Lisa Jarrett
When multidisciplinary artist Lisa Jarrett read a collection of essays by Meg Henson Scales, she was immediately struck by one sentence about how Harriet Tubman was tender-headed—or had a scalp particularly sensitive to hair-styling procedures. “That sentence made her human to me,” Jarrett says. “Everything that [Tubman] represents and everything that she did just seems so incredible, particularly at the time she was doing it. So to think of her as tender-headed was kind of an oxymoron, but also perfect. Pitch-perfect.” Women of color who can bear the pain of having their hair intricately styled, whether in tight braids or sleek silk presses, are often praised, while those who can’t are treated with kid gloves. This quagmire that Black women so frequently fall into—being seen as too strong to need care, ostracized or belittled if they show weakness—was one that Jarrett felt compelled to explore through materials “really specific to my identity as a Black woman and as an artist.” She grew up around hair salons in the South—her mother and aunt were hairdressers for Black women—so she was inspired to re-create beauty supply stores and dissect hair culture in her art. The resulting body of work is now part of a solo exhibition, Tenderhead, at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon.
The exhibition features two installation pieces that each stretch 22 feet tall, along with several mixed-media works hung around the gallery space. One of the larger pieces, Migration Studies, Beauty Supply (No. 111, Taproot: The direction of the rain.), is an entire wall made from weaving net that Jarrett installed in the space while perched on a scissor lift. She hand-wove synthetic hair throughout the substrate of the net, which was her “line work, as in drawing,” she says. The other, 503 portraits of wig mannequins and 1 portrait of Diana Ross (Beauty and Beyond), is a collage Jarrett created from photographs she’s taken at beauty supply stores across the country (with a portrait of Diana Ross snuck in amid them). While most visitors thought that the photos were of Barbie dolls, a group of fourth- and fifth-grade girls from the King School Museum of Contemporary Art (a museum inside of a public school, co-founded by Jarrett) immediately recognized the references to a beauty-supply store. The mannequin heads with wigs and synthetic hair were “such familiar territory to them. And that, to me, signals that I’m starting to get the work to do something that I’m deeply invested in,” Jarrett says, “which is to have children—who you don’t typically associate with expertise or sophistication in museums—walk into a place and just see themselves.”
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