“Don’t Cry for Me When I’m Gone” at Women & Their Work, Austin

by Christie Stockstill February 3, 2025
A field of grass with a single small black and white photo attached to a stalk.

Irene Antonia Diane Reece, “A Memory of Memories,” 2024, inkjet print, 20 x 26 inches

In a letter to Orilla “Bill” Miller after the death of her husband, James Baldwin laments the inability of words to lessen the grief experienced after the loss of a loved one, a grief that exists because love exists, a grief that persists because love persists. “I don’t know if there is anything to be said concerning the passage of someone one loved — loves,” he writes, “for love does not exist in the past tense.” 

Through self-portraits, family photos and archives, appropriated and original texts, collage, found objects, and installation, Irene Antonia Diane Reece’s new solo exhibition exemplifies the nowness of love, even as it looks backward or considers what is to come. Her research and the resulting art are acts of love that navigate a family space, a culture space, and a history space — depictions and representations of a specific Black experience through the lens of the U.S. South. Her goal is not to teach, expose, or humanize the Black experience but to participate in the process of learning and unlearning and to protect and celebrate Black lives. To be sure, this is work that would exist with or without an audience. We, the viewers, are allowed in. It’s a vulnerable and generous gesture.

A series of photographs are installed on the wall of a gallery.

Installation view of Irene Antonia Diane Reece’s “Don’t Cry For Me When I’m Gone,” 2019-24, inkjet prints. Photo: Christie Stockstill

Like many lens-based artists, Reece has dealt with a love/hate relationship with photography, a medium that can be intrusive and violent. Photography is a process full of (or fraught with) potential — an act that exists and continues in time, before and beyond the moment the shutter is depressed. Certainly, a camera can be used in ways that are harmful, but it is no different from a pen or a hammer, which can be used in loving service to others or as weapons against them. Without a camera, though, Reece’s projects would not exist. The photographs, installations, and exhibitions become secondary tools — ways to share stories, to create the potential for additional encounters, and to continue to care for others. This is a more generative understanding of photography that allows space for chance, connection, and care, and it is within this space that photography can function as a modality for care and the camera, as a tool for tending. 

A series of photographs are installed on the wall of a gallery.

Installation view of Irene Antonia Diane Reece’s “Don’t Cry For Me When I’m Gone,” 2019-24, inkjet prints. Photo: Christie Stockstill

The very idea of tending implies there is something of value that is perpetually at risk. To tend requires courage and a commitment to continued action. I asked Reece if she thought of herself as the care-taker of this collection — all these photos, objects, and stories — and she immediately shut down the notion. “I can’t be that. I already AM that for people in my family.” After a pause, she sort of sigh-smiled as if considering that perhaps that is exactly what she is doing, that maybe this space is evidence of the tending she is doing, and that she may not be able to escape the fact that it is simply in her nature to care for those she loves.

Two framed photographs hang on a gallery wall that has been painted a salmon color, before it a domestic scene is created by installing two chairs, a coffee table, and a recliner.

Installation view of “Hey pooh!,” 2025, inkjet prints, personal objects, dimensions variable. Photo: Christie Stockstill

A bible on a small table with a flower atop it.

Detail view of “Hey pooh!,” 2025, inkjet prints, personal objects, dimensions variable. Photo: Christie Stockstill

The gallery is full of her loves: immediate and extended family, dear family friends, folks she has never met, and those she knows well. Two large installation pieces draw attention immediately. On the left side of the gallery, Hey pooh! is a recreation of a quaint living room complete with furniture and treasures from Reece’s family. The area rug, the sofa and set of photo albums, the side tables with delicate figurines, a push button phone, and a Bible with a small photo peeking from its pages like a bookmark may seem familiar, reminiscent of childhood visits to an elderly family member’s home. For me, all that is missing is an ornate glass jar of hard candies. Two portraits on the wall above the sofa show women facing away from the camera with memorial photo pendants nestled in their hair. One of them, a self-portrait called “I’m Always With You pt. iii,” features the three women for whom Reece is named. She values these women, takes it seriously that she has been bestowed with their names, and feels like she carries part of them with her. The mirror between the two framed portraits allows the viewer a glimpse of themselves, an opportunity for both literal and metaphorical reflection.

A photograph of the back of a womans head who has three photo lockets woven into her hair.

Irene Antonia Diane Reece, “I’m Always With You pt. iii,” installation view, 2024, inkjet print, 20 x 26 inches. Photo: Christie Stockstill

A second installation called I will hold you tighter than ever before consists of a large collage of vintage portraits, reprinted and arranged to perfectly mirror the desk-top original. Below the quilt of aged, monochromatic portraits is a mound of brightly colored, plastic flowers, and sprawled before them, a message — part farewell, part promise — spelled out with letters made of thousands of tiny alphabet noodles. To avoid stepping on the precariously formed words requires mindfulness and care on the part of the viewer, a trust that was almost immediately breached. In a matter of minutes someone had already disrupted one of the letters. Reece did not reshape the letter during the opening. I’ll have to return to see if it gets fixed at all, or if leaving it disturbed becomes part of the work.

A gallery wall filled with reproductions of vintage family photographs and plastic flowers at the base.

Irene Antonia Diane Reece, “I will hold you tighter than ever before,” installation view, 2025, inkjet prints, plastic flowers, alphabet noodles, dimensions variable. Photo: Essentials Creative

Reece uses the tiny alphabet noodles in other text pieces — framed photographic prints of the Langston Hughes poem “Make America America Again,” and an original text called “I cried for you.” The latter, a poetic promise to “cry for you today and always,” stands in apparent defiance of the title of the exhibition, Don’t Cry For Me When I’m Gone. I asked her about the significance of the title, and she told me about attending funerals as a young girl, remembering that inevitably someone would break down crying, kind of falling onto the coffin, and her own father leaning down to warn her not to act like that when his day came, “Don’t cry like that over me when I’m gone.” 

The word "soul" spelled out on the floor of a gallery using small alphabet noodles.

Irene Antonia Diane Reece, “I will hold you tighter than ever before,” detail, 2025, inkjet prints, plastic flowers, alphabet noodles, dimensions variable. Photo: Christie Stockstill

All of the images in the exhibition are of (or from) her dad’s side of the family, and several feature her father: old, black and white photos; muted, retro, color photos; and more contemporary family photos that include Reece. She tells me about her father, that he is a writer, and that he used to read to her from texts by writers like Langston Hughes, Alice Walker, Nikki Giovanni, and James Baldwin, writers who continue to influence her and whose words sometimes show up in her art. 

Reece’s work seems to emerge from a deep understanding of human, especially familial, connection. The resulting exhibition, what she has chosen to share, exists chiefly because of the complexities of the human experience, particularly the capacity for competing physical and emotional responses to loss. The gallery is filled with proof that it is not only possible but necessary to both mourn and celebrate, to harness the power of grief to create light. Near the end of that same letter to Miller, Baldwin quotes Henry James. “Sorrow wears and uses us,” he writes, “but we wear and use it, too, and it is blind, whereas we, after a manner, see.” 

 

Don’t Cry for Me When I’m Gone will be on view through March 6 at Women & Their Work.

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