Procession

In Procession, the artist builds a shadowbox around a painting adding culturally significant images and objects that recall the history of the American South and Bailey’s ancestral past. This example of Bailey’s “medicine cabinet” sculptures, illustrates perfectly the artist’s intense awareness of African American history and social consciousness. As many other works by the artist, Procession incorporates water inspired imagery, such as ships, oars, fishing nets, and ripples, to evoke the traumatic history of the transatlantic slave trade and the role of the waterways in economic and cultural life in the South. With rich colors, thick paint application, and a sensitive and accessible approach, the artist incorporates his African ancestry by using old photographs from relatives and integrating tribal art in his own work.

Radcliffe Bailey was born in Bridgeton, New Jersey, in 1968, but he moved to Atlanta when he was only four years old. He attended Atlanta College of Art and graduated with a BFA in 1991. Bailey’s career emerged from his fascination with Atlanta’s history and the deeply rooted past eminent in the South.