Susan Harbage Page and Juan Logan, Prop Master at the Gibbes Museum of Art; Southern Spaces

In his large-scale video projection Welcome Home, Juan Logan samples and alters imagery and sound from D. W. Griffin's silent film Birth of a Nation (1915), Walt Disney's live action/animation feature Song of the South (1946), Disney cartoons, footage of a 1920 Ku Klux Klan rally at the Washington Monument, and engravings of the 1861 bombardment of Fort Sumter, the latter selected from the archives of the Gibbes Museum. The two feature films are infamous for their systematic use of racial stereotypes, as well as their artistic innovation. Griffith's film sympathetically depicted the Ku Klux Klan, implicitly giving cultural support to lynching by vilifying black males as sexually predatory and dangerous towards white women, which enflamed white supremacist passions. The Disney studio based Song of the South on Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus stories in which an Uncle Tom-like character recounts the adventures of Br'er Rabbit and other animal characters. While actors play Uncle Remus and the white plantation family, the animals are animated. The cartoon fish that repeatedly leaps into the air refers to 'fish tales' that romanticize the South just as the song "Everybody has a Laughing Place" contests idealized accounts of "Dixie." Denigrating stereotypes deployed in Song of the South prevented its release, in its entirety, in the United States, although the song "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" won the 1947 Academy Award for Best Song.

Juan Logan, Welcome Home video in its exhibit context, Charleston, South Carolina, 2009.
Photo: Rick Rhodes.

The blank silhouette that appears on the Wallpaper of Background Material and as the Portrait of Denmark Vesey also frames the scenes and sound track sampled in Welcome Home. The ironic title of Logan's video refers to the words of an older white woman welcoming a white family back to the plantation and its values. Images of a young white woman appear amid an army of hooded Klansmen, who celebrate their "protection" of her womanhood. These images alternate with scenes that include a smiling Uncle Remus, supposedly happy in the paternalistic embrace of slavery and Jim Crow, a black "coon" cat running scared from an unseen adversary, Civil War battles, and the face of a young black male (of the present as much as of the past) in the process of being erased. Logan digitally altered the imagery in his video to visually magnify its drama and draw attention to the frightening power of racial caricatures.