The world ends every day. With an almost mundane regularity someone, somewhere, is facing life-altering changes to the world as they know it: the loss of a job, the impairment of a faculty, the death of a loved one. Over the past year, more and more people have lost the familiarities around which we structure life. With the life-altering effects of the 2020 election, the collapse of the national economy, and the ongoing presence of COVID-19, large-scale losses have become personal.
Adrian L. Burrell’s collective self-portrait photography series reflects the ways the end of the world manifests in mundane and intimate ways. By framing his work as a collective self-portrait, Burrell positions his family as a particular microcosm of Blackness and hopes that Black people across the diaspora find collective resonance. It’s After the End of the World, Don’t You Know That Yet?, commissioned for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Bay Area Walls series, and installed during the institution’s winter shut-down, is a depiction of life after the end of the world.
Like many of the themes in the Bay Area Walls exhibition, including in fellow photographer Erina Alejo’s My Ancestors Followed Me Here, Burrell’s work foregrounds the importance of place in our practices of memory and ritual. Photographed in Burrell’s hometown of Oakland, the images of It’s After the End depict his grandmother, mother and sister in variously staged front-facing portraits. Dressed in all white, the three women appear with staid, regal faces in front of local landmarks. The vibrancy of the landscapes—the flamingo pink of the closed-down Mexicali Rose, the chromatic shimmer of a graffiti memorial for Nia Wilson—swath the women in riches. Burrell’s grandmother, Therether Louis, masked in white, takes a solemn pose in front of Twin Wall Mural Company’s Shut it Down, establishing a commanding presence to stop the virulent spread of both COVID-19 and anti-Blackness. Burrell renders the three women in lush portraiture, inserting their profiles, and their stories, into an artistic tradition often used to depict royalty and world leaders.
But the significance of Burrell’s artistry extends beyond representation. When you look closely at his photography, it’s clear how carefully he arranges moments to speak across disciplines and convey the story he wants to tell. The women don silver wigs intermingled with steel wool. Created with his sister, Antonia Burrell, the wigs evoke Oakland’s history as an industrial boom city. And laced with flowers, these flowing hairpieces frame the women as if draping them in fine furs and sashes.
The women wear church whites and pearls, a gesture to the Black church Pentecostal tradition and its iterations throughout the African diaspora. Burrell’s grandmother sports her wig in a solo shot in front of a storefront in downtown Oakland. The steel wool rises, weightless, in a vertical lift. In this photo, Louis’s fingers gently lift out from her side as if ascending with her hair.
