Vanessa Compton: A Night at the Garden
Brattleboro Museum & Art Center
May 2024 – April 2025
Collage is a dimensional medium. In viewing a collage, I notice the edges of cut paper and what has been put over what. Even digital collage employs what image-editing softwares call “layers.” In the exhibition Vanessa Compton: A Night at the Garden at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, the artist’s collages have been flattened into giant reproductions, and yet given a new sense of dimension with their incorporation into the museum’s facade.
Mounted into seven window recesses on two sides of the building, Compton’s images enter into a conversation with the world around them. The blue sky of The Past mirrors our Vermont sky on a clear and sunny day. The mandala-like circles of images that are often Compton’s focal point are echoed in the Lee Williams sculptures on the lawn. Beyond visual resonances, this installation makes Compton’s eye-catching works accessible to passers-by who may never step foot in the museum. (I was delighted to learn that Compton was contacted by not one but two biologists who study an obscure sea slug she included in her work.)
It is apt that Compton’s works should be placed where they can speak to the wider world—Compton’s concerns are worldly, and political. Three of Compton’s original collage-painting hybrids can be viewed inside the museum, including the work that gave the exhibition its title, A Night at the Garden. At the center of this work, a contemporary couple stands atop a rocky hill, gazing into a grainy black-and-white image of a 1939 Nazi rally that took place not in Germany, but in New York’s Madison Square Garden. The rally image is embedded into an eclipse, and the neon pink sky behind it is apocalyptic. Interspersed throughout the landscape below are fragments of recognizable moments of racial strife in our recent history: the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, North Carolina; football player Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during the national anthem; someone protesting the Flint water crisis while wearing a death mask.
It is a symptom of our times that these specific events of just a few years ago feel like ancient history, having been eclipsed (ha!) by so many incidents since that feel tragically similar. Dated 2019, A Night at the Garden predates the COVID-19 pandemic and yet includes a prescient image of an Asian man in a surgical mask, recalling the SARS and H1N1 epidemics that predated it. This work reminds us, in case we needed it, that we are stuck in an eternal recurrence, doomed to tragedy upon tragedy stemming from the original and ongoing sin of white supremacy.
The marginalization of people of color through politics, pop culture, and especially the mythic status of the American West is a frequent topic for Compton, but her works are not without hope or a call to action. To collage is to cut, clip, and quote images by and of others, mostly without permission or compensation. Compton is interested in interrogating that kind of appropriation and is thoughtful about her source material. For Riders of the Astral Plains, which features the quadrupled image of a Black cowboy, she contacted photographer Ivan McClellan, chronicler of Black rodeo culture, for permission to use a selection of his images. In exchange, should Compton sell the works that use his images, she will donate a portion of the proceeds to a charity of McClellan’s choice. Through McClellan, Compton also got to know Ronnie Davis III, a rider featured in McClellan’s photographs and now in Compton’s collage. Compton openly acknowledges her privileged position as a white descendant of settler colonists making work about, and thereby potentially profiting from, the plight of people of color. Her personal and financial engagement with the photographer and subject of the images she quotes is an acknowledgment of that predicament.
In addition to Compton’s frequent use of Western imagery and concerns about racial injustice, the works featured in this exhibition include personal references and local landscapes, representing an inward turn for the artist. In the intimately-scaled Some Velvet Morning, one of the works on view inside the museum, a couple in seventies-style dress gaze into a bassinet containing a white tiger pup. This was the first work on canvas Compton completed after giving birth to her daughter. Having children is among the more universal experiences on earth, and yet for new parents, their child is a rare, prized, and potentially fearsome beast. (I am a new mother myself with a daughter the same age as Compton’s.)
In I, Coyote, Still Wonder, Compton responded to a prompt for a 2020 exhibition at the Bennington Museum: “What is your vision for the future of Vermont?” She answers with rolling green hills, populated with portraits of family, friends, and artists she admires. The stereotypical Vermont landmarks are there—covered bridge, church steeple— but the diversity of faces occupying the scene defy the state’s reputation as among the whitest in the country. She writes of wanting to create “the village of my dreams, informed by the past yet not bound by it . . . . a positively psychedelic allegory to the future that was bound in wildness, safety, relationships, and love.”
Compton’s work strikes a rare balance, and one we are all struggling with now. She confronts, with honesty, with little fear, the extreme inequalities rooted in our past that are being constantly perpetuated, and yet she holds onto hope for a future as bright as a Vermont summer sky.
– Andrea Rosen
Andrea Rosen is the former curator of The Fleming Museum of Art at the University of Vermont and the founder of the Vermont Curators Group.