Gettin' Religion
1948

Narrator: Gettin’ Religion, made in 1948, is a horizontal oil painting on linen. The painting is displayed in the Black Music section of the exhibit. It is a little over 2 feet tall and 3 feet wide. This night scene shows a lively cluster of people with different skin tones moving around a sidewalk. Some are playing music or strolling by while others watch from windows and a porch on the far side of the road. Some of the people can be identified as Black but not all. In the background from left to right there is a brick building labeled market, a house and an apartment building running from one edge of the painting to the other. The entire painting is bathed in a deep blue color, matching the rich blue of the night sky shown above the tops of the buildings, which is punctuated by tiny stars. 

Just right of the center, a prominent street light reaches the top border of the painting and casts a bluish white glow onto the contours of bodies, faces, and the surfaces of the street and buildings. While there are no street signs that make this immediately evident, the painting is set in Bronzeville, Chicago. Motley was one of the first Black artists to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A patch of grass, a flower planter, and two round hedges give a neighborhood feeling to the scene. The people’s gender, ages, roles, and time period are strongly suggested by their clothing: men wear hats and suits, women wear knee length dresses with steep heels and children wear t-shirts and plain bottoms. The features of the people in the background are undefined yet expressive.

A central focal point of the foreground scene is a tall Black man, so tall as to be out of scale with the rest of the figures, who has exaggerated features including unnaturally red lips, and stands on a pedestal that reads “Jesus Saves.” This caricature draws on the racist stereotype of the minstrel, and Motley gave no straightforward reason for its inclusion. The artist’s ancestry included Black, Indigenous, and European heritage, and he grappled with his racial identity throughout his life. He may have chosen to portray the stereotype to skewer assumptions about urban Black life and communities, by creating a contrast with the varied, more realistic, figures surrounding the preacher. To his right on the platform there is a short, stout, light-skinned man playing a trumpet. Behind him at the left edge of the painting are two women wearing red hats and long sleeved dresses playing trombone and tambourine. Another woman dressed the same presents a tambourine with coins smiling at a man who leans against the street light. 

In the foreground from left to right, the majority of the crowd moves along the sidewalk across the street from the buildings; a man stands with his arm around a woman, a child watches alone, a man with a red tie stands contrapposto with a cigarette in his hand. A woman in a singular green dress walks her small white dog. Another man creates a formal repetition with the man holding a cigarette as their profiles both face left. At the right edge of the painting an older man with a long white beard enters the frame walking with a cane. 

Davarian Baldwin: Toda la pieza está bañada por una suerte de azul profundo y llega al punto máximo de la  gama de lo que considero que es la posibilidad del Negro democrático, de lo sagrado a lo profano.

Narrador: Davarian Baldwin, profesor Paul E. Raether de Estudios Americanos en Trinity College en Hartford, analiza la escena callejera, Gettin’ Religion, que Archibald Motley creó en Chicago.

Motley estudió pintura en la Escuela del Instituto de Arte de Chicago. Aquí, el artista representa una escena nocturna bulliciosa en la ciudad:  

Davarian Baldwin: En verdad plasma las calles de Chicago como incubadoras de las que podrían considerarse formas culturales híbridas, tal y como la música góspel surge de la mezcla de sonidos del blues con letras sagradas. Aquí se podría ver, literalmente, un sonido tal, una forma de devoción, emergiendo de este espacio, y pienso que Motley es mágico por la manera en que logra capturar eso. Pero, al mismo tiempo, se aprecia cierta caricatura en la obra.

El caballero a la izquierda, arriba de la plataforma que dice "Jesús salva", tiene labios exageradamente rojos y una cabeza calva y negra con ojos de un blanco brillante; no se sabe si es una figura juglaresca de Minstrel o un Sambo, o si Motley lo usa para hacer una crítica sutil sobre las formas religiosas más santificadas, espiritualistas o pentecostales. El espectador no sabe con certeza si se trata de una persona real o de una estatua de tamaño natural. Creo que algo que escapa al público es que sí, Motley fue parte de esa época, de una especie de realismo visual que surgió en las décadas de 1920 y 1930. Sin embargo, Motley fue sobre todo una suerte de  pintor negro surrealista que estaba entre la firmeza de la documentación y lo que yo llamo ‘la velocidad de la luz del sueño’. 

Davarian Baldwin: The entire piece is bathed in a kind of a midnight blue, and it gets at the full gamut of what I consider to be Black democratic possibility, from the sacred to the profane.

Narrator: Davarian Baldwin, the Paul E. Raether Professor of American Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, discusses Archibald Motley’s street scene, Gettin’ Religion, which is set in Chicago.

Motley had studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Here, he depicts a bustling scene in the city at night.  

Davarian Baldwin: It really gets at Chicago's streets as being those incubators for what could be considered to be hybrid cultural forms, like gospel music that came out of the mixture of blues sound with sacred lyrics. You could literally see a sound like that, a form of worship, coming out of this space, and I think that Motley is so magical in the way he captures that. But the same time, you see some caricature here.

The gentleman on the left side, on top of a platform that says, "Jesus saves," he has exaggerated red lips, and a bald, black head, and bright white eyes, and you're not quite sure if he's a minstrel figure, or Sambo figure, or what, or if Motley is offering a subtle critique on more sanctified, or spiritualist, or Pentecostal religious forms. You're not sure if he's actually a real person or a life-sized statue, and that's something that I think people miss is that, yes, Motley was a part of this era, this 1920s and '30s era of kind of visual realism, but he really was kind of a black surreal painter, somewhere between the steady march of documentation and what I consider to be the light speed of the dream.

Narrator: Davarian Baldwin discusses another one of Motley’s Chicago street scenes, Gettin’ Religion. 

Davarian Baldwin: Here, the entire piece is bathed in a kind of a midnight blue, and it gets at the full gamut of what I consider to be black democratic possibility, from the sacred to the profane. In the middle of a commercial district, you have a residential home in the back with a light post above it, and then in the foreground, you have a couple in the bottom left-hand corner. Then in the bottom right-hand corner, you have an older gentleman, not sure if he's a Jewish rabbi or a light-skinned African American.

Like I said this diversity of color tones, of behaviors, of movement, of activity, the black woman in the background of the home, she could easily be a brothel mother or just simply a mother of the home with the child on the steps. You're not quite sure what's going on. It really gets at Chicago's streets as being those incubators for what could be considered to be hybrid cultural forms, like gospel music that came out of the mixture of blues sound with sacred lyrics. You could literally see a sound like that, a form of worship, coming out of this space, and I think that Motley is so magical in the way he captures that. But the same time, you see some caricature here.

The gentleman on the left side, on top of a platform that says, "Jesus saves," he has exaggerated red lips, and a bald, black head, and bright white eyes, and you're not quite sure if he's a minstrel figure, or Sambo figure, or what, or if Motley is offering a subtle critique on more sanctified, or spiritualist, or Pentecostal religious forms. You're not sure if he's actually a real person or a life-sized statue, and that's something that I think people miss is that, yes, Motley was a part of this era, this 1920s and '30s era of kind of visual realism, but he really was kind of a black surreal painter, somewhere between the steady march of documentation and what I consider to be the light speed of the dream.