to the cell door and I'm going to let a bird land on that windowsill, and you take control of him. Tell it what to do and it will do it." And sure enough the bird landed on it. This moment proved to be both spiritually formative and visually inspiring for Light, fodder for hundreds of thematic works. Together and separately, the Hobo and Birdman offer both the artist and viewer a path toward salvation and personal transformation amidst the chaos of nature and the rigidity of society.
Joe Light passed away in 2005. To our knowledge, Hobo # Birdman is the first solo exhibition devoted to his work. Nonetheless, Light’s works are in the collections of the Ackland Art Museum (North Carolina), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Arkansas), Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, High Museum of Art (Atlanta), Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the New Orleans Museum of Art. For more information and to read a complete biography, click here.
This exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Arnett Collection (Atlanta, GA).
Press:
Joe Light, by Ashton Cooper, ARTFORUM, October/November 2020 print edition
Joe Light at Institute 193, by Dmitry Strakovsky, Under Main, July 19, 2020