Br’er Rabbit and the Tar Baby, Sequoia Danielle Barnes (2024) (EMPIRE LINES x Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, Edinburgh Art Festival 2024)

Artist and academic Sequoia Danielle Barnes redresses the ugly side of kitsch and ‘cute’ toy cultures, telling histories of trickster rabbits from Peter Rabbit to Bugs Bunny, appropriated from Black Southern American folklore from the 16th century to now.

With ceramics, fabrics, and super sticky slugs, Sequoia Danielle Barnes’ new installation is an Afro-surrealist retelling of Br’er Rabbit and the Tar Baby, a folktale developed by her enslaved ancestors after being ripped from Africa and displaced in Alabama, in the United States - the place she grew up before pursuing her practice in ‘transatlantic’ institutions. Here, stories about figures like Uncle Remus, Uncle Ben, and Aunt Jemima, often first told as a means of action guidance for outsmarting slavemasters, were mainstreamed into 20th century pop art and cultures.

Sequoia’s exhibition takes its title from the 1946 film, Song of the South, a nostalgic representation of the antebellum, pre-Confederate South, revealing how ‘cuteness’ masks anti-Black racist tropes and propaganda. We discuss how popular consumption of Western/European films, TV adverts, and commercials can perpetuate forms of oppression and marginalisation, including racialisation, infantilism, violence, and the cannibalisation of enslaved peoples. Sequoia tells of her interest in ‘Tellytubby lore’, how children’s cartoons and animations can sustain critical traditions of surrealism, and why younger people more readily engage with her work than adults. From her creepy and uncanny collectibles, we discuss why major institutions protect and preserve golliwogs, golly, and ‘piccaninny’ dolls, and Sequoia’s ‘Black radical art practice’ in spaces like CCA Glasgow, Fruitmarket, and the National Museum of Scotland.

Sequoia shares her subversive influences from the Black diaspora, including Faith Ringgold, Betye Saars, Robert Colescott,and Eddie Chambers. With Theaster Gates, Patrick Kelly, Joe Casely-Hayford,, we explore Afrofuturism, and find entanglements in their own practice, between works with textiles, fashion, and pottery. Beneath the dark humour and sweet surfaces of their works, Sequoia speaks of connections between contemporary consumption and capitalism, and historic sugar cane plantations. exposing how legacies of colonialism, slavery, and global trade still shape society today.

Sequoia Danielle Barnes: Everything Is Satisfactual runs at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop until 28 August 2024. The exhibition is part of Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) 2024, which continues in Scotland until 25 August 2024.

For more about Black Southern Assemblage, hear Raina Lampkins-Felder, curator at the Souls Grown Deep Foundation and Royal Academy in London, on the Quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend (20th Century-Now): pod.link/1533637675/episode/2cab2757a707f76d6b5e85dbe1b62993

Read about Sonia Boyce’s Feeling Her Way (2022), her Golden Lion-winning British Pavilion (2022), at the Turner Contemporary in Margate, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog-post-app/feeling-her-way-sonia-boyces-noisy-exhibition

And read about Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) 2023, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog-post-app/edinburgh-art-festivals-reckoning-with-the-citys-colonial-legacies

EDITOR: Alex Rees.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠

And Twitter: ⁠twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936⁠

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/empirelines