Still Waters Run Deep

BY KIMBERLY DREW PHOTOGRAPHY BY EMMANUELLE PICKETT

CALIDA RAWLES logs onto our Zoom call covered in paint. The artist is in go-mode, working fervently on a set of new paintings. Just over her shoulder is a not-yet-finished canvas featuring one of her signature floating figures. Rawles’s microbraids rock as she walks the camera over to showcase intimate details embedded in the composition. Inside the work’s approximately nine-foot canvas, a Black woman’s head is suspended, somehow both floating and sinking. Her white dress trails through clear, blue waters. “This beautiful, strong woman is pulling energy from something larger than herself,” she explains. The work, titled Thy Name We Praise, was recently commissioned by the Museum of Fine Art at Spelman College, Rawles’s alma mater, and joins other works in the traveling exhibition “Black American Portraits,” co-curated by the museum’s executive director, Liz Andrews, and the Tate Modern’s Britton Family curator-at-large, Christine Y. Kim.

The work’s title is borrowed from “The Spelman Hymn.” It wasn’t until a recent conversation with the college’s former museum director, Andrea Barnwell Brownlee, that Rawles began to realize just how deeply the college has informed her work as an artist. “The best thing about my experience at Spelman was recognizing the diversity of Blackness and the Black female,” she shares, noting that it helped her to better hold and understand her own complexity. In Rawles’s finished painting, the figure’s skin is created from a vast array of flesh tones to enhance its richness. Just before our call ends, the painter holds up her copy of the catalog for “Bearing Witness: Contemporary Works by African American Women Artists,” an exhibition held during her time at Spelman. Each page of the book is adorned with signatures from Black women artists who traveled to Atlanta for the exhibition in 1996. “The experience of these artists coming, seeing the show… I was like, This is what I want to do.” With this latest commission, Rawles has her chance to inspire the same reaction in a new generation of artists.