1993
mixed media
22.25 x 13 x 9.25 in.
Collection of Mary Anne Goley

One of Stout's most beautiful representations of the mysteries, memories, dramas, and torments of love is Louisiana Love Icon. It is an assemblage of elements paralleling in its formal richness the complexity of messages conveyed about its subject. This is an altar to Erzulie (a female Vodou spirit), who is honored by beautiful, glittering things and is summoned by graphic representations of a heart. It is a testimony to the deity's involvement with romance, captured by an emblazoned and embossed copper heart, and her supervision over motherhood, symbolized by a golden baby framed behind glass. Yet, despite Erzulie's ever-watchful presence, Stout uses a number of carefully chosen objects and a range of materials to make other sacred and secular references to love and its effects. The two golden bottles anchoring the base are containers of "love potions," showing that conjuring can help gain control over love. Between them is a bleeding heart studded with nails resting as an offering, which may literally refer to the pain of love. Here on this altar it also is a powerful Christian image, referring to the narrative of Christ's sacred heart, which first miraculously appeared before cloistered nuns between the end of the 11th and the mid-14th centuries in northern Europe. The Christian representation of a bleeding heart pierced with arrows has been transformed by Stout on Louisiana Love Icon into a heart driven with nails. This Africanizes it and transforms it into an nkisi (a power figure made by the Kongo and related peoples of Zaire), with the secrets of its unseen contents calling upon the spirits to relieve love's torments. Stouts evocation of a bleeding heart captures the essential syncretism of spiritual belief at the core of her work, where certain visual references and symbols can encompass a range of different meanings.

The main panel of Louisiana Love Icon has been treated like the surface of an African-American memory jar, a ceramic container covered with plaster and stuck with "shells, bits of glass, coins...and other odds and ends" and placed on a grave. Such jars date to the late 19th century and functioned as three-dimensional representations of the kinds of objects scattered over graves in the south. Stout has studded her Louisiana Love Icon with buttons, charms, milagros, Mardi Gras beads in the shape of Shakespearean masks, and other suggestive bits and pieces. It functions as a burial ground for the memories of lost love and past relationships.

From M. Berns, Dear Robert, I'll See You at the Crossroads: A Project by Renée Stout, University Art Museum, UCSB, 1995.

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