Review: “The South Got Something to Say” at Sanman Studios, Houston

Named after hip-hop artist Andre 3000’s famous declaration at the 1995 Source Awards, Morgan Newton’s exhibition, The South Got Something to Say, on view at Sanman Studios, echoes the Atlanta hip-hop artist’s clarion call in the service here of Black southern women. Highlighting, in particular, female hip-hop artists from the 1990s and 2000s, many of them from local scenes and less well-known than their male counterparts, Newton explores the broader cultural life produced, cared for, and celebrated by Black women of the South, particularly in Newton’s hometown, Houston. 

Trained as a painter, Newton, a self-described pop culture enthusiast, showcases her skill as an archivist, assembling an array of photographs, magazine covers and articles, clips of hip-hop videos, and a variety of examples of media and performance as cultural markers of the subjectivities of Black southern women. By interspersing images and videos of her personal life and family history, Newton offers a view into her own subjectivity as an artist, archivist, and a member of a community of women who cultivate and nurture a distinct cultural life with its own histories, topographies, stories, relations, rituals, dreams, and memories. Newton, interested in uncovering and presenting sometimes unknown or ignored coming-of-age narratives of Black women, explores her rich cultural inheritance in this exhibition.

Installation view of “The South Got Something to Say”

Visitors to the gallery will first encounter two video montages assembled by Newton. The first includes interviews and music videos featuring MCs such as Gangsta Boo, Diamond and Princess, Mia X, and others. The artists talk frankly about the challenges of being a woman in a male-dominated industry, their unique styles and their approaches to songwriting, including the sometimes sexually explicit content of their lyrics. The second video, titled Life in the South, showcases clips of gospel music groups — most notably The Clark Sisters — block parties in Houston neighborhoods, the Jack Yates High School Lionettes Drill Team, Soul Train episodes, and Newton’s family reunions. These videos explore a range of cultural products and experiences and serve as a tribute to Black southern women as artists and performers, whether on stage, in their communities, or during family gatherings with dance-offs and “Soul Train” lines. An abiding spirit of care and inspiration, humor, style, and a fierce but thoughtful approach to the singular cultural productions of Black Southern Women runs through these montages.

Highlights from the reels include rapper Mia X discussing the necessity of being “unladylike” in the male-dominated hip-hop industry, which for her simply meant “taking care of her business,” a role that men often assumed she couldn’t fulfill or tried to dissuade her from. The montages showcase Mia X and other artists in powerful performances. In a deeply emotional moment during her speech at the 2017 Black Girls Rock Awards, musical artist Solange declares, “Black women make me feel invincible, it’s the way that we walk, the way that we talk, our soul, our sway, our grace, our roots, it’s our secret language with one another,” all of which are spectacularly, joyfully and perceptively presented in the videos and images that Newton collects and creates. 

Installation view of “The South Got Something to Say.”

Along with the video montages, a large-scale installation frames the exhibition. On this tribute wall, arranged like a picture wall in a home, Newton has gathered photographs, magazine covers, advertisements, and articles that trace her pop-cultural lineage. This includes posters of films like Crooklyn and Eve’s Bayou and photographs of Black southern women MCs important to her now and growing up, a long list which includes Houston artists Choice (First Lady of Houston’s Rap-A-Lot Records), Enjoli Williams (from Screwed Up Click) and others from Atlanta, Miami, and Memphis, which along with Houston constituted the major Southern Hip-Hop Scenes of the 1990s and 2000s. The photographs of musical performers and MCs include images from their personal or family histories (Megan Thee Stallion is pictured as a child with her mother). By using the everyday aesthetics of framed photographs, Newton allows these portraits to coalesce into a personal history; her cultural influences, many of whom went underappreciated, become members of an extended family. Taken together, the images give us both a collective of singular performative personae and a glimpse behind it. Four framed photographs on an altar near nearby pay tribute to women rappers or their relatives who have passed on: Holly Thomas, mother of Megan Thee Stallion, Gangsta Boo, Princes Loko, and Magnolia Shorty. The space feels private as if one is entering a space of shared secrets. A place of reminiscence and imagination. A place where a young woman becomes curious, and dreams, as Newton says, of being in the know. 

Newton’s knowledge and experience of hip-hop are indeed formidable, and she expanded these with extensive research, which included following word-of-mouth recommendations. “This was before social media,” she says of these histories. People then passed the word along about clubs, hip-hop contests, performers, and mix tapes, and this is how she also conducted part of her research: through conversations, tips, phone calls, even traveling across the country to meet with artists. She speaks with care and concern about the connections she made with artists like Choice and Cl’Che. “I wanted to be intentional,” she said in conversation, “I check in on them.” Her archival work for the show evinces an eye and ear for stories and a care for the living histories hidden among us. She often hints at lost histories in her work, gathering material traces to recover them, like ticket stubs from Houston hip-hop clubs that no longer exist. 

Morgan Newton, “B is for Beautiful An Ode to Black Girlhood”

Newton’s collages, which further the archival work, present a range of styles. Some consist of carefully rendered cut-outs or overlays of figures and objects that explore juxtapositions — sometimes humorous — create cosmic atmospheres or display a lavish materiality. Others are explosive pastiches that crowd together in the excessive delight of dreams, a caravan of people and places that make up the landscape of memory and use the aesthetics of everyday life. In her “Houston” collages, she gives us images of leaders like Barbara Jordan, as well as images of historically Black neighborhoods, legendary Black-owned businesses like Hank’s Ice Cream, local bars, hamburger stands, kiddie parks, and clubs, and a host of other material cultural markers. Collages like Houston Forever, Where the Party at? and The South Got Something to Say read like histories of local cultural topographies.

Newton’s work echoes the style of Afro-Futurism, and while a cosmology of ancestors, priestesses, and warriors emerges from the work, Newton’s approach to world-building is less sci-fi and more influenced by astronomy and astrology, using planets, for instance, in several of her collages and mixed media compositions to suggest moods and revelations that circulate through dreamscapes and memories.

Morgan Newton, “Full Set”

Collages like Full Set do take up an Afro-futuristic aesthetic of a kind of gorgeous material excess used to suggest Black Womanist Power. The extravagantly manicured nails and hands armored in jewelry look like the gauntlets of a warrior or the futuristic techno-fantastical equipment of an interdimensional voyager. This aesthetic is made to outstrip conventional notions of beauty and, along with a host of images of unique and fantastic hairstyles throughout the show, suggest the freedom and power that Black southern women have expressed in their style, which Newton uses as an aesthetic trope of expanding and infinite possibilities. 

Morgan Newton, “BLUEPRINT,” detail

  The cyanotype BLUEPRINT pays further tribute to Black women working in hip-hop, a series of images celebrating video vixens, women who appear as dancers or models in rap videos, particularly those of the 1990s and 2000s. Video vixens have often been criticized for playing into the hypersexualization of Black women’s bodies, but Newton seeks to honor their contributions to hip-hop culture. These performers often worked in toxic environments, Newton says, and were underpaid. Newton attempts to reclaim their performances as a source of power. The free expression of the desire of Black women — their right to explore and display their own sexuality in a stylized performativity, a frank approach to erotic experiences, also explored in the raw lyrics of hip-hop artists like Trina — is a theme that surfaces in different moments throughout the show, a kind of embodied spiritual power that suggests self-expression, pleasure, and intimacy that Black southern women find in cultivating and enjoying their relation to eros in a variety of cultural stylings. 

Morgan Newton, “Hoochieverse”

For instance, in the collage Hoochieverse, Newton explains that she was interested in reclaiming this derogatory term. The woman at the center of the collage, with her extravagant hairdo (reminiscent of the marvelously styled, often ingenious, wigs and hairdos of the Queen in the Netflix series Bridgerton), acts for Newton like a “Mothership” hovering there in her gold ornate frame among the figures in this spacescape of planets and stars. In fantastic juxtapositions, Black women are pictured riding rockets, lifting an astronaut, sitting atop a flying saucer. The sense here and in other collages is of Black women coming together and enjoying each other in mirthful, joyous rituals of friendship and celebration of life, dressing up and going out, “squading.” Here and elsewhere in the show, they perform for neither a male nor a white gaze but for a Black Womanist Gaze, which serves to illuminate and liberate one another, their bodies and desires, in acts of care and love. 

Morgan Newton, “Haya (Life)”

Amid cosmic images celebrating the talent, style, ancestors, families, memories, dreams, and girlhood of Black Southern Women, Newton has placed a collage entitled Haya (Life), which acts as the spiritual center of the exhibition. The composition is spare compared to the others in the show and is the only collage using solely black and white images. It possesses a starkly quiet though arresting beauty. In the center of the collage, against a night sky filled with a myriad of stars, a group of dancers reaches toward the heavens. In the left quadrant of the collage, we see an image of Mahalia Jackson. The dancers, from the Alvin Ailey Dance Company, reach up to the planet Mercury, the planet of communication, which broadcasts rays of light — tensile lines of connection — across the surface of the composition. At the same time, Mahalia Jackson, in the throes of her deep song, has conjured a second iteration of Mercury, which seems to levitate in her arms. Above the figures, arms enter into the frame, hands gracefully gesturing, seeking one another. This image of the Alvin Ailey dancers comes from a performance of Revelations, during the song “I been ‘buked,” which features the lyrics: “I been ‘buked and I been scorned, trying to make this journey all alone,” a song Jackson also performed. The gesturing hands echo but transform Michelangelo’s famous fresco at the Sistine Chapel, The Creation of Adam. Instead of (white) male bodies enacting a dispensation, we have groups of Black bodies, presided over by Black women, a collective performance that points to a nexus of ritual gestures, connections formed in love and grief, sharing in the creative, transformative power at the center of Newton’s world-building.

Netwon recalls going to Church as a girl, and in the heat, on creaking pews, hearing her Grandmother call, “Haya!” Life! Newton’s work marvelously honors that transporting devotion to life in the Black Southern Womanist experience.