Blue Velvet Suitcase is simple: a wooden chair, a small suitcase, a shirt from a uniform, neatly folded. It’s unassuming enough that it almost — almost — invites the viewer to sit in the chair. But the text printed on the facing wall tells us we’re looking at so much more.
The piece is part of“Material Worlds,” the latest show at the New Alliance Foundation Art Gallery at Gateway Community College, curated by Noe Jimenez and running through Feb. 26. The suitcase, we learn, belongs to the paternal grandparents of the artist, Howard el-Yasin. In the 1930s,“they left the agrarian Jim Crow South for better opportunities in the North,” el-Yasin explains. For a time, they worked in domestic service to a wealthy family, living in the attic apartment of their mansion on St. Ronan Street. Grandfather William was a driver; grandmother Ruby did housework. William then got factory work and Ruby worked as a custodian at Yale (“the blue velvet coffin,” el-Yasin calls it). She cleaned private houses, too; el-Yasin, in his childhood, sometimes helped her do it.
