Baptism Sunday: Lynthia Edwards

As we witness the culture and the stories of southern life seem to slowly slip into obscurity, artist Lynthia Edwards offers us a glimpse of these fading traditions. Like a jigsaw puzzle assembling before our eyes, her work becomes an amalgamation of a distinctive regional visual vocabulary. From this new language, Baptism Sunday presents a series of multimedia collages and quilts detailing the social, religious, and personal experience of river baptisms.

In this exhibition, she continues her exploration of the lived experiences of Black girls in the south. Drawing from her own journey as a woman traversing the conservative nature of the Pentecostal church, whose practices she eventually rejected, she watched other young girls overcome by the excitement of their impending rite of passage. Visions of the river baptism transform from a coalescence of fragmented faces. Each expression adds to the kaleidoscopic range of emotions, from expressions of joy to the weight of this spiritual responsibility thrust upon young shoulders. The figures form from the intermingling of patterns and fabrics that imbue the works with a nostalgic longing for the past. A subdued palette of mellow neutral tones contrasted by tranquil rich blues captures the ambiguity of the time, the space, and the water.

 In a celebration of the lives of the Black girls in the rural south, Lynthia Edwards asks us to question the liminal spaces they are forced to inhabit. As she honors the lineage of southern crafts, she also illuminates the complexities embodied within the culture. As we wade into the dirty water of the river, an ecosystem polluted and abused, how can we expect our souls to be clean?