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Uncle Tom, The Clansman

a solo exhibition by David Dixon 

with selections from the work of Daniel Swanigan Snow

 

Opening Saturday, August 30, 3-9 PM, thru November 23, 2025

For the opening, drinks and grilled hotdogs (both conventional & vegan) served in the D. Swanigan Snow Enchanted Art Garden directly outside the gallery.

 

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This exhibition and its title begin with the premise that the term “Uncle Tom” is not a personality quality unique to Black people. That an “Uncle Tom” — one who betrays one’s values and people in a servile manner for personal gain in relation to power — is also a personality quality found in Whites, and other demographics. 

 

The title of the exhibition, Uncle Tom, The Clansman, is derived from an eponymous series of seven paintings by David Dixon made in 2018 that, until now, have not been publicly exhibited. These paintings are shown along with three first-edition copies of Thomas F. Dixon, Jr.’s novel, The Clansman, published in 1905, and visually manipulated by David Dixon in 2022. D.W. Griffith’s infamous film The Birth of a Nation (1915) was scripted by T. F. Dixon based on this best-selling novel. The seven paintings in the exhibition by the artist Dixon visually and textually attack the revisionist, Reconstruction era history put forward in the novel with the use of, mostly, silver ink and glossy umber enamel paint vigorously applied to black-plastered gypsum board. The black gypsum board on which the series is painted was “harvested” from Tariku Shiferaw’s breakout solo exhibition in 2018 at Cathouse Proper (Dixon’s former gallery) titled This Ain’t Safe. Gypsum board walls were built and plastered specifically for Shiferaw’s exhibition, after which, with Shiferaw’s permission, Dixon removed the gypsum board and cut it down into 32 x 24 inch panels that he then used for the paintings now exhibited at The Cubiculo.

 

The three Clansman books are visually manipulated by Dixon using a range of applied materials and symbols generally associated with historic west central Africa and drawings in the books’ interior employing an idiosyncratic, sigil-like language developed by the artist as incantations. The books are installed on custom pedestals made from painted, black and white checkerboard patterned plywood that was first used on the second floor platform constructed for a group exhibition built and curated by Dixon at Cathouse Proper in 2022 tilted Diasporic Entropic Diremption and the Cross-Cultural Cross. This same checkerboard plywood was also used for a quasi altarpiece in an off-site exhibition installed later in 2022 in Beacon, New York titled Bank, Church, Cathouse (The Sins of the Father).

 

As per the method at Daniel Swanigan Snow’s Cubiculo, which requires the exhibiting artist to choose at least one work by Snow to be included in the exhibition, Dixon chooses two of Snow’s wall-based assemblages to hang with his own work: In the Bag (2013) which influenced one of the paintings in Dixon’s exhibited series, and Kind of Brown (2016) a work that hung in Snow’s solo exhibition at Cathouse Proper in 2018 titled Feo, Fuerte y Formal.​

 

David Dixon and Daniel Swanigan Snow have been friends and artistic collaborators since 2005 when Dixon auditioned Snow to act in his first feature film, Unloosened and Root (2006). Subsequent to opening his gallery project, Cathouse FUNeral / Proper (2013-2023), Dixon has exhibited actor-artist Snow’s artwork on multiple occasions, including three consecutive solo booths at the Outsider Art Fair (2016-2018). Now, in turn, Daniel Swanigan Snow’s Cubiculo is honored to have David Dixon as its first artist exhibitor.

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