Artist Date: "Tall Poppies" by Jacquenette Arnette

The gallery was so minimalistic I almost missed it.

It didn’t help that I had been in the Schuech Fine Arts Center maybe twice- so I didn’t know what the lobby usually looked like. Aside from the huge tree made of rope in the center, there didn’t seem like much to look at. Maybe this was just...the way it looked all the time? Was the gallery somewhere else?

After I wandered around for a bit, sorta afraid to ask anyone, (which didn’t matter in the end because after five minutes I was probably the only one in the building), and was reminded of how claustrophobic the building is, I confirmed that, yes, that was indeed, the gallery I was looking for.

According to the wall and the papers on the benches (which I probably should’ve been more aware of)  the exhibit was called “Tall Poppies” by Jacquenette Arnette. Poppies are one of my favorite flowers, so that was already enough to get me excited. I also recognized the reference to what Tv Tropes called “Tall Poppy Syndrome” though I didn’t initially get how that tied into the art. More on that in a bit.

The art was lovely, in my opinion. The art on the walls near Wupperman looked like they were made out of construction paper, but it was cut so cleanly, has really vibrant colors, and did a fantastic job of realistically depicting setting.

The charcoal art on the wall near Ayers kind of threw me in a loop again because it looked so stylistically different from the rest of the exhibit,- it was fascinating to look at too, if in a different way.

Once there was nothing else to look at, I sat down on the bench in front of the artist biography and spent a good ten minutes reading over it. And God did having context totally change everything about the exhibit.

Arnette’s a native of San Antonio, and the idea for the exhibit began with the stories her Grandma and mother would tell her about the segregated south- my own grandma related to me the consequences of being friends with the first and only black students at my high school during the 50’s, but it’s so much more brutal and tragic hearing directly from one’s family history.

“As an adult, when I navigate the city I have a more removed view of where I live. I know which tree is the hanging tree on W. Kings Hwy. I remember the story that my grandmother told me about her brother being lynched at the now blue star art complex, former railroad yards.”

She applied the crowd mentality of the Jim Crow period with the idea that “tall poppies get cut down”. Each piece is based on a real place where someone was murdered, and there’s at least one tall poppy appropriately representing the person(s) that died there. Their faces are cast in charcoal along the wall across from the tree, which I realized as I was leaving- mentally hitting me with all the force of a semi - was a literal hanging tree.

Arnette turned her art into a memorial, and that totally blew me away. I left the gallery feeling really excited and refreshed. I also realised that I should probably read the word parts of art galleries more often.