Untitled, from the series Mum by Nancy A. Newberry
For eighteen brief months at one of the most impressionable of impressionable ages, I lived in North Texas. I moved there with my family when I was 13, and spent most of junior high school there. Fraught as that age is with confusion, insecurity and boundless wonder, longing and mystery, I remember quite vividly the pretty, preening girls of my Dallas/Ft. Worth suburb, and wanting and trying very much to fit in.
One particular adolescent detail came careening fast into my adult consciousness when I first saw the work of contender Nancy A. Newberry. Like one would imagine, football is big in Texas, and what is equally a rite of passage repeated through junior and then high school is homecoming. Many of us are familiar with the codified ritual of the formal dress, dance, and choosing of a homecoming queen and king, as has been immortalized from all ends of the spectrum in John Hughes' and Stephen King's films. There's a Texan home-spun accent to the whole thing that's just a little bit different, and a whole lot, um, shiny. It's the Homecoming Mum.
Untitled, from the series Mum by Nancy A. Newberry
From her artist's statement:
MUM is centered around a gift-giving ritual virtually unknown outside of Texas, the Homecoming Mum. Exchanged between friends the Mum is an elaborate corsage decorated to indicate the wearer's interests, social standing, and allegiances to loved ones. Homecoming mums are proudly worn for all activities on Homecoming Friday, and then immortalized as trophies on bedroom walls all over Texas. Each year the collection grows with a more elaborate Mum, marking progress and personal history. As both adornment and insignia, the Mum offers its wearer the opportunity to promote self-image, while identifying their status as an integral member of their particular community. At a time when many American high schoolers seem actively disengaged from the world around them, the Homecoming Mum constitutes a unique act of cultural immersion, and specific brand of folk art.
Newberry goes on to say that the impetus for this project came when, recovering in her childhood home from an injury, she came across these exact mum mementos from her high school days, and wrote that she was, "..immediately confronted by the ritual trappings of collective history," with the discovery.
Reminiscent to me of the compositionally taut (and not say psychologically fraught) images from Sally Mann's body of work At Twelve, or even Lauren Greenfield's long study of Girl Culture, these strange portraits that Nancy Newberry gives to us in Mum skillfully evoke many of these same themes that I never seem to grow tired of looking at: visual descriptions of what it is like to be yearning towards a very defined social status, obsession with body image, a waxing appreciation of a dawning and powerful sexuality and maybe most striking—the deep desire to create distinctions of individuality while adhering to a tightly controlled, ritualized and recognized social code of sameness.
Plus, Homecoming Mums are just morbidly fascinating. Like an exploded Christmas ornament, the Mums can grow to defy all expectations of mum-ness, appearing to dwarf the wearer's features, or even conceal one's basic features.
Untitled, from the series Mum by Nancy A. Newberry
Newberry's entire Mum series can be viewed on her website. An exhibition this fall at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston will show images from this project.