Art City: Tyanna Buie's artwork a family memorial

The shoebox-sized container sat in Tyanna Buie’s art studio for a long time. With a return address from a funeral home in Illinois, it held the cremated remains of an uncle she barely knew.

Buie's mother had asked her to make an artwork in her uncle's honor. She was hoping for a modest pastel, or maybe a drawing that could be kept within the family.

On instinct one day, Buie reached for her uncle’s ashes and decided to use them in her art, spreading them onto a detail of what would become a towering, tapestry-like work at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

“Incarnation,” Buie’s most significant work to date, is part of an ongoing artistic memoir. While her work touches broad themes about being black in America, it is also specific to her family history: a grandmother who died young, a mother who turned to drugs, a father who walked away, an uncle who got lost in the prison system and a childhood of contradictions.

Using imagery gathered from an almost forensic investigation of her own ancestry, including mug shots of family members culled from the internet, Buie is creating a body of work rooted in a sense of longing for family connection.

“She is bringing this family together that was never together,” says the museum’s chief curator Brady Roberts, who orchestrated the acquisition of “Incarnation.”

By accepting the artwork into its collection, the museum has become duty bound to regard the artwork – which includes the remains of Gregory Buie, who died in an Illinois prison in 2009 – as part of a special category. As the International Council of Museum’s Code of Ethics suggests, the public display of human remains should be done “with great tact and with respect for the feeling of human dignity held by all peoples.”

This is part of the beauty of Buie’s artistic gesture. She has reclaimed dignity and cultural significance for a family that had lost a sense of itself.

Haunting work 

“Incarnation” is both monumental and fragile: a patchwork of screen-printed images, layered atop one another, giving them a stark, graphic abstraction. The whole thing is collaged together like a quilt. Seams are evident and imperfect. Like old wallpaper, they feel as if they could peel apart.

“There is the warmth of family in the piece,” says Grace Gnorski, a museum docent who hosts discussions about the work, which she thinks of as an artistic heirloom. “People look at this piece and they want to talk about it.”

The dominant image in the artwork is based on one of the last known photographs of Buie’s grandmother, taken when she was dying of cancer. The female figure, deep black and faceless in the work, is bent over and gripping a bouquet of pearls, necklaces and flowers, objects Buie associates with her mother.

“When I saw it, it took me right there, right then and there, to Chicago and what my mom had on,” says Tyanna’s mother Darlene Buie.

“Culturally speaking, usually in the African-American family, the grandmother is the matriarch of the family,” Buie says, noting that her grandmother died young, in her mid-50s. “Unfortunately, once she passed away, the unraveling really began and began fast.”

For Buie, that unraveling meant a tumultuous childhood. With her father increasingly out of the picture and her mom addicted to drugs – on the streets and in prison – Buie ended up being shuttled between various family members and foster care. She jettisoned bedrooms, school lockers, best friends and a sense of permanence, sometimes with little warning.

“The family, it literally fell apart,” says Darlene Buie, who received treatment for her drug addiction and has a good relationship with her daughter today. “We were drinking and doing drugs and all of that.”

As for her uncle, Buie never got to know him well. She recently discovered a picture of herself perched on his knee when she was little and remembers a window of connection when she was in the fifth grade, when he was briefly out of prison.

The family lost track of him due to a simple clerical error – his name had become misspelled as “Bowie” in the prison system. They learned of his death, from a heart attack, after the fact. He was 43.

A short time later, the box of ashes arrived.

“I just remember feeling this huge weight of sorrow and actually anger and also feeling like I am a crappy niece,” Buie says of her response to his death, regretting that he died without family.

His mug shot, with specific facial features removed, haunts “Incarnation.” It recurs subtly like a background pattern in a textile, quilt or wallpaper. Gregory Buie’s ashes appear over the surface of an image of a funerary urn, small and at the center of the work.

'Your greatest work'

“Incarnation” is one of a select few artworks by area artists displayed prominently in the museum’s recently reconfigured contemporary galleries. Rarer still, it was effectively commissioned sight unseen.

“I told her, ‘I want a great work from you, your greatest work,’” says Roberts, who calls the 32-year-old Buie an important, emerging voice in the art world.

The amalgam of imagery, culled from family artifacts, fragmentary memories and quintessential images of home, expresses something about larger histories, too, Roberts says.

Buie’s mother’s beloved necklaces, abstracted through the hand-applied process, take on the appearance of chains, echoing a more distant history of bondage, slavery and lynchings. Picket fences, likewise, resemble bars to a cell, raising questions about separations and justice. Images of a boarded-up building, a symbol of abandonment, become part of the color and texture of the work.

The portraits embedded within the work are tellingly faceless, expressing something about families bound by name but unknown to each other. There is a sense of lost lineages, both recent and quite distant, bound up in the work.

In a city known for its segregation and high incarceration rate of black men, the acquisition of “Incarnation” is an indication that the museum is not only willing to buy exceptional work by local artists (which has not always been the case) but that it will not shy away from art that addresses critical issues as well (also not always the case).

“Our collection and our audience should reflect our city,” says Roberts, acknowledging that the museum has not always done this well.

“I think it is a bit of a memorial,” says Buie, who lives in both Milwaukee and Detroit. “I think there is something memorializing about this, trying to sum up ... stories of people that I believe are significant.”

Buie, who is represented by the Dean Jensen Gallery, 759 N. Water St., was a recent recipient of the prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation grant for artists deserving wider recognition. It includes a $25,000 prize.

Mary Louise Schumacher is the Journal Sentinel’s art and architecture critic.

IF YOU GO 

Buie will talk about her work and lead an art-making workshop Friday during MAM After Dark at the Milwaukee Art Museum, 700 N. Art Museum Drive. The event begins at 8 p.m. For information and tickets: mam.org/afterdark.