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RADAR 12 - Inside / Outside
Publication Date: December, 2004
There Goes the Neighborhood
Essay by exhibition curator Jed Dodds
There Goes the Neighborhood
Zoë Charlton and Rick Delaney
Through Dec 18, 2004
Creative Alliance
With There Goes the Neighborhood, Zoë Charlton and Rick Delaney fashion a surreal, pseudo-suburban cul-de-sac,
complete with real grass and a white picket fence. The residents, however, aren't rosy-cheeked children but hundreds
of nordic garden gnomes with their skin painted black, opening up a treasure chest of issues regarding the black
middle class today: suburbia, self segregation, and the meaning of the American dream. That there are wide and
rigid class distinctions within African American society is a longstanding fact which is deeply understood, if
rarely discussed, among African Americans, and hardly even noticed among whites. Fine distinctions according to
the color of one's skin (Charlton and Delaney's gnomes come in seven different shades) carry immense
social significance. From the early days of the Great Migration, as blacks moved from Southern farms to Northern
factories, they found small but prosperous groups of African Americans who'd been there for generations and were
deeply afraid of what their country cousins might do. African American newspapers like Chicago's Defender carried
articles celebrating the "New Negro" alongside editorials exhorting recent arrivals to wear shoes in
the street, and generally comport themselves with dignity. Today Bill Cosby is on the lecture circuit, sparking
controversy by saying much the same thing.
The neighborhoods formed in the wake of the Great Migration—Harlem, Bronzeville, Pennsylvania Ave. in Baltimore—started
to break down in the 60's and 70's as blacks moved to the suburbs. Though a trickle at first, the trend has become
a flood, with the number of suburban blacks doubling to 12 million in the past 20 years. The desire for a patch of
grass in the right neighborhood like the one Charlton and Delaney have planted seems to be universal, but the class
divisions wrought by self segregation resonate uniquely among African Americans, for whom solidarity has long been
a necessity and Southern manners a cultural lodestone. For all their readiness to help with the lawn, Charlton and
Delaney's Gnome-boys aren't likely to turn up in the yards of any black middle class homes. They are more like those
country cousins, or collectibles from the arena of "black memorabilia", awkward objects that nonetheless
command great prices among wealthy African American collectors, because they speak of a history they refuse to forget.
Charlton and Delaney's gnomes are cheerful, but they dwarf the little pink houses around them; suburbia may be the
topic of discussion, but race is the issue.
Jed Dodds |
