War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Memorials

by Binh Danh and Robert Schultz

TRAVELING EXHIBITION PROSPECTUS

War Memoranda War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Memorials by Binh Danh and

Robert Schultz, a word and image exhibition featuring original photographs, poetry, chlorophyll prints, and artist’s books, draws upon the war poems and prose of Walt Whitman and upon the Liljenquist Collection of Civil War portraits held in the Library of Congress. Using Whitman’s writings as a guide, Danh and Schultz have sought to memorialize the experience of war by concentrating on the faces of individual soldiers, the landscapes where they fought, and our collective gestures of remembrance. First shown at the Taubman Museum during the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, the exhibition proves timely again, opening a new perspective on the controversy that has arisen over the fate of national monuments.

The exhibition’s portraits and landscapes treat the U.S. Civil War, the Vietnam-American War, and the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, including Binh Danh’s daguerreotype

studies of the Lafayette Hillside memorial erected on private land in California to remember casualties of our current wars in the Middle East. Renderings in nineteenth-century photographic media—daguerreotypes and cyanotypes—assert that all wars are essentially the same: they are agonies borne chiefly by individual soldiers and their families.

For Whitman, the land itself is a revivifying memorial. In his poem “This Compost” he wonders at the purifying power of the earth that takes in death and sends back life, as when the “resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves.” Correspondingly, the leaves that hold soldiers’ images in War Memoranda have grown out of contemporary American soil and fulfill Whitman’s prediction that the war dead will inhabit “every future grain of wheat and ear of corn, and every flower that grows, and every breath we draw.” Concentrating on

the portraits of common soldiers, battlefield landscapes, and memorials both public and private, the exhibition insists upon a personal and intimate perspective, a “ground-level” view beneath politics and ideologies.

Molly Rogers, author of Delia’s Tears, has written about War Memoranda:

[Schultz and Danh] have reconfigured the documents of war to create a new kind of memorial, one that speaks of war as personal tragedy. War memorials are too often mute, naming the dead with fitting solemnity but neglecting to say anything of what the dead know . . .. Perhaps of all our national monuments, only the Vietnam Veterans Memorial gives the civilian a shiver of understanding. “We wade on in,” Schultz writes of the Memorial, as if we were not on the Mall in Washington but in the swamps of Southeast Asia, a place where, faced with Maya Lin’s austere granite gash, “particular deaths rush out.” It is impossible not to feel in some small but significant way involved. So it is with War Memoranda.

Whitman’s war poems are both elegiac and comforting, finding consolation in nature’s renewals and human generations. In a wall text quoting “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Whitman

addresses us—“I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence”—and War Memoranda looks back at him in answering contemporary artworks and poems. Even portraits of Whitman himself are rendered in leaves plucked from his own Camden House garden, responding to the famous passage near the end of “Song of Myself”: “I bequeath myself to

the dirt to grow from the grass I love, / If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.” Similarly, portraits of young Civil War soldiers are rendered in leaves from battlefield “witness trees” that stood in the 1860s.

Since August 2017, when white nationalists carried torches past Jefferson’s Rotunda at the University of Virginia chanting the Nazi slogan “Blood and Soil,” the works and themes of the War Memoranda exhibition have taken on a new inflection and urgency. For Whitman, the grass springing from American soil was a sign of democracy, “Growing among black folks as among white, / Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.” And American blood in American soil yielded “the beautiful uncut hair of graves”:

Tenderly will I use you, curling grass, It may be you spring from the breasts of young men, It may be if I had known them I would have loved them.

In December of 1862, after the Battle of Fredericksburg, when the poet traveled to Virginia seeking his wounded brother, he saw outside a field hospital established in a captured manor house “a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, &c., a full load for a one-horse cart.” Those amputated limbs were piled at the foot of two catalpa trees that still stand, flowering and

leafing out each spring in front of Falmouth’s Chatham Manor. In War Memoranda, a soldier’s portrait in a Chatham catalpa leaf makes literal Whitman’s trope of regeneration.

In War Memoranda, the flesh of leaves holds the images of Civil War soldiers Northern and Southern, black and white, who look out and seem to ask hard questions. Nearby, Whitman’s poem “Reconciliation,” written at the end of the war, challenges us with its exemplary compassion.

. . . my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead, I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin—I

draw near, Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in

the coffin.

The War Memoranda exhibition aspires to a similar humanity, and to be a kind of monument, itself—a call to our better angels of reconciliation.

Lefttoright:UnidentifiedUnionamputeeinFalmouthcatalpaleaf;unidentifiedAfrican-Americansoldierinhostaleaf;unidentifiedConfederatesoldierinAppomattoxoakleaf;imagescourtesyoftheLiljenquistFamilyCollection,LibraryofCongress.

The ArtistsWarMemorandagrowsoutofanongoingeight-yearcollaborationbetweenBinhDanhandRobertSchultzwhichhasseenartworksandpoemspublishedsidebysideinnationalliteraryjournals,inthebookAncestralAltars(Artist’sProofEditions,2005),andonScribners’BESTAMERICANPOETRYwebsite.

Binh Danh BinhDanhreceivedhisMFAfromStanfordUniversityandhasemergedasanartistofnationalimportancewithworkthatinvestigateshisVietnameseheritageandourcollectivememoryofwar,bothinVietnamandCambodia—worksthat,inhisownwords,dealwith“mortality,memory,history,landscape,justice,evidence,andspirituality.”Hedevelopedaprocessformaking“chlorophyllprints,”bywhichphotographicimagesareembeddedinthefleshofleaves,andhisnewestbodyofworkfocusesonthedaguerreotypeprocess.Hisworkshavebeenincludedinimportantexhibitionsatmuseumsacrossthecountryandinternationally,andareheldinthecollectionsoftheNationalGalleryofArt,theCorcoranArtGallery,thePhiladelphiaMuseumofArt,theDeYoungMuseum,theGeorgeEastmanHouse,andmanymore.In2013hewasafeaturedartistatthe18thBiennaleofSydneyinAustralia.HeisprofessorofphotographyatArizonaStateUniversityandisrepresentedbytheHainesGalleryinSanFranciscoandtheLisaSetteGalleryinScottsdale,Arizona.

Robert Schultz RobertSchultzistheauthoroffivebooksandhasreceivedaNationalEndowmentfortheArtsfellowship,CornellUniversity’sCorsonBishopPoetryPrize,and,fromTheVirginiaQuarterlyReview,theEmilyClarkBalchPrizeforPoetry.PoemsincludedinWarMemorandahaveappearedinnationalliteraryjournals,inanthologies,andintextbookspublishedbyRandomHouseandMcGrawHill.Hisbooksincludethreecollectionsofpoetry,AncestralAltars,VeinAlongtheFault,andWinterinEden;anovel,TheMadhouseNudes;andaworkofnonfiction,WeWerePirates:ATorpedoman’sPacificWar.HeholdsMFAandPhDdegreesfromCornellUniversityandhastaughtatCornell,theUniversityofVirginia,andLutherCollege.Since2004SchultzhasbeentheJohnP.FishwickProfessorofEnglishatRoanokeCollegeinSalem,Virginia.HeisrepresentedbyBrandt&HochmanLiteraryAgentsinNewYork.

Traveling Exhibition Specifics

Includes: Approximately50chlorophyllprints,15cyanotypes,35daguerreotypes,8poetrybroadsidesandartist'sbooks.Theartistswelcometheopportunitytoworkwithcuratorstoadjusttheexhibitionfortheirvenues.

Space Requirements: 176linearwallM.,2,500squareM.,subjecttolayout.Space requirementsareflexible,basedonselectionandarrangementofworks.

Rental Fee: *$13,500*RentalFeeincludesartiststravel,lodging,perdiem,jointpresentationanddemonstration

Shipping Costs: Exhibitingvenuepayspro-ratedone-wayshippingcosts

Insurance: Tobecarriedbyvenue

Supporting materials: Electronicfilesofeducationalmaterials,labels,walltexts,and galleryguide.Theartists,BinhDanhandRobertSchultz,willconductajoint-60minutepresentationwithslidesaswellasaBehindtheScenesProcessdemonstrationforupto*thirtyparticipants.* Subject to facilities, technology and capacity

Companion book War Memoranda available to accompany the exhibit published by the Taubman Museum of Art. Complimentary copies will be given for planning purposes and as a gallery companion.

Workshops: Camera/PhotographyandPoetryWorkshopsavailable;canrequesta collaborativeworkshopwithbothartistspresent

Availability: Twelveweekrental,November2016-December2022

Selected Works

BinhDanh&RobertSchultzUnidentifiedyoungUnionsoldierinforagecap,2012Chlorophyllprintandresin14.5x11.5inchesImagefromtheLiljenquistFamilyCollection,LibraryofCongress

BinhDanh&RobertSchultzWaltWhitmaninCamdenHouseHostaleaf,2011Chlorophyllprint&resin14.5x11.5inchesDaguerreotypebyunknownphotographer,probablyGabrielleHarrison,1854,NewYorkPublicLibrary,Astor,LenoxandTildenFoundations,RareBooksDivision

BinhDanh&RobertSchultzGirlinmourning,withphotograph,2012Chlorophyllprintandresin19.5x16inchesImagefromtheLiljenquistFamilyCollection,LibraryofCongress

BinhDanh&RobertSchultzUnidentifiedUnionsoldierincatalpa“witnesstree”leaf,ChathamManor,Falmouth,Virginia,2013Chlorophyllprintandresin14.5x11.5inchesImagefromtheLiljenquistFamilyCollection,LibraryofCongress

BinhDanh&RobertSchultzUnidentifiedwomaninmourningwithphotograph,2012Chlorophyllprint&resin16.5x13inchesImagefromLiljenquistFamilyCollection,LibraryofCongress

BinhDanhThememoryandmemorialatMyLaiArtistisbook,daguerreotypes,200911x26.5x1inch

BinhDanhUSsoldier(GreenMan)Chlorophyllprintandresin,2008145/8x12.25x1.25inch

BinhDanhStonewallJacksonMemorialCemetery,Lexington,Virginia,2011Cyanotype18.75x26.5x1.5inch,framed

BinhDanhSongofOurselves,nos.3,3b,6,&7,2010Uniquephotogramsondaguerreotypes10x12.25x1.25incheseach,framed

BinhDanhInMemoryofOurTroops,April22,2012(EarthDay)Original“cameraexposed”daguerreotype12.25x14x1.5inchesframed

BinhDanhWeWillNotForgetYou,May20,2012Original“cameraexposed”daguerreotype14.25x12x1.5inchesframed

Chlorophyllprintsongrassandresin(lefttoright):JamesA.Wright,21;GregMcColloug,20;JamesTroyRalph,21;HaroldJamesWarmsley,24.AllworksbyBinhDanh,18.5x15.5x1.25inches,framed,2008.

WarMemoranda:Photography,WaltWhitman,andMemorialsbyBinhDanhandRobertSchultz

TRAVELINGEXHIBITIONPROSPECTUS

Formoreinformation,pleasecontact:

KimberlyC.Piland,ExhibitionCoordinatorkpiland@taubmanmuseum.org540.204.4126

Taubman Museum of Art 110 Salem Ave, SE, Roanoke, VA 24011

540.342.5760 | www.taubmanmuseum.org