Pictured center: "All Black and Blue, Bruises of a Queen's Crown" (2018) by Rontherin Ratcliff
When she was a child Bobbie Jean Johnson was given up for adoption, ran away from a foster home where she had been molested, and ended up on the streets. Then came the night when a car she was riding in was stopped. Without her knowledge, one of the men she was with slid a gun and a knife into Johnson’s purse. The police, who were investigating a stabbing, booked her with first-degree murder. Beaten and suffocated into a coerced confession, and notwithstanding her companion’s eventual admission that he planted the weapons in her purse, Johnson was convicted and sentenced to forty-one years in prison for a crime she did not commit. She was nineteen.
Johnson is one of thirty currently or formerly imprisoned women whose experiences are explored in an exhibit named Per(Sister): Incarcerated Women in Louisiana, on view at Newcomb Art Museum at Tulane University through July 6. The exhibition, jointly developed by Newcomb curatorial staff and team members from the re-entry organization Operation Restoration, paired each woman—or “Persister”—with a practicing artist, who created a piece to represent her story and address the stark ramifications of a life behind bars. Johnson chose conceptual sculptor Rontherin Ratliff to tell her tale. Like her, Ratliff had grown up in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward and had been touched by the criminal justice system himself—his father had been imprisoned through most of his early childhood. With his piece “All Black & Blue, Bruises of a Queen’s Crown,” Ratliff uses the form of a chess piece—the all-powerful queen—to interpret Johnson’s experience. Black and blue for the forced confession, Ratliff’s queen stands at Bobbie Jean’s height and is crowned by a woman’s purse out of which rise curved handgun stocks. Atop her crown, a makeup mirror reflects the viewer’s face, eliciting another kind of reflection: “Could this have been me?”
"She had to accept this life sentence. That became the crown she had to wear.”
“Bobbie Jean has such a presence,” explained Ratliff. “The challenge was how to display that presence without creating a portrait. So I was thinking back to young women, and to the evidence found in her purse. That’s a makeup mirror but also a representation of a police badge. I was considering ‘Who does a cop see when they see you?’”
In the context of an exhibit about women and their place in society, Ratliff’s choice of imagery was no accident. “The notion of a queen resonates on many different levels,” he observed. “I was thinking about the way her confession was obtained but also about the strategic way that the criminal justice system game is played. She had to accept this life sentence. That became the crown she had to wear.”
[Read this: "Within Angola, some inmates find that art provides the only path to freedom".]
A conceptual artist, Ratliff considers his work to occupy two different lanes: one lane shares personal experiences; the other serves as social commentary—the artist looking at the world around him and making work that comments on it. “My father was in prison for most of my early childhood,” he noted. “Growing up and having a parent in the system, you live with a certain level of shame and embarrassment. There’s a vulnerability that comes with expressing that through art. As artists we have agendas about what we want to create and how we want to be portrayed. When I was presented with Bobbie Jean’s story, I had to separate what is mine from what is purely hers. I had to ask ‘What is her experience? And what is my experience, and how can I relate?’”
The exhibit Per(Sister): Incarcerated Women of Louisiana remains at Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane through July 6. To see more, visitpersister.info.
See more works by Rontherin Ratliff at his studio, 3014 St. Claude Ave, New Orleans, or atrontherin.com.
Per(Sister): Incarcerated Women of Louisiana and the project behind the exhibit will be profiled in LPB’s Art Rocks, the weekly showcase of visual and performing arts hosted by Country Roads publisher James Fox-Smith, on Friday, April 19 at 8:30 pm and Saturday, April 20 at 5:30 pm across the LPB network. lpb.org/artrocks.
