Archibald Motley’s Tongues (Holy Rollers)

BA: Kirkland, can you tell us how you’re connected to Motley?

Apostle K. Sheldon Bailey: He is my great grand-uncle, the brother of my great-grandmother. I spent a lot of time with my great-grandmother. She and my grandmother shared a duplex on the south side of Chicago in the Englewood neighborhood. At that time, we called Motley Uncle Arch. He lived down the street, but I don’t ever recall conversing with him. I would go to my grandmother and great-grandmother’s house during the summertime every other week to mow the lawn, and I remember going to the basement to pull out the lawnmower and seeing these paintings. I was about 14, 15 years old. I mean, they had no significance to me. But even in my great-grandmother’s home, who of course was his sister, there were paintings. There were Motleys all over the place.

BA: Kirkland, you mentioned that this was one of your favorite Motley paintings. After you grew up and started to appreciate the artist in your family, what was it that drew you to Tongues (Holy Rollers)?

KSB: This is my absolute favorite because of the subject. I’m a born-again Christian, and tongues represent a part of Christianity that I became familiar with not long after I committed my life to Christ 34 years ago. I’ve traveled to other countries to lead congregations to be filled with the Holy Spirit and speak in tongues. In 2018, I finished a book about it as well.

BA: He does. And images of Motley showed that he did have a receding hairline. When this figure does show up, it’s often as an observer. Here he’s part of this intimate moment between him and the young man, in the midst of this explosion of rapture and excitement and praise that Kirkland mentioned. And you have these curtains, which open up almost like a stage set, but I don’t know if that would be a typical thing you might see in a space like this at the time.

KSB: Not typically. In churches you wouldn’t see a curtain. But I was recently looking at a photo of the All Nations Pentecostal Church in Chicago having a revival, and there’s a tent there. And it made me speculate about whether Motley was taking artistic license and combining something that he saw in that tent setting with the church. What we think are curtains could actually be a part of the tent that he’s peering into. Because it certainly looks painted from the point of view of a person who’s on the outside looking in. Perhaps the observer is not really comfortable with going in and getting too close to it.

BA: I think that’s a great point. The famous Chicago preacher, Elder Lucy Smith, started the All Nations Pentecostal Church before she found an actual home for it. She started with tent revival meetings before they built a church on Langley Avenue in 1926. So it almost could be a conflation of these two things.

KSB: Exactly. And I also wonder whether at that time the African Americans in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where Uncle Bob lived, would have had a church with windows, electricity, and an actual floor. My understanding is that during that time it would have been a dirt floor. And the church may not have had windows. Which would lend credibility to the scene taking place in Chicago.

I also want to make one last point about the balding gentleman in the picture. He seems to be helped by an usher, because in church it was common for ushers to help the elderly find a seat or to aid them in other ways. And I wonder whether the gentleman was already in church but was getting up to try to get involved with the other worshippers. Despite the fact that he had a cane, he was feeling something that made him want to engage. And he had a difficult time getting to his feet and participating, so perhaps the usher was helping him to his feet so that he could do the most with the limited mobility that he had.