International Day of the Girl Child Exhibit
Baton Rouge Arts Council, Shell Gallery
Baton Rouge
Through Nov 4
Walking into the Shell Gallery, you encounter a chair that sits like a throne in the middle of the gallery, papered by pages from different Bibles. A sign invites people onto the white museum pedestal to snap photos of themselves sitting in the chair, If you do, the audio recording of a prayer begins.
“Dear Heavenly Father, I’d like to thank you for your light and your covering over my life,” a female voice begins. “I pray I always remember who I am because of the authority you have granted me.”
This is “Tree Chair,” an interactive artwork created by Ashli Ognelodh. It is part of the “International Day of the Girl Child Exhibit” presented by Network of Women NOW, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering women and girls. The show, which highlights the voices of women and girls, is on display in the Shell Gallery within the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge building.
Oct. 11 was the international day of the girl child, a UN-declared international observance day intended to raise awareness of the problems that girls face globally such as unequal access to education, medical and/or legal rights, forced marriage, and violence against women. The exhibit features art from women around the world in different mediums from quilting from an activist in Richmond, Virginia, to bead-working from Northern Tanzania, to local photography.
The wall on the right front of the gallery features mainly local artists and many of the pieces are on sale. Toward the back, there’s art from further away with more full informational panels about the art and the people who created them. For example, Nana Naima Wares-Akers, the artist/activist behind the quilt cofounded Kuumba Afrikan American Quilting Guild which preserves quilting traditions and community stories through textile arts. I found myself longing for that kind of background about the local artists whose pieces are simply labeled with the title, artist, medium, dimensions and price tag.
Art can speak for itself, but that doesn’t mean it always should. If the goal is to spotlight the voices and stories of girls and women, the way this exhibit was executed missed the opportunity to more fully highlight those narratives locally. But “Tree Chair” does have a voice of its own.
Ognelodh’s piece features Bible pages from the crossing of the Red Sea in Exodus and Isaiah 54, a prophecy about the restoration of Israel in the Bible that uses the metaphor of a barren woman to represent Israel. These pages provide the backdrop to a magnolia tree painted in acrylic with three faces growing out of it.
Often, the interactive piece of an art exhibit is made specifically for that purpose, it’s a print of the art or a backdrop inspired by some of the art, or even something that the audience builds together. It’s rare that people are trusted to touch the art, much less sit on it, and Ognelodh’s piece doesn’t require anything from the person observing it. Just to sit there while the prayer plays over the speakers. It’s nearly two minutes long.
As a Christian, I felt strange to see parts of the Bible cut out of the book and used as collage materials. People who have different religious backgrounds would likely react to the piece differently.
But the audio prayer, which is a surprise when one sits down, stopped me in my tracks. In the current political environment, women’s empowerment and faith are often presented in opposition to each other, but this piece presents them growing hand in hand. This feels radical, and it has the potential to turn the simple act of posing for an Instagram photo into a meditative act – if you let it.
