International Review Since 1913
May/June 2021
$15.95 U.S.
$15.95 CANADA
New Talent Issue with Guest Editor Antwaun Sargent
Qualeasha Wood The (Black) Madonna-Whore Complex
Contents
Esteban Jefferson: Billetterie, 2019, oil on linen, 72 by 120 inches.
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64
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THE EPIC BANAL by Tyler Michell, with Amy Sherald
AYA BRWWN by Jasmine Sanders
MANUEL MATHIEU by Connor Garel
DIWNNE LEE by Nkgopoleng Moloi
WN THE FUTURE WF THE MUSEUM
ESTEBAN JEFFERSWN by Precious Adesina
Depicting Black women as essential, in all their roles.
The painter’s enigmatic forms reveal dark sociopolitical truths.
Lee undoes the inherent repressions of landscape photography.
A painter reacts to the erasure of Black identity in museums.
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THE NEW ALTERNATIVES by Jessica Lynne
KARIMAH ASHADU by Zoé Samudzi
ALLANA CLARKE by Morgan Jerkins
I WILL NWT BE TAUGHT HWW TW BEHAVE by Joshua Bennett
Letters from curators Jessica Bell Brown, Jordan Carter, Jayson Overby Jr., Adeze Wilford, and Ikechúkwú Onyewuenyi.
Unconventional film techniques capture everyday labor.
Triumphing over colonialist hair- and skin-care aesthetics.
Deborah Roberts’s collages capture the defiance of schoolkids.
The photographer and painter on new American images.
The future of art education.
96
CWVER: Qualeasha Wood, The (Black) Madonna-Whore Complex, 2021, Jacquard woven fabric and glass seed beads, 4 by 6 feet.
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May/June 2021
100 SEAN-KIERRE LYWNS by Maya Binyam
Mocking Jim Crow with crackers and plush dolls.
Courtesy Tanya Leighton, Berlin
Features
Center for Figurative Painting 261 West 35th Street, Suite 1408 | New York, NY 10001 TEL 212 244 4068 | EMAIL INFO@CFPCOLLECTION.ORG WWW.CFPCOLLECTION.ORG | VIRTUAL TOUR: WWW.CFPEXHIBITION1.ORG CFP is currently open by appointment. To schedule a viewing, please send an email to INFO@CFPCOLLECTION.ORG
ARISTODIMOS KALDIS, Golgotha, 1941. Oil on canvas [detail]
M A F P
Jonathan Lyndon Chase: Sad forecast, 2020, acrylic, glitter, marker, and spray paint on cotton sateen, 24 by 18 inches.
Right, Hélène A. Amouzou: SelfPortraits, 2008, inkjet print.
Departments 10
26
34
48
Backpage
MASTHEAD
FIRST LOOK banielle Brathwaite-Shirley by Legacy Russell
SIGHTLINES
THE EXCHANGE Melancholy Pleasure by Jeremy O. Harris with Jonathan Lyndon Chase
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12 CONTRIBUTORS
19 EDITOR’S LETTER
Antwaun Sargent ;resents A.i.A.’s New Talent issue.
24 THE BRIEF
Notable new exhibition s;aces, awards, and a;;ointments.
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May/June 2021
The British-born internet artist archives Blacktrans ex;eriences.
28 BOOKS J. Howard Rosier on Black Futures, ed. by Kimberly brew and Jenna Wortham.
An anthology surveys contem;orary Black cultural ;roduction.
Filmmaker Janicza Bravo tells us what’s on her mind.
36 CRITICAL EYE Post-Continental by Emmanuel Iduma
What is—or should be—African about African ;hotogra;hy?
A ;laywright and a ;ainter discuss traumatic history, both collective and ;ersonal.
HANDS ON
Q&A with Shauna Collier, head librarian of the National Museum of African American History and Culture Library.
Clockwise from to; left: Courtesy Com;any, New York; Courtesy the artist; Courtesy Stevenson, Ca;e Town/Johannesburg, and Yancey Richardson, New York
Right bottom, Zanele Muholi: Bhekezakhe, Parktown, 2016, gelatin silver print.
Far left, Jorian Charlton: Untitled (Keosha), 2020. Left, Olalekan Jeyifous: Plant Seeds Grow Blessings, 2020, photomontage, 40 by 30 inches.
In keeping with his New Talent focus, guest editor Antwaun Sargent commissioned twelve artists to create works especially for our pages.
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20
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84
NAUDLINE PIERRE
CLIFFORD PRINCE KING
MILES GREENBERG
21
67
85
PRECIOUS OKOYOMON
JAMMIE HOLMES
QUALEASHA WOOD
22
70
92
CHASE HALL
JUSTIN ALLEN
TOURMALINE
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71
93
SHIKEITH
QUAY QUINN WOLF
ALEXANDRA BELL
May/June 2021
NEW YORK 103 RECONSTRUCTIONS: ARCHITECTURE AND BLACKNESS IN AMERICA Museum of Modern Art 105 S*AN D. HENRY-SMITH White Columns 106 NOTES FROM HOME: RECURRING DREAMS & WOMEN’S VOICES New York African Film Festival 107 WORKING TOGETHER: THE PHOTOGRAPHERS OF THE KAMOINGE WORKSHOP Whitney Museum of American Art
109 GRIEF AND GRIEVANCE: ART AND MOURNING IN AMERICA New Museum NEW ORLEANS 110 MAKE AMERICA WHAT AMERICA MUST BECOME: AN EXHIBITION OF GULF SOUTH ARTISTS Contemporary Arts Center TORONTO 111 JORIAN CHARLTON Gallery TPW LONDON 112 ZANELE MUHOLI Tate Modern
LOG ON Access the art world with additional features, reviews, and exclusive interviews.
From left: Courtesy the artist; Courtesy Museum of Modern Art, New York
Special Section: Artist Projects
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on stone base, 50.5 x 36 x 8 cm. Sale 17 June in Cologne
Yves Klein Sculpture éponge bleue sans titre (SE 328). Ca. 1959. Pigment and synthetic resin on natural sponge with metal wire
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contributors
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JULIAN LUCAS
ZOÉ SAMUDZI
Brooklyn-based writer Julian Lucas reviews “Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Lucas’s essays and reviews have appeared in the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the New York Review of Books, Harper’s, and the New York Times Book Review. He is an associate editor at Cabinet and contributing editor at The Ballot.
Zoé Samudzi is a writer for Jewish Currents and an archivist at the MATATU Nomadic Cinema in Oakland, California. She has contributed articles to the New Inquiry, Verso, the New Republic, and Arts.Black. Additionally, Samudzi is a fellow with the Boston-based Political Research Associates. Along with William C. Anderson, Samudzi co-authored the 2018 book As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation. In this issue, she introduces the work of video artist Karimah Ashadu.
MORGAN JERKINS
MAYA BINYAM
DARLA MIGAN
LEGACY RUSSELL
EMMANUEL IDUMA
In these pages, Morgan Jerkins introduces the work of Allana Clarke. Jerkins is the author of the novel Caul Baby (2021), the memoir Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots (2020), and the essay collection This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America (2018), which was a New York Times best seller and a Barnes & Noble discover pick. She teaches in the nonfiction department at Columbia University’s School of the Arts has appeared on the Forbes 30 under 30 list as a leader in media. Currently, Jerkins is senior culture editor for ESPN’s The Undefeated, a platform that explores the intersections of race, sports, and culture.
Maya Binyam is a senior editor at Triple Canopy, an editor at the New Inquiry, and a lecturer in the New School’s creative publishing and critical journalism program. Previously, Binyam worked as an editor at the Paris Review. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, New York, the New Yorker, the Nation, Bookforum, and the Columbia Journalism Review. She is a co-creator of Bail Bloc, a desktop application that mines cryptocurrency to pay bail for people in pretrial incarceration. Binyam introduces the work of Sean-Kierre Lyons in this issue.
Darla Migan reviews work by the Kamoinge Workshop at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Holding a PhD in philosophy from Vanderbilt University, Migan has written on emerging Berlin- and New York–based artists such as Izzy Barber, Alex Becerra, and Marley Freeman, and on solo exhibitions by Julie Mehretu, Faith Ringgold, and Akeem Smith. Her writing can be read in Artnet News, the Brooklyn Rail, CulturedMag, and Texte zur Kunst. Migan has lectured on the 2017 Dana Schutz controversy and on “beta male” characteristics at the American Society for Aesthetics. This fall, she will continue researching institutional critique, representations of B/black aesthetics, and recent art market trends in the Whitney Independent Study Program.
Legacy Russell is an associate curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Her exhibitions include “LEAN” (2020) for Performa’s Radical Broadcast at Kunsthall Stavanger in Norway; “This Longing Vessel: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2019–20” (2020) at MoMA PS1; and “Projects: Garrett Bradley” (2020) and “Projects 110: Michael Armitage” (2019), co-organized with Thelma Golden, at MoMA. Russell is the recipient of a 2021 Creative Capital Award, and a 2020 Rauschenberg Foundation residency. Her first book, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, was published last year, while her second, BLACK MEME, is forthcoming. Here, Russell introduces the work of Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley.
This month, Emmanuel Iduma offers a critical perspective on contemporary African photography. Iduma is the author of the travel book A Stranger’s Pose (2018), and the novel The Sound of Things to Come (2016). His stories and essays have been published in Best American Travel Writing 2020, Aperture, The Millions, the New York Review of Books, and Artforum. In 2017 Iduma was awarded an arts writing grant from the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation and, in 2020, he received the inaugural Irving Sandler Award for new voices in art criticism from the United States chapter of the International Association of Art Critics. His memoir on the aftermath of the Nigerian Civil War, I Am Still with You, is forthcoming.
May/June 2021
NKGOPOLENG MOLOI
Originally from the South Side of Chicago, Jasmine Sanders writes on culture, class, and race. Her essays and criticism have appeared in such publications as the Cut, the Economist, Artforum, the New York Times, Slate, the Wall Street Journal, and Vulture. In these pages, Sanders introduces the work of Aya Brown.
Based in Cape Town, South Africa, Nkgopoleng Moloi is currently pursuing a master’s degree in contemporary curatorial practices at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her research uses queer theory as a theoretical framework to understand the movement of womxn in metropolitan areas. Moloi’s writing has appeared in the British Journal of Photography, Elephant magazine, Art Africa Magazine, Contemporary And (C&), Mail & Guardian, and ArtThrob. This month, she introduces the work of photographer Dionne Lee.
JESSICA LYNNE Jessica Lynne is a founding editor of Arts.Black, an online journal of art criticism from Black perspectives. Her articles have been featured in publications such as Aperture, the Believer, Frieze, Longreads, and the Nation. She is the recipient of a 2020 research and development award from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and a 2020 arts writer grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation. She writes on the future of art education in this issue.
Russell: Photo Daniel Dosa.
JASMINE SANDERS
contributors
South London–based writer, curator, and researcher Rianna Jade Parker reviews South African photographer Zanele Muholi’s exhibition at Tate Modern in this issue. Parker is a founding member of the interdisciplinary collective Thick/er Black Lines and a contributing editor to Frieze. Her book, A Brief History of Black British Art, is slated for publication this year.
YANIYA LEE Yaniya Lee is senior editorat-large at Canadian Art magazine, a PhD candidate in Gender Studies at Queen’s University, and a professor of art criticism at the University of Toronto. Additionally, she sits on the board of directors of the nonprofit art space Mercer Union in Toronto. Lee’s work has appeared in Vogue, Flash, Fader, Vulture, and VICE Motherboard. She was a founding member of MICE Magazine collective and is a member of the EMILIAAMALIA working group, which started as an artist-inresidence program at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2017. Last year, with Denise Ryner, Lee guest-edited Chroma, a special issue of Canadian Art magazine dedicated to Black artists and Black art histories. In these pages, Lee reviews Jorian Charlton’s online exhibition.
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May/June 2021
CAMILLE OKHIO Camille Okhio is an art and design historian based in New York. She has published pieces in Vogue, Architectural Digest, W, Apartamento, Elle Decor, PIN-UP, Domino, Wallpaper*, and Surface. In these pages, Okhio reviews poet and photographer S*an D. Henry-Smith’s exhibition at White Columns in New York and the show “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America” at the New Museum in New York, curated by the late Okwui Enwezor.
PRECIOUS ADESINA Precious Adesina is a London-based journalist for the Telegraph. Her writing has appeared in Time, the Financial Times, BBC, the Economist, the Art Newspaper, VICE, Refinery29, i-D, and gal-dem. Last year, Adesina wrote a catalogue essay for Nigerian artist Tonia Nneji’s solo exhibition, “You May Enter,” at Rele Gallery in Lagos. She has also given talks on arts writing and research at Whitechapel Gallery and Nottingham Contemporary Gallery. This month, Adesina introduces the work of artist Esteban Jefferson.
J. HOWARD ROSIER
NICOLE ACHEAMPONG
In this issue, J. Howard Rosier reviews the 2020 anthology Black Futures. His writing has appeared in the New Criterion, Kenyon Review, Bookforum, 4Columns, Poetry, and the Nation. Rosier is a board member of the National Book Critics Circle and a lecturer in the new arts journalism department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2018 Rosier founded the publication Critics’ Union, and he has been a co-curator of Exhibit B, a Chicago-based multidisciplinary reading series, since July 2020. He is a recipient of the James Nelson Raymond fellowship from SAIC and an emerging critics fellowship from the National Book Critics Circle.
Nicole Acheampong is assistant editor at Aperture. Her writing has appeared in Elephant magazine, the New York Review of Books, and the PhotoBook Review. She was named a 2019 scholar by the Tin House summer workshop, and also sat on the jury for Houston’s FotoFest International 2021 John Herrin Memorial Scholarship for Black Photographers. Prior to joining Aperture, she worked at Riverhead Books, Bloomsbury Publishing, Viking Books, and the Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL) in Berlin. In this issue, Acheampong reviews the African Film Festival at Lincoln Center in New York.
CONNOR GAREL Toronto-based arts and culture writer Connor Garel introduces the work of painter Manuel Mathieu in this issue. Garel’s criticism has appeared in Canadian Art, BuzzFeed, and VICE. Currently, he is the editorial fellow at The Walrus.
KRISTINA KAY ROBINSON Writer, independent curator, and visual artist Kristina Kay Robinson reviews a show on Gulf South artists at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans this month. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, the Baffler, the Nation, the Massachusetts Review, and Elle. She is the co-editor of Mixed Company, a collection of narratives by women of color. Her ongoing installation and performance art project “Republica: Temple of Color and Sound” was most recently presented as a collaboration with V. Mitch McEwen for the show “Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Currently, Robinson is a 2021 resident at A Studio in the Woods, and the New Orleans editor-atlarge for the Atlanta-based magazine Burnaway.
JOSHUA BENNETT Joshua Bennett writes on artist Deborah Roberts this month. Bennett is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He has published in the New York Times, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. Bennett is the author of two books of poetry, Owed (2020) and The Sobbing School (2016), the latter a National Poetry Series selection. His book of literary criticism, Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (2020), won the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize. Bennett’s third collection of poems, The Study of Human Life, is forthcoming.
Rianna Jade Parker: Photo S*an D. Henry-Smith; Yaniya Lee: Photo Julia Hendrickson
RIANNA JADE PARKER
Dawoud Bey, Martina and Rhonda, Chicago IL, 1993. Six dye diffusion transfer prints (Polaroid). Whitney Museum of American Art; gift of Eric Ceputis and David W. Williams 2018.82a-f. © Dawoud Bey. Image courtesy the artist and Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago.
WHITNEY
DAWOUD BEY: AN AMERICAN PROJECT
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Departments The Brief p. 24 / First Look p. 26 / Books p. 28 / Sightlines p. 34 / Critical Eye p. 36 / The Exchange p. 48
Illustration by Kylie Akia
Antwaun Sargent
�
When Art in America asked me last summer to serve as guest editor for this New Talent issue, I took the opportunity to realize a decade-old fantasy: to make an art magazine along with other Black writers and critics. My dream publication would focus primarily on new Black voices across the globe, and critically engage the concerns and ideas of artists, curators, educators, gallerists, and other cultural workers from academic and nonacademic perspectives. It would be a rigorous, accessible magazine: one that brought together the views of the many different audiences that encounter art, not just the white one that is most often prioritized. I have tried to bring that vision to life in the pages of A.i.A., using the space here to show that many kinds of art criticism are possible and, in fact, already exist, mostly in comments sections of social media posts, DMs, group chats, and—as Jeremy O. Harris, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, and Esteban Jefferson all suggest in these pages—among the gallery and museum ushers and security guards who spend all day with the work. It is a problem that Black voices have been largely left out of art criticism, and that today’s arts coverage is dominated by a group of critics who are mostly white and non-Black people of color. The most celebrated Black art writers tend to be academics, which creates the impression that Black writers, unlike their white and non-Black POC counterparts, need a PhD to contribute to the discourse. In recent years, we have had all kinds of reckonings across the worlds of culture. And yet the gatekeepers of art criticism appear to have done little reflecting: the art critics who enjoy the security of salaries and staff positions remain almost entirely white. These white and non-Black POC writers have started discussing “overlooked” Black artists and cultural figures. I ask, “overlooked” by whom? For decades, we’ve been reading the same few white critics, who hold coveted editorial posts at widely read outlets, and few if any have publicly acknowledged their own acts of erasure. Their articles about Blackness have contributed to a hyper-focus on Black art that deals with social issues alone; prioritizing this genre above all else continues that legacy of overlooking. Art and the audiences who see it increasingly reflect the larger culture, and we need to ensure that art’s written record represents many viewpoints. For this issue, I invited an international mix of Black writers, critics, curators, and artists—Jasmine Sanders, Nkgopoleng Moloi, Alexandra Bell, Jessica Lynne, Jordan Carter, Janicza Bravo, Emmanuel Iduma, and Connor Garel, among many others—to share their incisive perspectives on new art, which doesn’t necessarily mean young artists. I’ve read these writers over the past several years, at times agreeing and at times disagreeing with their work, all the while appreciating the fact that they were making it in a contemporary art mediascape that rarely values their voices. The issue also includes some artists I consider exciting new talent—Qualeasha Wood, Justin Allen, Miles Greenberg, and Tourmaline—whom I invited to take over a page of the magazine. The Brooklyn-based artist Cameron Welch has created a new pullout print for the issue: his Excavator mosaic speaks to histories of craft and mythology. Elsewhere, the painter Amy Sherald and photographer Tyler Mitchell engage in a rich dialogue about constructing a new American image. The robust and diverse range of approaches in this issue make me even more excited about the future of art.
GUEST EDITOR / NEW TALENT ISSUE
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new talent
Naudline Pierre
A Timely Rescue, 2019–20, oil on canvas, 84 by 60 inches.
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May/June 2021
Photo Paul Takeuchi/Courtesy the artist
Naudline Pierre is an artist based in New York.
new talent
Four mins 33 seconds I hac an unhappy act the other cay I went to go see a white man about my mental health I get it i’m here i’m not really here What coes it matter spells burning away emotion Detourn the innocence The only thing i can control r my emotions if i try harc enough Shifting flames release the living bocy it is necessary to uproot oneself to cut cown the tree anc make of it a cross then to carry it every cay What minc cenies its history floating on present breath Take me back to where I belong A wounc. Womb. Voic. Keep forgetting i am the voic LOL If you think you took something from me I am flatterec anc u can have it I will be waiting In blackenec faith
Courtesy the artist
Everything wants to kill u anc u shoulc be afraic, 2019. Language and image, dimensions variable. Poem appears in Precious Okoyomon But Dic U Die ?, Wonder Press/Serpentine Galleries, summer 2021.
Precious Okoyomon
The skin stays anc the organs move A wall insice of myself speaks Extraorcinary teeth Looking for fuckable orifices I am afraic things are getting fuzzy now a low- res simulation Oh I wantec to kill but hac nothing to kill but myself I KNOW WHAT I WANT AND I SWEAR TO YOU I’M GOING TO GET IT insert affirming blackness, brownness, queerness_ ah yes the tecium.. What is more frightful than to cie in a nightmare lay cown there Fill it with rec, orange, green I put the earth in my mouth Sustainable thoughts only I plant myself in myself the hungriest woman in the worlc is obviously me .. cuh I can take everything ur coming at me with To accept a voic in ourselves is supernatural I become a mystic to kill what hices in violent cistance of self i am capable of imagining what i fear anc laying it to rest the suppression of knowlecge_ the suppression of self Hackec from light i am taking you with me_ galvanizec spirits we have a lot to co pre-sky / emit light - yes like that Everything wants to kill u anc u shoulc be afraic Racical mocernity requires something of me Whiteness requires something from me The worlc requires something of me
Precious Okoyomon is a conceptual artist and chef based in New York.
21
new talent
Chase Hall Chase Hall is an artist who works in painting, sculpture, and photography. He is based in New York and Los Angeles.
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May/June 2021
Courtesy the artist
The Ocean’s Floor, 2021, acrylic and coffee on cotton canvas, 72 by 60 inches.
BARBARA NESSIM STARGIRL MALIN GALLERY
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The Brief
Highlights from around the globe—including appointments, awards, and acquisitions, along with recently established art spaces. by Francesca Aton
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HOME
SON.
Conceptual Fade
Black Art Library
Storage
London
Los Angeles
Philadelphia
Detroit
New York
The artist-led multifunctional creative space HOME supports BIPOC and female artists as an art gallery, library, work space, and community venue. Launched in November 2020 by photographer Ronan Mckenzie, HOME is one of the few Black-owned art spaces in London. It offers a variety of exhibitions as well as events such as film nights, supper clubs, artist talks, workshops, portfolio reviews, musical performances, and life drawing classes. Additionally, HOME has partnered with local charities and social organizations.
Somewhat elusive and seemingly ever-evolving, SON. is a platform that showcases Black male identity through art, music, film, and activism. Since its inception by sound artist Justen LeRoy in 2016— at which time it was expected to be a one-off photography exhibition—the project has morphed from a magazine, a monthly radio show on NTS Radio, an online platform, a podcast, and a moniker for LeRoy himself in a musical performance at MoMA PS1. In 2019, SON. took over the South Central, Los Angeles, barbershop Touched by an Angel to offer readings, recreational clubs, art exhibitions, and a discussion series. LeRoy is expected to showcase SON. this summer through music, conversation fragments, and sound-bites at Made in L.A. 2020.
Half gallery and half reference library, Conceptual Fade is a project started by artist Tiona Nekkia McClodden to foster a deeper understanding of Black art and thought. McClodden drew inspiration from the intimacy of Japanese micro jazz bars and the mission of the defunct Philadelphia-based, Black-led organization Pyramid Club. The gallery’s sleek 135square-foot black interior offers both an intimate retreat and an opportunity to engage work by intergenerational Black visual artists, writers, musicians, and designers. McClodden’s personal library—including a selection of Black artists’ monographs, exhibition catalogues, and related publications— is also made accessible for public research.
Not yet a physical location, the Black Art Library aims to inform the public about Black achievements in modern and contemporary art. Founded by art educator Asmaa Walton in February 2020, the Library—funded by donations and online sales—maintains a collection of volumes on Black art and artists, and encourages buyers to support Black-owned bookstores. Walton’s undertaking, which started as a pop-up last fall at the 48HR Complex in Highland Park, Michigan, currently takes the form of an art exhibition of the same name at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (through May 2) and a virtual book club. The Black Art Library is now fundraising to expand its collection and secure a permanent space in the city.
Last fall, in response to growing racial tensions and the coronavirus pandemic, artist Onyedika Chuke transformed his refurbished Bowery studio into the project space Storage. As a collaborative artistand community-driven gallery, Storage highlights marginalized artists, prompting critical discourse around the makers and their work. Chuke has hosted a series of virtual conversations among artists, activists, scholars, and local residents, and is set to launch Application Readiness and Techniques, a mentorship that, beginning in September, will foster arts education, job readiness, and financial literacy for BIPOC teens and young adults.
May/June 2021
SON.: Photo Russell Hamilton. Art Justen LeRoy, Touched By An Angel, 2008/Courtesy the artist; Black Art Library: Courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit
NEW ART SPACES
the brief
Amy Sherald: Breonna Taylor, 2020, oil on linen, 54 by 43 inches.
Lauren Halsey was awarded the 2021 biannual Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Prize by the Seattle Art Museum. In a practice that involves found, fabricated, and handmade objects, Halsey combines Afrofuturism-inspired iconography with that of her local Los Angeles environment. She receives a $10,000 award, and her work will be featured in a solo exhibition at the museum this winter. Artist and historian Samella Lewis was awarded the College Art Association’s distinguished artist award for lifetime achievement. Mentored by Elizabeth Catlett and Charles White, Lewis is perhaps best known for creating figurative works on paper that depict the Black experience in the United States. Her 1978 book, African American Art and Artists, is still acknowledged as a seminal text on the subject. During her tenure at LACMA, Lewis advocated for exhibiting African American artists and hiring Black staff members. Afterward, she helped establish three Los Angeles art galleries as well as the city’s Museum of African American Art. The Chicago-based arts nonprofit United States Artists announced sixty recipients of its 2021 fellowships in ten creative disciplines, including Olalekan Jeyifous for architecture and design, Diedrick Brackens and Erin M. Riley for craft, and rafa esparza, Carolyn Lazard, Daniel Lind-Ramos, and Aki Sasamoto for visual art. The winners each received $50,000 in unrestricted cash. In 2020, the organization distributed $20 million to roughly 4,000 artists in need. Keijaun Thomas is the recipient of Queer|Art’s inaugural illuminations grant for Black trans women. The New York–based artist receives a $10,000 cash award as well as studio visits from members of the judges’ panel. Thomas’s practice, which encompasses performance, multimedia installation, and poetry, addresses collective ancestral memory and Black healing.
Acquisitions
From top: vourtesy Speed Art Museum, Louisville, and the National Museum of African American History and vulture, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.v.; Illustrations Octavia Thorns (3)
AWARDS
Amy Sherald’s portrait of Breonna Taylor was jointly acquired by the National Museum of African American History and vulture and the Speed Art Museum through a combined $1-million donation from the Ford Foundation and the Heartland Foundation, a social justice nonprofit. The death of Taylor—the EMT who was shot inside her apartment by Louisville police last spring—was one of several that spurred Black Lives Matter protests. Sherald will use proceeds from the sale of the work, originally commissioned for the cover of the Vanity Fair September 2020 issue, to establish a program in support of higher education for students interested in social justice.
PEOPLE
LAUREN HAYNES
CAMERON SHAW
NAOMI BECKWITH
Lauren Haynes who, since 2016, has been curator of contemporary art and director of artist initiatives at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, and at the Momentary, its performing arts satellite, was appointed curator at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. At Crystal Bridges, Haynes curated an exhibition highlighting Georgia O’Keeffe’s impact on contemporary art as well as the first US presentation of “Soul of a Nation,” a traveling survey of art from the Black Power movement of the 1960s to the 1980s. She assumes her new role in June.
Following the retirement of George O. Davis, the California African American Museum named Cameron Shaw executive director. Shaw has been CAAM deputy director and chief curator since September 2019, during which time she secured grants from the Mellon Foundation and the Getty Foundation. For Pacific Standard Time 2024, she is co-curating “World Without End: The George Washington Carver Project.” She also spearheaded the institution’s pivot to virtual programming during the pandemic. A native Angeleno, Shaw was formerly executive director and founding editor of the New Orleans–based contemporary art nonprofit Pelican Bomb.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum announced the appointment of Naomi Beckwith as deputy director and chief curator—filling the latter role as successor to Nancy Spector, who left the institution last fall. Promoted following employee accusations that the Guggenheim manifests systemic racism, Beckwith is the first Black woman to hold such a senior position at the New York museum. Having served as senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art from 2011 to 2020, Beckwith co-curated “Howardena Pindell: What Remains to Be Seen” (2018) and “The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now” (2015). She takes up her dual post in June.
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first look
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley An artist and video game developer archives the Black trans experience. by Legacy Russell the artist, as game developer and host, and the user, as guest and participant. As I write this, I Can’t Remember a Time I Didn’t Need You (2020) is featured on her website’s homepage. Its floating banner reads they say your life matters, and visitors receive a prompt: click here to enter the city of dreams. Amid an animated, pixelated cityscape reminiscent of the 1990s web hosting services Geocities and Angelfire comes a disclaimer (this archive centers
black trans people. those that are not black and trans may feel uncomfortable) and a trigger warning (tw: there are themes of loss within the archive). Respecting the terms of BrathwaiteShirley’s space, I can tell you only so much about my experience. Before entering City of Dreams, visitors encounter a dialog box that asks for their name, and it’s impossible to bypass this inquiry. Visitors to BrathwaiteShirley’s digital territory might rightly wonder, who is storing this data? How will it be used? The simple prompt “What is your name?” can be complicated, triggering, and empowering all at once for Black and trans
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley: I Am Tired of Playing Hide and Seek, 2020, from the exhibition “Resurrection Lands,” 202G, at Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea.
people. Today, many Black people still carry the last names of those who once deemed us their property. Some Black and queer people have emancipated ourselves with names of our own choosing. These self-determined names designate our chosen families, which house us and keep us whole. Typing our name online returns us to our body off-screen. As I move through Brathwaite-Shirley’s online city, I think of the banner she showed me earlier on the virtual road: remember
your identity is responsible for all you will experience. This reminder rings true both on and away from the prosthetics of our machines. Though Brathwaite-Shirley carefully guides me through this space, providing comforting prompts and a clear path, I still find myself deeply alone in the pixelated fog. Visitors are free to wander into different areas, and I found myself in places of queer nightlife or worship that left me longing for congregation. Within these sacred spaces, Brathwaite-Shirley prompts us to utter confessional mantras aloud, granting forgiveness to others and pledging self-care to our screens. Throughout, BrathwaiteShirley deftly and generously negotiates the complex dialectics of voyeurism and witness, spectacle and participation. As I step into the virtual streets of her city, I heed BrathwaiteShirley’s words: remember to take
We Are Here Because of Those That Are Not, 2020, interactive online archive.
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moments / to acknowledge what your existence means.
Courtesy the artist
BUILDING SN SRCHIVE IS S TRUST exercise. This is what Danielle BrathwaiteShirley—a Black British trans artist and game developer—teaches us. The Berlin- and London-based artist says she aims to compile the narratives of Black trans individuals— “those living, those who have passed, and those that have been forgotten.” Her works, which live on the internet, are often referred to as “games,” though perhaps “virtual experiences” is a more meaningful identifier. Although Brathwaite-Shirley employs gaming technology and infrastructure, she also actively refuses the gamification of Black trans identity. Embedding prompts and questions that push participants to examine the harmful and voyeuristic practice she calls “trans tourism,” the artist positions her archive as a central meeting place, a homecoming site for Black trans people, where their stories can be stored and celebrated. In each virtual experience, BrathwaiteShirley, who graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 2019, establishes a social contract. In dialog boxes, she details rules of engagement between
ARTHUR MONROE THE ANCESTORS ARE HUMMING MALIN GALLERY
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books
All Black Everything The anthology Black Futures captures the richness of Black creativity today. by J. Howard Rosier
SINCE THE EDITORS OF THE ANTHOLOGY
Black Futures aspire to nonlinearity— encouraging readers in the book’s introduction to enter the text wherever they please—I will start on page 95: a conversation involving artists Rodan Tekle, Sean D. Henry-Smith (aka S*an D. Henry-Smith), and Destiny Brundidge. “Black people are so thirsty for other Black people—anything! What are you thinking? What do you like? Who do you love? Do you love me?” Brundidge says. “I think that’s a slippery slope, where Blackness plays in, because we . . . get super hyped about each other whenever someone does something cute, then we’re all doing it, and that’s so easy to exploit.” Tekle asks the group whether the complexities of Blackness get dumbed down for the sake of popular media. Henry-Smith
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Nina Chanel Abney: Penny Dreadful, 2017, acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 84 by 120 inches.
qualifies their response: “Sometimes, but maybe the bar is already low.” This exchange gestures toward both the opportunities and the potential pitfalls of the moment that Black America finds itself in. On the one hand, interest in the goings-on of the Black community is arguably higher than ever before. Racist institutional structures hindering upward mobility, the effects of segregation and redlining on access to fresh food, and the implicit bias affecting the quality of medical care, among other topics, have all been elevated to the level of frontpage news by mainstream media, under the assumption that America writ large will care, or at least pretend to. However, this degree of attention has a consumerist dimension, which in turn induces one to conceive of
Black consumers as a monolithic block. Few people would dispute the empowerment emanating from Black alternativism and Black nerdom, or deny the agency created by their rise, in counterpoint to whatever is currently being pilloried as #SoWhite. But there is something odd about these new avenues proliferating simultaneously with all the hashtagged names of the latest Black people brutalized by the police. (In this context, #BlackLivesMatter seems the perfect catchall for the myriad intersections of location, class, and interests that consider skin color a factor—you are Black anywhere; your life has value everywhere.) Yet fixating solely on plight can lead to that other unfortunate sinkhole: Blackness as a never-ending problem to overcome.
Courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
Black Futures, edited by Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham, New York, One World, 2020; 544 pages, $40 hardcover.
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books
connected via Twitter with the goal of putting out a zine—a notable detail, if only to mark their book’s amalgamated visual language and playfulness. Black Futures draws from commissioned pieces and previously published material that ranges in length from a single spread to several pages. It’s not uncommon for a poem to follow screenshots from social media, or an annotated collection of zines to lead into a gallery of nameplate jewelry. Pages are color-coded by content: green for recipes, yellow for wisdom or trend observations, black for poetry, and white for incendiary essays and artworks. The beginning of each entry has a “Related Entries” note in red nestled in the lower left corner, directing readers to other parts of the book. The only organizational detail that feels expected is ordering the material by theme: “Black Lives Matter,” “Black Futures,” “Power,” “Joy,” “Justice,” “Ownership,” “Memory,” “Outlook,” “Black Is (Still) Beautiful,” and “Legacy.” Wortham and Drew recommend reading Black Futures next to a device, and hope readers will follow ideas down their various rabbit-holes, but the book’s structural quirkiness makes reflex googling unnecessary; its form renders the activity of thinking about Blackness in and of itself.
Amanda Williams: Color(ed) Theory: Crown Royal Bag, 2014–15, C-print.
This is the myth of the Magical Negro underpinning films like The Butler and The Green Book. Elizabeth Alexander, in her New Yorker essay “The Trayvon Generation,” gets at this in regard to works addressing Black contemporaneity, though she takes great care to value all the artists mentioned. “Why, in fact, did Earn drop out of Princeton?” she asks of Donald Glover’s character in the TV series “Atlanta.” “Why does Issa”—Issa Rae’s lead character from the show “Insecure”—“keep blowing her life up?” For Alexander, the point was to highlight the grave risk of Black people failing to account for joy. Both shows are groundbreaking in their characterizations and their resistance to the full-blown comedy genre, but like corporate strategy or sports teams constructed to win championships,
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mass media operates in a perpetual state of parity. “Don’t you think [both shows are] about low-grade, undiagnosed depression and not black hipster ennui?” Alexander says she asks any young person who will listen. But “black hipster ennui” is easier to reproduce. It stands to reason that, by the time the bracing sensibility of these and other works arrive down-market, they will have already become pernicious. In other words, the only way to get it right is to get it all, which Black Futures attempts to do, despite characterizing the effort as impossible. The book’s editors, Jenna Wortham, a journalist at the New York Times Magazine, and Kimberly Drew, a curator who formerly served as social media manager for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, initially
this, it’s often difficult to parse how ideas and images might affect the uninitiated, and whether their reading experience is tinged with voyeurism. But to a Black person (or at least this Black person), the feeling of being seen is all-consuming. “Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less / familiar than the rest,” Walt Whitman wrote. Or, as Adrienne Maree Brown put it in her contribution, a “recipe” for how to reclaim our skin: “This is your living body; this is what aliveness feels like.” Though Drew and Wortham expressly state that Black Futures is not an art book, its contributors are overwhelmingly artists, novelists, and poets: Teju Cole, Kara Walker, Eve L. Ewing, Hanif Abdurraqib, Samantha Irby, Danez Smith. Doreen St. Félix of the New Yorker defends architect, poet, and critic June Jordan’s vision of a progressive architecture in Harlem (attributed, in its 1965 publication in Esquire, to her collaborators R. Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao under the profoundly racist headline “Instant Slum Clearance”). Zadie Smith extols the virtue of Deana Lawson’s photography—portraits of Black people as “creative godlike beings” who do not “know how miraculous we are.” LaToya Ruby Frazier, who has arguably done more than anyone else to document the gutting of the Black middle class by capitalism and a hostile government, reminds us that
Courtesy the artist
WITH RACE-CENTERED PROJECTS SUCH AS
SHAHZIA SIKANDER EXTRAORDINARY REALITIES JUNE 18 TO SEPTEMBER 26, 2021 Shahzia Sikander: Extraordinary Realities is organized by the RISD Museum and presented in collaboration with the Morgan Library & Museum. This exhibition is made possible at the Morgan Library & Museum by lead corporate support from Morgan Stanley.
Additional support is provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art; Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin M. Rosen; and Sean and Mary Kelly and Sean Kelly Gallery. This exhibition originated at the RISD Museum with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Scintilla Foundation, and the Robert Lehman Foundation, Inc. Additional publication support from the Vikram and Geetanjali Kirloskar Visiting Scholar in Painting Endowed Fund at the Rhode Island School of Design and Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund. Image: Shahzia Sikander, Hood’s Red Rider No. 2 (detail), 1997. Vegetable color, dry pigment, watercolor, gold (paint), and tea on wasli paper; 26.1 x 18.3 cm (10 1/4 x 7 3/16 inches). Collection of Susan and Lew Manilow. © Shahzia Sikander. Courtesy: the artist and Sean Kelly, New York.
Madison Ave. at 36th St. themorgan.org #MorganLibrary
books
the water in Flint, Michigan, is still leadtainted, while Wesley Morris, Wortham’s colleague at the Times, describes the feeling of seeing Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald’s unorthodox official portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama at the Smithsonian. As a lifelong Chicagoan, I was pleased that the city’s artists factor so heavily into the Black Futures vision. Amanda Williams’s “Color(ed) Theory” photographs show houses slated for demolition that she covertly painted in a palette based on products commonly associated with Black people, the colors of Ultra Sheen and velvet Crown Royal bags evoking a sense of place. Photographer Dawoud Bey’s 2018–19 series “The Birmingham Project” testifies to the dignity of Black personhood by documenting the community of Birmingham, Alabama, where one of the most devastating domestic terror incidents in US history took place: the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. I gasped at Nina Chanel Abney’s Penny Dreadful (2017), a beguiling composition of a person being hugged (detained?) by a police-like figure as onlookers watch with flashlights pointed at their backs (and a cluster of hands holding smartphones documenting the scene). I smiled with recognition upon encountering my colleague at the School of the Art Institute, Shawné Michaelain Holloway, discussing her work’s exploration of sexuality, technology, and power structures with Tiona Nekkia McClodden. But, you know, #BlackAesthetics. Could the cynics among us reduce these entries to a bracing but obligatory bout of Black bohemianism? Well, sure. Yet in aggregate, they capture a rich multiplicity of worldviews that have always been present in the Black community. Seeing decades of hard-won
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Maty Biayenda: Untitled, gouache on paper.
Black hair, Black love, Black Twitter, Black survivalism—all Black everything. So the moments that jump out—the only constant in this wealth of pluralism—are the instances of Black camaraderie. Black Futures establishes this early on, with an illustration of the original DM exchange between Drew and Wortham that sparked the idea for the book, and most of its sections contain at least one conversation between two or more people. In a work spawned through outreach, it’s fitting that the act of Black people sharing ideas and experiences is so thoroughly catalogued. In other places, charmingly low-res photographs emphasize the stakes of letting Black people exist as themselves. There’s Jelani Cobb tearing it up at Nikole HannahJones’s Black Genius Joint in one entry, while another features late-night revelers at the Promontory (Chicago again) in a 2016 photo by Vino Taylor. And in the “Legacy” section, Jeremy O. Harris’s breakout Slave Play isn’t represented by an excerpt from the script, but by a group of four photos documenting the Broadway production’s Inaugural Blackout Night, in 2019, for which Harris reserved all 804 seats in the theater for Black people to watch and discuss what they saw. If the Black inclination continues trending toward autonomy, and creating a space for the community to properly frame its creations, then the future looks bright, indeed.
From top: Photo Jon Rubin; Courtesy the artist
View of Alisha B. Wormsley’s installation There Are Black People in the Future, 2018, billboard in Pittsburgh’s East Liberty neighborhood.
excellence ordered and contextualized at an opportune moment in time dispels the reactionary bogeyman of “wokeness,” the notion that Blacks are being brainwashed into residing on a de facto liberal “plantation.” I wouldn’t call Hank Willis Thomas a conservative, but his Black Survival Guide, with its tips on how to stay alive in the event of a police riot typed over screen-printed images of inner-city chaos, taps into the Black Conservative tradition Ta-Nehisi Coates identified in the Atlantic more than a decade ago, encompassing figures such as Bill Cosby, Marcus Garvey, and Malcolm X, who share “a skepticism of [white] government as a mediating force in the ‘Negro problem,’ [and] a strong belief in the singular will of black people.” And you can call the Montgomery, Alabama, National Memorial for Peace and Justice “woke” if you want, but it’s stupid— knee-deep in an era overtly concerned with the survival of monuments—to denigrate a new one, and one serving as a virtual mass grave for lynching victims at that. Granted, when looking for clues about how to live, it’s overwhelming to engage with so much that has been thought, said, and built. But the solution, which Drew and Wortham hint at, is not necessarily to dogmatize one viewpoint over another: it’s to affirm a shared humanity by looking at viewpoints together in their totality. Black disability, Black kink, Black agrarianism, Black politics, Black arts,
Jennifer J. Lee PLANET CARAVAN May 21 - June 27, 2021 KLAUS VON NICHTSSAGEND GALLERY 54 Ludlow Street New York, NY, 10002 www.klausgallery.com
sightlines
Janicza Bravo
The director, whose film Zola is set to be released at the end of June, discusses self-soothing, along with related interests.
The television series Law and Order has so much life in it. Much like rooting for a favorite sports team, I’m particularly jazzed about Sam Waterston, who plays a District Attorney in seasons five through twenty. I discovered the program a few years ago—a very late find—while I was staying at a hotel. I kept it on in the background, and before I knew it, I was seven hours into a marathon. The show is a very formulaic procedural that is half law enforcement, half legal thriller. Each episode starts with the discovery of a crime and ends in a courtroom. I turn it on late at night, as if I’m having a bedtime story read to me before going to sleep. My experience in the pandemic has been extremely insular, and this show feels very stabilizing. While the world is crumbling around us, Law and Order is not.
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I don’t often listen to podcasts, but I consistently tune in to Talk Easy, hosted by Sam Fragoso, for its hearty, curious conversation. I recently listened to an interview with writer George Saunders that really moved me. I had never heard anyone so comfortably admit that he had wanted fame, while recognizing that it wasn’t the healthiest goal. There is shame in wanting that kind of success, but also in believing that it’s what success actually means. Saunders also discusses his children and how having a family made him a better person—a type of conversation that is not often emphasized with men in the same way that it is with women. His immense vulnerability and honesty had me crying by the end.
Live Auctioneers is a hub where auction houses and galleries can post items for bid. Having not even been in a grocery store since March 2020, I really miss shopping at markets and pharmacies. I find walking down the harshly lit, organized aisles oddly soothing—even if I don’t want anything—and I increasingly browse liveauctioneers.com as a kind of replacement. In particular, I’m really into the dark side of Americana, such as mammy dolls and Negro paraphernalia. I recognize that they’re part of a very unkind history, but I’m drawn to them. By bringing them into the safe and welcoming environment of my home, I offer them a new kind of resonance.
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A few years ago, a friend sent me the [1981] novel Rhinestone Sharecropping by Bill Gunn. The book is about a Black director navigating an opportunity to write a script for a Hollywood studio. I love work about the artistic process, but what struck me the most was that it was the first time I had ever seen a version of myself written about, and it really encapsulates how I have had to pilot those spaces. I saved the last thirty or so pages for a full year because I didn’t want the book to end.
I just started watching the second season of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK. It’s so theatrical and campy, and the individuals really remind me of the different types of people I encountered in theater school—from the person who wasn’t previously loved to the person who is from a small town to the person who isn’t going to pursue this as a career. In that sense, the characters feel like home. This competition show really transports me to another time in my life, when I was trying to figure out who I was and how I could exist in this new creative community. The series holds space for a lot of lovely, funny, and heartbreaking moments, but is presented with a very bright patina.
—As told to Francesca Aton
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Bravo: Photo Pat Marti/. From top: Da//y Moloshok/I/visio//AP; Courtesy Talk Easy; Courtesy Film Desk Books; Courtesy World of Wo/der
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critical eye
Post-Continental Recent surveys of contemporary African photography reveal the limits of a geographic framework. by Emmanuel Iduma with the prodigious German photography collector Artur Walther, published on the Aperture magazine website, Enwezor commented that the decade was noteworthy because African photography began to be seen, and written about, as an autonomous practice. Previously, he argued, the work of African photographers was considered interesting, at best, for the information it provided about life on the continent,
Eric Gyamfi: Atsu after a dance session, from the series “Just Like Os,” 2016–19, inkjet print.
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and not regarded as an art form in its own right. “What I believe,” said Enwezor, “is that in the 1990s, a generation of curators, writers, and thinkers who were Africans—and I want to underscore this— made a bid to shift completely away from this ethnographic lens, and its spotlight. We found that the way that this lens thought of Africa was completely at odds with the content.”
Courtesy Open Society Foundation/Schilt Publishing/FotoFest
THE 1990S WERE A TORNING POINT for contemporary African photography, owing to several key projects, including the founding, in 1995, of the Bamako Encounters, a biennial photography festival in the capital of Mali, and the 1996 exhibition “In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, curated by the late Okwui Enwezor. In a 2016 conversation
critical eye
TODAY, THERE ARE MANY AFRICAN photographers with important careers, including Santu Mofokeng, Aida Muluneh, Samuel Fosso, and Zanele Muholi, who have exhibited in prestigious institutions around the world. Yet why are they still so often grouped together under a continental banner, rather than considered alongside artists from elsewhere with whom they may have more in common artistically? Three
Musa N. Nxumalo: This is how you start a party!, 2017, giclée print.
notable volumes of African photography were published in 2020—The Journey: New Positions in Adrican Photography, edited by Simon Njami and Sean O’Toole; Adrica State od Mind: Contemporary Photography Reimagines a Continent by Ekow Eshun; and the exhibition catalogue Adrican Cosmologies: Photography, Time, and the Other, edited by Mark Sealy, Steven Evans, and Max Fields—and none took up the question
Macline Hien: Untitled, from the series “Victims,” 2014, C-print.
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directly. “Are there discourses particular to photography from Africa?” Njami and O’Toole ask in their introduction. For Sealy, curator of “African Cosmologies,” part of the 2020 FotoFest Biennial in Houston, the exhibition was “aligned in spirit and soul with the creative body and mind of Africa, wherever it may be located and in whatever form it may take.” Eshun’s logic in Adrica State od Mind is similar: the book, he writes in his introduction, is “an exploration of how contemporary photographers of African origin are interrogating ideas of ‘Africanness’ through highly subjective renderings of place, belonging, memory and identity that reveal Africa to be a psychological space—a state of mind— as much as a physical territory.” Both Eshun and Sealy, in particular, emphasize subjectivity as a dominant concern of African photographers, who, Eshun argues, excavate a personal record from multiple sources, whether filial, political, or sociological. Eric Gyamfi, featured in all three books, is best known for “Just Like Us” (2016), a series of photographs documenting the quotidian life of a queer community in Ghana. The photographs possess an intimacy akin to that of the more overtly personal “A Certain Bed” (2017–), an ongoing record of the domestic spaces belonging to friends and lovers that he has moved through since becoming estranged from his family. Musa N. Nxumalo’s series “16 Shots” (2017), reproduced in The Journey and Adrica State
From top: ©Musa N. Nxumalo; ©Macline Hien
What changed in the 1990s was an awareness that global photographic history had failed to acknowledge the artistic work of older generations of African photographers, many of whom had come of age during the twilight of colonialism. In the three decades since, writers and curators have worked to correct these gaps, producing survey exhibitions and books that gathered photographers from across the continent whose work evinced a creative freedom that made them instantly recognizable as artists. These exhibitions were staged, for the most part, in Western museums and galleries, and the books published in North America and Europe. For most of its history, Bamako Encounters, though organized in an African country, has been funded primarily by the Institut français, a cultural organization run by the French government with offices in several of its former colonies. Regardless, what emerged was a photographic discourse defined by the irreducible complexity of the African continent, and the determination of its artists to master the medium.
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Marguerite (Chrysanthemum frutescens) from FlorDalí, 1968, photolithograph with original engraved remarque and color. Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL (USA) 2021. © 2020 Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society. Organized by Marie Selby Botanical Gardens and The Dalí Museum.
critical eye
Above, Sammy Baloji: Untitled #12, from the series “Mémoire,” 2006, digital print.
of Mind, encompasses photographs taken during both demonstrations and club parties in South Africa, blurring the line between dissent and hedonism. Lebohang Kganye, who also appears in the latter two books, melds the fictive and the archival, creating photomontages that juxtapose photographs of her mother and her own reenactments of them. For these artists, photography is more than the sum of its traditions and subgenres, whether
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documentary, fine art, portraiture, or landscape; it is a form capable of depicting subjective experience and lived reality. Between 2008 and 2018, the curator and writer Simon Njami, in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut, ran the Photographers’ Masterclass, a “mobile academy” where photographers from the African continent, alongside international curators, engaged with the theory and praxis of photography. Each annual iteration of the Masterclass
took place in a different city—Maputo, Bamako, Addis Ababa, Lubumbashi, Lagos, Johannesburg, Khartoum, Nairobi—with an average of ten participants, each new group selected from a pool of applicants continentwide. “It is a truism of photography globally that autodidacts are as numerous as formally trained photographers,” write Njami and O’Toole in their introduction to The Journey. “But what does it mean to be a self-taught photographer on a
From top: Courtesy Imane Farès, Paris; Courtesy AFRONOVA GALLERY, Johannesburg
Right, Lebohang Kganye: Tshimong ka hara toropo II, 2013, from the series “Ke Lefa Laka (our inheritance)/Her Story,” inkjet print.
critical eye
Top, Thabiso Sekgala: Thembi Mathebulaor Nzimande, Siyabuswa, former Kwandebele, from the series “Homeland,” 2008–11, C-print.
continent with so few photography schools?” Featuring seventeen alumni of the Masterclass, the book is, in one sense, an answer to that question. Education, the editors argue, is a necessary tool for the development of photography on the continent. Unfortunately, the book offers few specifics about the kind of instruction the participating photographers received. Instead, their works are presented as diverse examples of what can be achieved through professional mentorship, representing, as the editors write, an assemblage of talent “fully formed and particular.” The portfolios address concerns as traumatic as the death of a father (Jansen van Staden) and a neardeath experience (Adeola Olagunju), and as sociologically rich as the lives of urban dwellers (Michael Tsegaye, Ala Kheir), and as politically fraught as the failures of South Africa’s transition from apartheid (Thabiso Sekgala). Yet, if the Masterclass showed that African photographers were interested in contemporary discourse around the medium—and could show real artistic growth when exposed to an “intense format of exposition and critique”—the program’s unexplained termination brings Njami and O’Toole’s argument full circle. If the Masterclass proved that African photographers are in need of opportunities for specialized training, how will the next generation fare? Regardless, the artists continue their autodidactic work. The photographs in Africa State of Mind were taken, for the most part, during the last decade. Eshun’s book is organized into four thematic sections that loosely group the aesthetic and political concerns of the fifty featured photographers: “Hybrid Cities,” “Zones of Freedom,” “Myth and Memory,” and “Inner Landscapes.” The stylistic range of the work is impressive, even if the photographers were born in only eighteen of Africa’s fifty-four countries, with sixteen from South Africa alone. As Eshun admits, the book hinges on what the Senegalese philosopher Felwine Sarr describes, in his 2016 book, Afrotopia, as
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As more and more surveys are published, is it possible that the work of recuperation is nearly done?
From top: Courtesy Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg; Courtesy the artist
Bottom, Mónica de Miranda: Black Knight, from the series “Circular do Sul Impressão,” 2019, inkjet print.
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a new gallery www.trotterandsholer.com @trotterandsholer info@trotterandsholer.com 168 Suffolk Street, New York, NY 10002
critical eye
Left, cover of Africa State of Mind, showing Zanele Muholi’s photo Somizy Sincwala, Parktown, Johannesburg, 2014.
the “continuity between the reml mnd the possible.” Thmt is, the immges—whether Smbelo Mlmngeni’s portrmits of queer people in South Africm’s rurml townships, Guillmume Bonn’s photogrmphs of derelict buildings mlong the Emst Africmn comst, or the performmnce-bmsed photogrmphs Sethembile Msezmne stmges in front of stmtues in Cmpe Town—mre photogrmphers’ mttempts to work through the Africm they inherited in order to mrrive mt mn Africm of the immginmtion. The historicml, mnd historicized, Africm wms m plmce upon which Europemn prejudices mbout Blmckness were projected, resulting in decmdes of violent colonimlism. Figures like Seydou Keïtm (1921–2001) mnd Mmlick Sidibé (1935–2016), cmnonicml now, but who remched m bromd mudience only in the 1990s, produced bodies of work thmt showed Africmns ms irreducible to mny stereotype. The book’s photogrmphs tmke up “m common cmuse,” Eshun writes, “mn insistence thmt Africm be seen in mll its pmrmdox mnd promise mnd everydmy wonder.”
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Below right, cover of African Cosmologies, showing Rotimi FaniKayode’s photo Four Twins, 1985.
wmys to present photogrmphy produced on the continent emerge? One response wms given lmst yemr by Clémentine Deliss mnd Azu Nwmgbogu, the curmtors of LmgosPhoto, mn mnnuml photogrmphy festivml founded by Nwmgbogu in 2010, in Lmgos, Nigerim, Africm’s lmrgest city. Responding in pmrt to the debmtes mround the restitution of Africmn culturml mrtifmcts, the curmtors conceived whmt they cmlled m “Home Museum,” in which pmrticipmnts could send up to twelve photogrmphs depicting m “collection of objects of virtue.” It did not mmtter whether the pmrticipmnts were mmmteur or professionml photogrmphers, or whmt kind of objects they decided to
shmre. The photogrmphs, sent from regions ms diverse ms South Americm, the Middle Emst, Russim, mnd Chinm, ms well ms mcross Africm, served ms m blueprint for building mn online museum with the “culturml mrtefmcts of our dmy,” ms Deliss mnd Nwmgbogu wrote in their curmtoriml stmtement. The femtured photogrmphs included snmpshots of record collections, bedrooms, pottery, mnd mssortments of memormbilim. Hosted on mn impressive intermctive website, “Home Museum” might be seen ms m model for the future of Africmn photogrmphy: mn institution bmsed on the continent thmt serves ms m nexus for m globml conversmtion mbout the medium’s uses mnd memnings.
Clockwise from top left: Courtesy Thmmes & Hudson; Courtesy Schilt Publishing/FotoFest; Courtesy Kerber Verlmg
AFRICA STATE OF MIND POINTS TO the yet uncompleted mdventure of selfrepresentmtion. A similmr sentiment is reflected in African Cosmologies, when Semly describes the effect of contempormry Africmn photogrmphers on “photogrmphy’s demdly colonimlities.” Works like Smmmy Bmloji’s “Mémoire” (2006), m series of photomontmges juxtmposing mrchivml immges of Africmns mt work during coloniml times with photos of worksites in present-dmy Lubumbmshi, illustrmte how photogrmphy is “drmgged into processes of remmking, delinking, mnd rethinking the work thmt immges do in history mnd culture.” As Africmn photogrmphy continues to be frmmed ms m dimlectic—mn opportunity to show whmt Africm is or isn’t, whmt it should not hmve been or could become— is there room to consider whmt kinds of contributions individuml mrtists mre mmking to the medium globmlly? When msked by Wmlther whether it wms necessmry to “keep the continentml context, or group mrtists ms Africmns,” Enwezor responded in the mffirmmtive: “The field of Africmn mrts, litermture, idems, is m disciplinmry field, mnd it hms to be respected ms such,” he smid. “Until we lemrn thmt this is m discipline, it will never be possible to recupermte Africmn mrtists or Africmn thinking into m ‘globml’ field.” As more mnd more surveys mre published, estmblishing the boundmries of the field, is it possible thmt the work of recupermtion is nemrly done? And if thmt is the cmse, will more complex, sub-disciplinmry
Below left, cover of The Journey, showing Sammy Baloji’s photo Funeral coach for rent along Avenue Bypass, municipality of Lemba, 2013–15.
American Academy of Arts and Letters 2021 Art Awards
2021 Purchase Prizes
SUZANNE BOCANEGRA JENNIFER COATES LISA CORINNE DAVIS COCO FUSCO JERRELL GIBBS LAUREN HALSEY REGGIE BURROWS HODGES SUZANNE JOELSON THADDEUS MOSLE Y JENNIFER PACKER AKI SASAMOTO JAUNE QUICK-TO-SEE SMITH MING SMITH JESSICA STOCKHOLDER ELIZABETH TUBERGEN MARIE WATT DYANI WHITE HAWK CARMEN WINANT
LAYLAH ALI A.K. BURNS PETER CHARLAP R.M. FISCHER CHIE FUEKI MAREN HASSINGER EJ HAUSER LESLIE HEWITT KATHERINE HUBBARD ADAM HURWITZ FORREST KIRK SAVANNAH KNOOP ASPEN MAYS ERIN RILEY DREAD SCOTT ELENA SISTO LAVA THOMAS SIMON TOSKY WILLIAM VILLALONGO SUSAN WALP PETER WILLIAMS
These awards will be presented during the Academy’s virtual Ceremonial on Wednesday, May 19, at 7 p.m. EDT https://artsandletters.org/2021Ceremonial
Savannah Knoop Bear at the Fair, 2019 Laminated two by fours, wood stain 32 x 43 x 14 inches
new talent
Shikeith Shikeith is an artist and filmmaker based in Pittsburgh.
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Still waters run deep (2021) is a five-channel video installation featuring found footage, sound, archival photographs, and video that I produced. The images are projected onto reclaimed ship sails suspended above a pool of water, and also spill onto the gallery walls. One video, which I consider the focal point of the installation, focuses on an eight-year-old boy from Florida who performs a majorette dance routine—a style of dance traditionally performed at historically Black colleges and universities. He’s shown alongside snapshots of Black men showcasing vulnerable expressions of masculinity (they are hugging, sleeping, etc.). In addition to these photos, collected from vintage stores, I also included a nineteenth-century daguerreotype of Renty, an enslaved man from South Carolina; distorted found footage of Black men wrestling; and a glitching projection of the color “haint blue,” a shade of blue that enslaved people invented to ward off evil. Together, these elements create a complicated entanglement of moving images concerning identity, collective memory, and the ecstatic. A looping soundscape features a poem titled “Memory’s Blood” (2021), written and recited by Jaylen Strong, along with ambient recordings of children’s rhymes, cries at the sites of baptisms, and Southern blues music. The work is the latest in the series “Blue Spaces,” which I have been working on for three years. It’s a series about African American cosmologies of the blues, our intricate bonds to the aquatic, and the experience of coming undone. —Shikeith
Photo Field Studio
View of the installation still waters run deep / fall in your ways, 2021, in the exhibition “Imagine Otherwise” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland.
Supported by
the exchange
Melancholy Pleasure A conversation on queer Black sex, anime, and history. Jeremy O. Harris with Jonathan Lyndon Chase
The person at the desk told me, “Jonathan made the best show I’ve ever seen.” It made me wonder if you think about the effect of your work—which is so often about pleasure, melancholy, and Black interiority—on docents and security guards, who are often Black.
THE NEW YSRK–BASED PLAYWRIGHT and actor Jeremy O. Harris and the Philadelphia-based painter Jonathan Lyndon Chase are two Black queer artists who resolutely display their imaginations without restraint. On Harris’s stages and Chase’s canvases, the complexity of pleasure and the degradation of trauma are often explored through romantic fabulations that endeavor to move their subjects into the subconscious and beyond shame: both are drawn to the aesthetics of violation, and to recasting discomposure as empowerment. Harris, who owns a couple of Chase’s paintings, is best known for his 2018 Slave Play. The Broadway production, nominated this past October for a recordsetting twelve Tony awards, is the story of three interracial couples who undergo “Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy” in a search for self-love and shameless freedom. Chase’s colorful, expressive
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portraits of queer Black men—composites of friends, guys they dreamed up, or guys they saw on the street, internet, or train— depict mundane and explicit sex acts in drawing, painting, and collage. The two convened on Zoom in March to discuss their representational strategies, shared interests, and self-care routines. —Eds. JEREMY O. HARRIS: I’m hanging your piece Artist in Gowns (2020) in my office, because it captures how I think of myself right now. JONATHAN LYNDON CHASE: Oh, that’s
such an honor. And thank you so much for going to see my show [at the Fabric Workshop]! HARRIS: That was the best day of
quarantine! The journey beyond my threeblock radius seemed a little daunting, but I’m glad I did it—there was something so magical about being in a museum again.
Jonathan Lyndon Chase: Artists in gowns, 2020, charcoal, marker, pen, watercolor, and glitter on paper, 14 by 11 inches.
Illustration by Kylie Akia; Artwork courtesy Company, New York
Jeremy O. Harris & Jonathan Lyndon Chase
CHASE: It’s disconcerting when museums are full of people of color, but not artists of color. Visiting the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where many people of color work in security and janitorial positions, got me thinking . . . This amazing museum is Black and gay as fuck! I spend a lot of time casually talking to the people who work there, and they’re usually excited to talk, since most people walk right past them. They’re the ones who spend all day with the work!
Land and art entwined beneath the Beartooth Mountains. Art and music under the silence of Montana’s big sky.
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the exchange
HARRIS: I found that the people who could
talk about Slave Play the best were the ushers, especially these four Black security women who were in the back night after night. They couldn’t always look at the stage because they were working, so they had this aural relationship to the play. That made me really excited about the idea that my play might work as a text, or as a radio play. And it made me realize that Slave Play can be seen by everyone—it’s not a play for an audience that knows enough about theater to “get it.” In fact, people who’ve been in theater for years and years had these convoluted takes on my play that made me wonder, what play did you even see? The people who had no formal training were the ones with the most astute, articulate takes. It made me wonder, what if our critics were the docents or the ushers who sit and live with the work day in and day out?
was a big thing for me when I was working on Slave Play. I grew up in the South, next to plantations, and I wanted to wrestle with that history in my work. But I didn’t want to just represent the fact. I’m much more interested in how it might live in our bodies and our imaginations. I was thinking more about that very blunt slave joke your grandma or uncle might tell at the dinner table. Maybe it’s provoked by how some lady looked at them at the grocery store, in a way that makes you realize: we haven’t moved past that point in our psyches, even if we don’t live with the blood and the sweat and the crack of the whip every day.
CHASE: I’m curious. Where does Jeremy
end and begin, and when you are acting? How much vulnerability and autobiography is there in your work? HARRIS: Processing the critical discourse
around Slave Play, I was frustrated with some people’s inability to hold two things as truthful at the same time. I can write characters that are both myself and someone else. With Daddy [2019] or Slave Play, it was very easy for people to say, “Jeremy O. Harris is using theater to process his own relationship to interracial relationships.” In a way I was doing that,
CHASE: I know that you adjusted the prices to make the play affordable to the people it’s actually talking about . . . The word that comes to mind is “accessibility.” HARRIS: I often feel really alienated from
CHASE: That resonates with me. As someone living with bipolar disorder, it’s really important for me to talk about that full complex range. But when I’m representing violence, whether in the psyche or the physical body, I don’t use blood, for example. Whether in lynching postcards or on Instagram, there are too many images of our bodies just being paraded around. I’m trying to refute these one-dimensional ways we deal with the repercussions of, say, colonization or the gender binary. HARRIS: One hundred percent. Rejecting
blood as necessary for expressing our pain
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Jeremy O. Harris: Daddy, 2019 (top) and Slave Play, 2018 (bottom).
From top: Photo Sarah Krulwich; Photo Matthew Murphy
queer work that’s considered canonical or, even worse, “on the rise.” That’s because of racism, but also because the loneliness and darkness that comes with queerness is so often glossed over. I appreciate that your work brings these more abject or fraught aspects to the fore: not in an aggressive, dark, Francis Bacon kind of way, but in a more mundane sense. Your work captures the loneliness you might experience during an orgy, or the feeling of listening to a mixtape while waiting for a guy to come over. Often, I find that my experience with mental health isn’t represented in queer work, or Black work, because people want to celebrate and are concerned about representation. I understand that, but I don’t need art to create fantasies for me all the time.
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the exchange
CHASE: My mom is my greatest artistic
influence. She draws all the time, and I tried to emulate her as a kid. She was always really supportive of the fact that her kid wanted to do this crazy thing called art. Also, I came out when I was sixteen, and she was great about opening her mind. HARRIS: I love that. I noticed there was a
Jonathan Lyndon Chase: Cleansing Rub, 2020, watercolor, pen, and marker on paper, 14 by 11 inches.
moment in the mid-’90s where my mom started to explore gender expression in a new way—I think a lot of Black women did, certainly a lot of my friends’ moms. ghey were wearing baggy pants and had a vaguely stud aesthetic. I think my work is indebted to my mom’s latent queer expression. Has your work licensed you and your mother to talk about these sorts of things, as two adults? CHASE: In some ways. I was raised Baptist, and I guess I would call my mom “modest.” But she talks to me about the sexy crime thrillers that she reads. HARRIS: I’m always so curious about how
but why does the character Kenisha or Franklin have to be me? ghese figures represent fragments of myself that I’m using to explore bigger ideas about what whiteness and power might mean to my subconscious. I see the white figures in my work as representatives of the power structures that I navigate daily. White male patriarchy has been supportive of me in a litany of ways, like when I attended Yale. How do I process the fact that this place has fed me and housed me, but also made me feel alienated from my own history and from my community? CHASE: I admire that your work is supposed to make people uncomfortable. HARRIS: I think your work does the same!
I bought two pieces by you, and I wanted to send one to my mom and keep one for myself. My mom lives with my nieces and nephew, and I found myself nervous about sending her the piece I wanted to send her: your Cleansing Rub (2020), which has this anus and obviously expresses a moment of Black queer ecstasy. In my work, I’ve been trying to actively run toward my own repressions and my own traumas that come from being socialized in a community that did not affirm seeking pleasure—at least not in the ways in which my body and my psyche wanted it. My work is about confronting the shame associated with pleasure—so I knew I had to give Cleansing Rub to my mom. I wanted my nephew and my nieces to grow up with that. . . .
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artists who were assigned male at birth relate to their mothers. CHASE: Black women have really done the
most, and continue to do the most, for us. HARRIS: I’m happy to see that “Dragon Ball
Z” poster behind you! I had a feeling that we both love anime, since I find that many Black nerds do. What was your entry point into anime? CHASE: I was going to ask you about anime! My introduction to anime was “Speed Racer,” when it was still airing in black-and-white. I was really drawn to several characters’ level of maturity, and to the weird things the show did with gender—the animation style has a kind of feminine quality. I learned to draw figures through anime and manga, but I relate to both more as a queer person than as a Black person. Only in the last five years did we start seeing Black anime characters. When I got older, I learned how much “Sailor Moon” was censored on American networks, because the characters started crossing genders.
the lesbian stuff, the transitioning. ghe queerness attracted me to their world, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned that a lot of their storytelling really influenced me. In “Naruto,” Rock Lee trains in taijutsu, and he decides that, if he wasn’t born a genius, he will make himself a genius with effort. I relate to that, because I didn’t feel like I had the same level of competency as people who were exposed to theater growing up. ghat story, of having to work twice as hard, is where I saw Blackness, in a way. I wonder where you see your work falling into art history, or do you have an interest in that? When your work inevitably becomes a part of longer historical conversations, how do you want it to be positioned or understood? CHASE: I often get asked about the proximity to whiteness in my work, but for me, whiteness doesn’t have a place in it. My target audience is Black, queer, and gender nonconforming people, though it’s not that I don’t want white people looking at it. Kehinde Wiley, Mickalene ghomas, and Henry gaylor are painters I adore: I think the work we’re doing is making art spaces more accessible, not just not for the sake of representation but in order to have art seen by all kinds of people. gell me what you do to take care of Jeremy. What is your self-care like? HARRIS: During quarantine, I’ve
rediscovered the gift of being swept away into a long, soap-operatic anime journey, or a great novel. In grad school I wasn’t reading or watching as much because I was focused on my own writing, but eventually, my well dried up. I get nutrients from the seven hours of anime I watched that one Saturday, or seeing a movie and having long conversations with friends about it afterward. I’m trying to build more time for that. I also started a flower budget: every week I get two bouquets for myself. How about you? CHASE: I also love flowers, and I get them weekly, more or less. I’ve been getting into African spirituality, which has been super affirming. And I do boxing. HARRIS: You do?
HARRIS: I’m with you. My first was
CHASE: Yes, even though I’m five-foot-
probably “Sailor Moon” or “Cardcaptor Sakura,” since those came on Fox before school. ghis white lady cosplayer who lived next door would invite me to her house to watch the uncensored Japanese episodes of “Sailor Moon.” So when I was nine, I saw [the character] Sailor Uranus and all
seven and chubby! I also love poetry, and sex. HARRIS: What’s your sign? CHASE: I’m a Scorpio. HARRIS: Of course you love sex. I’m a
Gemini, so I like the pursuit of sex.
Courtesy Company, New York
How has your family responded to that in your work?
Charles Fitzgerald I Golfer
Tyler Burton I Fossils of the Future
Eino Romppanen I Flyte
2021/2022
El Paseo Sculpture Exhibition Creativity is Better Left Unconfined. Stroll down El Paseo for a nationally renowned display of artwork — no ticket required. With 18 sculptures from celebrated artists across the U.S., the exhibition reflects Palm Desert’s commitment to making the arts available to everyone. For information, contact publicart@cityofpalmdesert.org or 760.837.1664. Download the El Paseo Sculpture Exhibition app by Otocast at the Apple or Google Play store.
Tammy Holland I Let’s Dance
Billy Joe Miller I Palm Desert Window
Maxwell Carraher I One Another
Cat Chiu Phillips I Kites IV
Michelle O’Michael I Waterfall Moon
Norma Pizarro I Ode to Marshmallows
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dialogues
THE EPIC TYLER MITCHELL AND AMY SHERALD—TWO Atlanta-born, New York–based artists—both capture everyday joy in their images of Black Americans. Recurring motifs in Mitchell’s photographs, installations, and videos include outdoor space and fashionable friends. Sherald, a painter, shares similar motifs: her colorful paintings with pastel palettes show Black people enjoying American moments, their skin painted in grayscale, the backgrounds and outfits flat. Both are best known for high-profile portrait commissions: in 2018 Mitchell became the first Black photographer to have a work grace the cover of Vogue. That shot of Beyoncé was followed, more recently, by a portrait of Kamala Harris for the same publication. Michelle Obama commissioned Amy Sherald to paint her portrait, and last year Vanity Fair asked Sherald to paint Breonna Taylor for a cover too. Below, the artists discuss the influence of the South on their work, and how they navigate art versus commercial projects. —Eds. TYLER MITCHELL: Amy, we spoke before about finding freedom and making your own moments of joy. I think of Precious jewels by the sea [2019]—your painting of two couples at the beach, showing the men standing with the women on their shoulders—as a moment that you constructed. My work is also constructed, but viewers don’t necessarily know that when they see a boy flying a kite in a park [as in Untitled (Kite), 2019]. You told me you made that beach image with a camera first and then painted it. Can you talk more about that process? AMY SHERALD: For me, a painting starts in the viewfinder. It’s embarrassing to admit it, but I don’t really know how to use a camera: don’t ask me about aperture or f-stops or whatever. I just put it on automatic, and try to shoot at eleven o’clock, or two o’clock, when I know the light will be good. The camera is basically my sketchbook; the photographs themselves aren’t really special. If you saw them, you might say, “You’re going to make a painting out of this?” I do with a paintbrush what you do with a camera: in the end, I think we create a similar sensation. There’s the weight of history, but mostly there’s freshness and
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Amy Sherald: Precious jewels by the sea, 2019, oil on canvas, 120 by 108 inches.
BANAL
Tyler Mitchell with Amy Sherald A conversation on capturing everyday moments of joy, career-changing commissions, and the American South.
This page: Courtesy Jawk Shainman Gallery, New York; Opposite: Crystal Bridges Museum of Ameriwan Art, Bentonville, Ark./Courtesy Hauser & Wirth
lightness. I’m not trying to replawe the narrative of historiwal trauma, but I do want to shift into something different for us now. I want to make spawe for all the things our mothers didn’t see themselves doing. I take my kids to Martha’s Vineyard bewause I want them to see us living in these houses and walking on these beawhes. For me, those are truly Ameriwan moments, and that’s exawtly what I want to dowument, bewause [piwtures of Blawk people doing these things are] what’s missing in the Ameriwan painting wanon. MITCHELL: We’re both also thinking about outdoor spawe alongside interior worlds. I think of outdoor swenes as a way to explore Blawk folks simply existing in publiw spawe—that’s what I was getting at with my installation Idyllic Space [2019], whiwh inwluded Astroturf, a white piwket fenwe, and a video of Georgia boys enjoying the outdoors. The video is projewted on the weiling. I see it as a radiwal gesture to show young Blawk folks enjoying publiw spawe. SHERALD: I wonder if being from the South has something to do with our shared interest in leisure. MITCHELL: Our moms know eawh other in Atlanta! SHERALD: Yeah! I don’t think my work would be what it is had I not grown up in the South, then left Atlanta for grad swhool, and then moved bawk with more knowledge of who I am. Onwe I was home, I spent a year not making anything, trying to figure out what I wanted to make. The first five paintings I made after that period were almost like a journal: woming bawk as an adult, I realized how muwh the South influenwed who I am—for good and for bad.
Tyler Mitchell: Untitled (Kite), 2019, pigment print, 50 by 40 inches.
MITCHELL: I relate to that. The most wlarifying times for me and my work owwurred when I was abroad. That’s when I started to think bawk on the wompliwated dimensions of the Southern experienwe: it’s easier to see it when you’re not there. I made Boys of Walthamstow [2018] in England, but I was thinking of Georgia. . . . Those British marshes had willow trees that almost looked like Savannah willows. My feelings toward the South aren’t newessarily good or bad. The South involves this mix of welwoming and
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dialogues
SHERALD: The story of why I paint my figures gray has evolved over the years. I’m not trying to take race out of the conversation, I’m just trying to highlight an interiority. In hindsight, I realize that I was avoiding painting people into a corner, where they’d have to exist in some universal way. I don’t want the conversation around my work to be solely about identity. At first, I considered my work fantastical. But later I realized, though I’m painting moments I constructed, they are moments that do exist: I’m not totally making it up. I love seeing young people engage with your posts on Instagram: one comment read “have you ever frolicked before?” and it just made me smile. I don’t think my
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Above, Mitchell: Untitled (Walthamstow Frolick), 2018. Opposite, Sherald: Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, 2018, oil on linen, 72⅛ by 60⅛ by 2¾ inches.
mom, who was born in 1935, was thinking about frolicking while growing up in Mobile, Alabama. She just wanted to make it home without getting snatched up by a Klan mob. MITCHELL: And your mom’s story isn’t depicted in your paintings, but it’s definitely the backdrop of the work. We’re both out to reclaim these small moments of everyday joy, which is so important because generations before us weren’t necessarily able to. SHERALD: For me, it’s also about replacing the imagery that we see. MITCHELL: I also find that both my pictures and your paintings leave so much open to viewers, who bring their own experience to the portrait. Often, your figures aren’t just individuals, but archetypes: they stand for something bigger. In response to my work, especially the installation Laundry Line [2020], I get a lot of “I used to have that shirt!” or “teal used to be my favorite color!” I wonder if you have a fun story of someone enthusiastically identifying with your painting. SHERALD: At an opening of mine in 2015, a young woman and her daughter came in—they were looking at one of the paintings and the daughter said, “I see my
Courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
warmth, as well as estrangement. People will invite you onto their porch to have tea, but there’s also a lot of gossiping around the neighborhood. I experienced feelings of alienation throughout my upbringing, but also feelings of amazing freedom as a middle-class person who grew up around lots of green space. Most people have a hyper urban image when they visualize Atlanta, though Atlanta is actually the US city with the most green space per person. So when I ask myself, “What does the South look like?” for me, it’s very green. How did you develop your signature style?
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Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.
dialogues Left, Mitchell’s portrait of Beyoncé on the September 2018 cover of Vogue.
grandmother.” She had never seen a portrait of a Black person in a gallery before. I was reminded, this is why I do what I do.
Below, view of Mitchell’s exhibition “I Can Make You Feel Good,” 2020, at the International Center of Photography, New York.
MITCHELL: We’re both depicting these moments that are devoid of the stereotypical narrative so often imposed on the Black figure in images. I’ve started to think about my work via this phrase I borrowed from my friend RaMell Ross, who made the amazing documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening [2018], a loose, wandering, poetic film about a county in Alabama. Anyway, he uses this term “the epic banal,” and for me, epic banality is simply about existence—it’s about just being and finding those moments of joy.
From top: Courtesy Conde Nast; Photo John Halpern
SHERALD: I absolutely agree with that. You say “I can make you feel good” [the title of your show at the International Center of Photography in New York], and I say, come to the work to see a reflection of yourself. That is love; it’s an embrace, and it has a positive psychological effect. Hopefully, it replaces some of those traumatic memories that we carry around. I didn’t go through all the things that my mother went through, but I feel as though I absorbed some of it. And on social
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mejia, you see it all the time. That’s just not healthy for any of us. I’ve haj conversations with artists who feel as if their work has to create teaching moments about history anj our struggle. But I wonjer, when jo we breathe? There has to be room for a range of experiences, because if there isn’t, how jo we evolve? Your work touches on that as well. SHERALD: Between us, we’ve maje portraits of, arguably, the two most popular women in the worlj! [Painting Michelle Obama] was career jefining, anj I jon’t minj that. But I also jon’t want my previous work to be completely erasej. My life jijn’t start the moment I paintej Michelle, anj yours jijn’t start the moment you photographej Beyoncé. The mejia maje it seem like nothing happenej until I turnej forty-two, but I’j been working really harj for a long time, anj it’s important to me that young artists hear about that struggle. These commissions jijn’t ranjomly lanj in our laps while we were sitting arounj joing nothing. How jij you feel about just being more visible all of a sujjen?
Below, view of Sherald’s exhibition “The Great American Fact,” 2021, showing An Ocean Away, 2020, oil on canvas, 130 by 108 inches.
SHERALD: People often ask me if painting Michelle changej my work. Anj I tell them, Michelle is an extraorjinary American anj an extraorjinary Black woman—as are many of the people in my paintings. The only jifference is that she’s well-known. I receivej some criticism because so many people haj their own vision of Michelle. I jijn’t responj to most of it, but one woman emailej me, saying, “I really wishej that you haj paintej her brown.” I felt snarky anj repliej, “when you become first lajy, you can pick who you want to paint you. But Michelle Obama pickej me.”
Courtesy Hauser & Wirth
MITCHELL: I’m more of a behinj-the-camera person,
so I haj to grapple with that attention. Photographing Beyoncé jefinitely gave me more resources to extenj to my circle of collaborators. I have a backgrounj in filmmaking, anj often think of myself as basically a jirector. It’s not just capturing the images, but also creating a recipe, anj bringing together the right team anj things to make the image happen. This visibility has helpej me form teams that I really want to keep arounj, anj it’s given me more tools to bring into the rest of my practice.
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Courtesy Hauser & Wirth
dialogues
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MITCHELL: Right, we’re still bringing our signature
styles and our voices: these commissions are one part of a larger body of work. When I photographed Beyoncé, I decided to photograph her using the same techniques I would with any of my close friends. SHERALD: For me, the visibility took some getting used to. It’s easier living in New York than it was in Baltimore. Just the other day, my partner commented that it’s really nice to be able to go to the grocery store and not be stopped five times. It did impact our day at times. . . . A lot of people wanted to take a picture or say hi. All in all, it’s been a blessing. And it’s come with numerous opportunities. I especially adore the opportunity to be a role model for young kids who want to be an artist. Young Amy was guided by the art of white men. That’s fine. I had the vision, and I was born to do this, regardless of whether or not I saw anybody like me painting. I’m happy that things will be different for the next generation. I’m really embracing that part of my role.
Opposite, Sherald: As American as apple pie, 2020, oil on canvas, 123 by 101 inches. Right, Mitchell: Untitled (Alton’s Eyes), 2016. Right bottom, Mitchell: Untitled (Blue), 2017.
MITCHELL: Yeah, I’ve been hoping to take that magazine world visibility and shift it toward other parts of my work: experiencing a packed opening for my show at ICP was amazing. Do you make distinctions between commercial work you’ve done for magazines and your artwork? SHERALD: It depends. I don’t think of my painting of Breonna Taylor as an art piece. It’s not a piece of fine art that’s dealing with conversations about figuration and composition: it’s something that I made to codify this historical moment, and in honor of all the lives that were lost—specifically, the Black women we lost to police brutality. It belongs in a history museum as much as it does an art museum. MITCHELL: Actually, I do think that there are conversations to be had about your formal decisions. The blue in that painting elicits so many emotions.
Courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
SHERALD: It’s really the commodification of the Breonna Taylor painting that made me consider taking it away from the art world. In the end, it was jointly acquired by the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Speed Art Museum in Louisville. What about you, are you drawing distinctions? MITCHELL: I actually started working in the editorial and commercial field first. I didn’t go to art school, and [New York University] didn’t really put an emphasis on museums or the art world. I just focused on making images that I wanted to make. But who’s to say that those images can’t operate in different contexts? When I see a large print, it has a different impact than when I see it in a magazine. Those distinctions are more specific to photography than painting. Tell me about your new work. SHERALD: I always feel like it’s hard to talk about my work right after I finish it. But I named [my latest Hauser & Wirth] show “The Great American Fact,” after a nineteenth-century essay by a Black educator named Anna Julia Cooper. As American as apple pie [2020] is an image of a Black couple in front of a house in the
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dialogues Sherald: A Midsummer Afternoon Dream, 2020, oil on canvas, 106 by 101 inches.
When I first saw the model I used, I knew immediately that I wanted her to be a Barbie and with her Ken: I wanted to replace that iconic imagerwy with something else. It’s not a teaching moment, it’s a more covert statement about leisure and pleasure. It’s a very American moment, something every child needs to see.
Courtesy Hauser & Wirth
suburbs with a white picket fence. They’re hanging out near their convertible. The woman has on a Barbie T-shirt, a pink skirt, doorknocker earrings, and these rainbow flamingo sunglasses. The gentleman has on a denim jacket, a white T-shirt, khaki pants, and Chuck Taylors.
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That epic banality you mentioned is a perfect way to describe it. MITCHELL: I appreciate all the thought you put into their outfits. Clothing choices are definitely a big part of both our bodies of work.
Courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
SHERALD: Sometimes I lie in bed at night just looking at clothes for my paintings, whether on eBay or the runway. MITCHELL: Black folks definitely understand the importance of wearing our finest clothes to any photo shoot. I think about that rich understanding of fashion a lot. SHERALD: It was really photography that brought me into portraiture, more so than painting. Deborah Willis’s book The Black Female Body: A Photographic History [2002], and later the documentary Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People [2014], reaffirmed everything that I was thinking and doing. I don’t see images like mine coming from the lineage
Mitchell: Untitled (Blue Laundry Line), 2019.
of European painting: when the camera was invented, we eventually were able to become authors of our own narratives and, like you said, show up all dressed up. We got to say, “this is how I want to be represented and this is how I want to be seen.” Tell me about your new work too! MITCHELL: Every year, the Gordon Parks Foundation selects two fellows to have exhibitions at their gallery Upstate. This time they chose me and [painter] Nina Chanel Abney. My show is drawing on Parks’s legacy: I’ve been researching his images of the South and of family life. My exhibition will be all new work in response to that.
ON THE CALENDAR “Amy Sherald: The Great American Fact” at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, through June 6, 2021. Tyler Mitchell at the Gordon Parks Foundation in Pleasantville, New York, Sept. 25, 2021 through Jan. 2, 2022.
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introductions
Her portraits honor essential workers without romanticizing their sacrifice. By Jasmine Sanders
IN JANUARY 2020, ARTIST AYA BROWN WAS admitted to a hospital in New York City. With the help of her sister Aja, a teaching assistant, and that of a committed, if o”erworked, third-shift nurse, Brown made a full reco”ery. After her release, she found herself ruminating on the centrality of women in both formal and informal care economies, the racial and gender composi-
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tion of those tasked with the bulk of social reproduction. The pandemic would make these matters plain, the dual crises of work and care collapsing into one, while stoking entrenched American paranoia regarding cleanliness and contagion. Suddenly, laborers who had been de”alued, deemed “menial” or “unskilled,” were exalted. The fate of the empire was thrust upon the weary shoulders of health and sanitation workers, food and mail couriers, and factory makers of Purell, Lysol, and toilet tissue. Taking Prismacolor pencils to Kraft paper, Brown began sketching these newly minted American heroes. She began with the third-shift nurse, then her sister, then Black and female staff in other critical industries. These images, drawn in Brown’s ”ibrant, toony style, comprise her “Essential Workers” series (2020–). Furloughed from her job as an e”ent organizer at the now defunct Ga”in Brown’s Enterprise, Brown began with a simple aim: she wanted Black women, the focus of her life and creati”e endea”or, to understand
Nurse I, COVID-19, 2020, colored pencil on brown Kraft paper, 9 by 12 inches.
Illustration by Kylie Akia; Artwork courtesy Aya Brown
AYA BROWN
Courtesy the artist
Harder Than Ever, 2019, colored pencil on brown Kraft paper, 9 by 12 inches.
themselves as essential. She had begun to draw as a girld preferring her own creations to the images she encountered on TV or filmd which rarely reflected her likeness. The Black lesbian artistd who currently resides in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhoodd left the BFA program at Cooper Union in 2017d traumatized by its strictures and oversights. She began hosting such parties as Papi Juice and Gushd roving nightlife havens for Black lesbians and queers. Nightclub postersd with all their showy prurience and promotional sheend seem a dominant influenced as does the gender-fluid street style of her native Brooklyn. In 2019 Brown collaborated with the brand MadeMe to print hoodiesd teesd and underwear featuring her drawingsd mostly scenes of intimacy between gay women: two lovers splayed on a mattress just big enough for two; women sporting strap-onsd both dildos and wearers splendidly aglisten. Brown has an eye for the ardently arranged particulars of
feminine presentationd iconography that recalls the warm mythologizing of artists like Diamond Stingily and Lauren Halsey. Her figures come fastidiously accessorizedd their adornments dazzlingd illuminated as if caught by a camera’s flash or the club light’s glare. Such details provide much of the easyd ineludible charm of “Essential Workers.” The first illustrationd titled Nurse 1d was completed and posted to Brown’s Instagram in April of last year. The titular figure compiles the drabd familiar medical accoutrements of pandemic time—medical visord face maskd latex gloves—alongside totems of her own choosing. Gold jewelry shines from her neck and wrists. A constellation of tattoos peeks out from under her scrubsd which sport a SpongeBob print. The allure of those door-knocker earringsd that updod those Air Maxes is tempered by a furtived tentative mood. Brown’s subjects stand in various states of heedful un-pose—one or both hands on hipsd arms folded over their fronts or hidden behind their backsd hands stuffed into pockets. Several workers arrange the instruments of their labor directly in front of or across their bodies. In Hospital Housekeeperd the woman’s hands grip the utility cart in front of herd which is loaded with a broomd Cloroxd dustersd and other cleaning supplies. Captured in semi-profiled the housekeeper’s body remains aligned with her cartd headed off to clean the next roomd then the nextd and the next. Only her head turns toward the viewerd her stare smoothly ambivalent. Lashes superbly extendedd the figure in Nurse 1 returns the viewer’s gaze from behind her face shieldd which provides both viral and symbolic protection. What’s on display is not candord nor any grand “dignifying” imperative that such projects usually entail. The composition of the twelve-by-nine-inch images further conveys distanced each woman floating in the brown space of the paper. This is a visualization of the spatial requirements of Covid-19 as well as a maneuver against any invading overfamiliarityd the abnegation inherent in identifying one’s self in the other. The portraits emphasize each worker’s individualityd doing away with any cozy liberal notion of a cohesive “us.” Despite being preceded by #MeTood which addressed women’s workplace conditions and gender pay equityd it was the pandemic and the summer protests against police brutality that forced the plight of essential workers to the fore. Representations of them have proliferatedd with murals popping up in Charlotted Chicagod and New Yorkd and platitudes “honoring” or “saluting” them have become de rigueur. Stilld material improvements like increased wages or guaranteed health care (currentlyd one out of seven essential workers lacks insurance coverage) have not yet come to pass. Their exploitation is spun into the romanticd nationalistic language of wartimed rife with heroic sacrifice and frontline serviced the disease cast as invading enemy combatant. For all the idiosyncratic vibrancy and style of Brown’s seriesd what I hope remains with viewers is the leeriness of the workersd the trepidation in their posture. May they serve as a reminder that the sacrifices have been unequal and unnecessaryd and challenge us all to deliver more than mere gratitude.
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new talent
Clifford Prince King
Untitled, 2020, photograph.
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Courtesy the artist
Clifford Prince King is a photographer based in Los Angeles.
Photo Chad Redmon/Courtesy the artist and Library Street Collective, Detroit/Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
new talent
Brown Sparrow, 2020, acrylic and oil pastel on canvas, 75½ by 71¼ inches.
Jammie Holmes Jammie Holmes is a self-taught painter based in Dallas.
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introductions
MANUEL MATHIEU
(Zapruder/313, 2016). Viewers’ first reactions might be to distrust their senses, and to question whether they’ve invented whatever latent images Mathieu has buried in his canvases. The artist makes paintings about history, memory, identity, and power. And about Haiti, almost always. He looks at his birthplace—its political history, its residual tensions, its traumatized subconscious, its self-imposed amnesia—as a prism through which he interprets the world. Mathieu was born in 1986 in Port-au-Prince, eight months after uprisings ended a violent thirtyyear dictatorship. His maternal grandfather was a colonel in Jean-Claude Duvalier’s regime; several members of his father’s family were among the tens of thousands killed under the successive reigns of Papa Doc and Baby Doc. As a teenager, Mathieu passed the time hanging out with his cousin, the artist Mario Benjamin, who makes ominous portraits of Black faces materializing from the shadows. Benjamin’s house was stuffed with catalogues and back issues of Art in America, in which Mathieu discovered some of his early artistic influences: Bacon, Tuymans, and de Kooning, whom he read about obsessively. He was charmed too by the artistes de la Grande Rue, with whom he hung out at night, as they upcycled the city’s jetsam into sculptures that explore spiritual aspects of Haitian life. Mathieu’s works spring from an archive of found photographs and JPEGs, but the source images have been annihilated through techniques like scratching, frottage, drawing, and dripping. “I use the structure of the image or subject as a reference, but I naturally drift from it,” he told me in a February phone interview. Once he’s satisfied with whatever
Zapruder/313, 2016, mixed mediums, 98½ by 118 inches.
The Haitian-born painter’s haunting works take up the history of his homeland.
PAREIDOLIA, THE BRAIN’S TENDENCY TO FIND familiar patterns or images in the visual world, wasn’t always understood as a natural cognitive function: finding a human face in the passing clouds was once considered a sign of losing your mind. Staring at the work of the Haitian-Canadian painter Manuel Mathieu, who lives and works mostly in Montreal, is often like having that instinct teased. What at first appears to be a haunting field of steamrolled, amorphous shapes resolves into images of tenderness or brutality: the melting figure of a mother clutching her child (Rempart, 2018), a man on the brink of public execution by firing squad (Numa, 2017), or President Kennedy’s head blown open across the hood of a limousine
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Courtesy Kavi Gupta, Chicago
By Connor Garel
he’s made, he mutilates it, abrading the canvas by rubbing and scraping off layers of paint, then reintroducing impastoed snarls of muted color. As a result, these figures, adrift in their anonymous settings, appear to be constantly mutating, in flux. “I only paint what changes me,” Mathieu told the Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat last year, during a public conversation in conjunction with the artist’s exhibition at the Power Plant in Toronto. What this means, I think, is that he doesn’t take his subject matter lightly. He is interested, he says, in “narrational voids” from Haiti’s revolutionary history—scenes that he renders with expressionist gestures, planting them in a zone between abstraction and figuration. Are these bodies emerging from the canvas or being erased from it? Are they calling attention to themselves or parrying our gaze? In 2015, while studying at Goldsmiths in London, Mathieu was hit by a motorbike and nearly killed. He suffered a concussion and a fractured jaw, lost his short-term memory, and had a black eye for eight months. Over time, his injuries healed, but the headaches lingered and his memory never quite snapped back. He began a series of paintings that connected the scars his body still carried with the traumas of his homeland, illuminating how history can continue to disfigure the present if we refuse to confront it. He made a monstrous portrait of Duvalier’s ex-wife, Michèle Bennett, on their $4-million wedding day (Bennett, 2018); another of a Duvalier-era prison sometimes called “Haiti’s Auschwitz” (Fort Dimanche, 2017). Cultural materialists might refer to these moments as residue, fragments of
Below left, Bennett, 2018, mixed mediums, 60 by 54 inches. Below right, Resilience—A Landscape of Desire, 2020, fabric, ink, and dust, 80 by 110 by 3 inches.
the past that loiter in the present. I think Mathieu, in his numinous way of speaking, would call them “soul wounds.” Art that depicts atrocity often risks spoiling itself with sensationalism, but Mathieu doesn’t try to transcribe reality. He paints the aftermath, interprets the feeling. He says he works in a world of sensations. “The real challenge with trauma,” he tells me, “or the mechanism of not looking at our trauma, is that we lose the tools to face it. And so the colonial agenda continues.” But trauma isn’t his only focus. When we spoke, he was preparing for an April solo show at Kavi Gupta in Chicago (another is scheduled to open at Matthew Brown in Los Angeles in June). The Chicago show’s theme, he said, is desire, and he’d have liked to name it “How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired,” after a 1989 novel by Dany Laferrière, had the author allowed it. The new title is “Negroland: A Landscape of Desire.” (The apparent reference to critic Margo Jefferson’s book Negroland: A Memoir was accidental.) He started exploring ways of articulating desire during a residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. Experimenting with scorched fabric, he ended up with Resilience: A Landscape of Desire (2020) and Ouroboros (2020), which both include large panels of cotton the artist has burnt and left tattered. “Desire is something that can be very fatal, and, at the same time, it can be very generative,” he says. “I want to talk about our ephemerality, about fucking, about cumming, about birth, about death. It’s important in our experience as Black people that we have a certain elasticity on our existence, and that it isn’t just about our survival.”
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new talent
Oak trees and whitetail deer in Abundances we tame Razed woods and ticky tacky TV dins with the fam Excess, the new convenience Tinged with work ethic shame Same teenage rage all summer Restraint, virtue or sham? Teens retreat into trees and Smoke cigarettes and claim Who’s more hardcore than hardcore
Justin Allen Justin Allen is a performer and writer based in New York.
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Bass: Justin Allen with Taja Cheek, 2020, performance at Chocolate Factory Theater. Poem by Justin Allen.
Photo Filip Wolak
More rage sprouts from ho-hum
new talent
Quay Quinn Wolf
Courtesy the artist and Jack Barrett, New York
Quay Quinn Wolf is a sculptor based in New York.
My Man’s Gone Now, 2018, velvetlined blazer, plastic jug, water, red carnations, dimensions variable.
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DIONNE LEE A photographer combines darkroom techniques with wilderness survival tactics. By Nkgopoleng Moloi
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IN HIS ESSAY “THE OCCASION FOR SPEAKING” (1960), West Indian novelist George Lamming posits that the seeds of colonization are subtly and richly infused with myths that are difficult to dislodge. Lamming was speaking of myths that haunt postcolonial writing, but his observation applies to photographer Dionne Lee’s chosen medium too. The artist explores how histories of trauma are embedded in the conventions of landscape photography. Working primarily with analog tools, she investigates dualities found in the natural world, focusing on how rural landscapes have historically been sites of both refuge and violence for Black people. Lee first noticed this duality while growing up in Harlem. In a 2020 virtual studio visit hosted by Silver Eye Center for Photography in Pittsburgh, she cites Central Park as her entry point to the natural world. But later in life, she learned that this contested geography conceals stories of the free Black American landowners who once populated Seneca Village, a community that was forcibly displaced to make room for Central Park. Lee began interrogating the racialized histories of the American landscape by means of photography in 2016, while an MFA student at the California College of the Arts. Her black-and-white A Test for Forty Acres from that year is a photograph of a patch of grassy land covered by a giant emergency blanket—the artist was aiming for forty acres—that Lee made by taping together sheets of reflective mylar. By producing this emergency blanket and then placing it on the hilly land, she pointed to an unfulfilled promise: in January 1865, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15 granted family homesteads up to forty acres to some 18,000 freed slaves in portions of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, but by that fall, President Andrew Johnson had overturned it. Lee’s choice of material was prompted by personal experience. After receiving an emergency blanket in an earthquake kit upon moving to California, the artist noticed that it both beautifully reflected the sky and evoked an image of crisis. In a virtual artist talk at the New Orleans Museum of Art, she said the gesture posed a series of questions: What do we consider an emergency? What could be reflected back to us? More recently, Lee, who is now based in Oakland and teaches at Stanford, has been making collages. She often glues together double-exposed gelatin silver prints, found images, and graphite drawings. In two related collages, North and True North (both 2019), we see the artist’s hands gesture upward—pinkies extended, thumbs touching, and the three middle fingers of each hand bent inward. This configuration, held horizontally, is a tool for navigation. If one pinkie is pointing to the end of the Big Dipper’s handle, the other should point toward true north, which differs from magnetic north in small yet fundamental ways. One is found using a tool; the other, using one’s body. In an audio track accompanying the works in “Companion Pieces: New Photography 2020,” an online exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Lee says the images are an homage to her ancestors who navigated north on the Underground Railroad. The works bespeak Lee’s interest in exploring the body’s relationship to the land, and in tools that facilitate survival in the
Courtesy the artist
introductions
Left, North, 2019, gelatin silver print collage, 14 by 11 inches. Below, Drafts, 2016, video, 7 minutes, 19 seconds. Opposite, A Test for 40 Acres, 2016, pigment print, 8 by 10 inches.
Courtesy the artist
wilderness, an ability relevant to both social history and climate change. Motivated by fear of impending ecological disaster, Lee has been learning a number of outdoor skills: how to navigate, make fires, and forage for food. During a lecture at the Rhode Island School of Design last fall,
Lee noted, “My ancestors, who were enslaved, had to be survivalists, and I’m attempting to reclaim that heritage.” In response to nearly drowning in a public pool as a child, she made her gelatin silver print A place to drown (2019) by scanning an image of a desolate swimming hole. Lee slowly dragged a found photograph across a digital flatbed, and the resulting image is a distorted view of what seems like a gaping hole, perhaps a portal for escape. Swimming is yet another survival skill that reflects histories of racial oppression. The work brings up questions of access: historically, who had the right to swim? Who had access to water? Who had the privilege to perfect the survival skill of swimming? Many of Lee’s works evoke the sublime terror we feel when faced with nature’s wondrous magnitude. Yet the artist seems to chafe at traditional landscape photographs. In her seven-minute video Drafts (2016), we see Lee’s hands at the top of the screen. Physically inserting herself into the picture this way, she refers to the ancestral traumas the landscape contains. Lee performs a sort of slow montage, creating a litany of provocations in the form of landscape images. One after another, the pictures are placed on a flat surface, slowly yet almost carelessly. Formulaic images of glaciers, layered bands of red rock, sunrises and sunsets, flowering plants, and various galaxies are punctuated by shots of dramatic natural events: volcanic eruptions, storms. The only sound is the rustling and rending of paper. Tearing, cutting, and folding these beautiful views, Lee gracefully refutes, among other things, the role photography played in the displacement of people by misleadingly depicting the American West as “pure” or “unaltered.”
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ON THE FUTURE OF THE MUSEUM
Five Black curators reflect on the challenges—and opportunities—facing art institutions.
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Opposite, fnom left: Countesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New Yonk, and Convi-Mona, London; Countesy New Museum, New Yonk/Photo Danio Lasagni
letters
The future does not belong to the whims of navel gazers. Never more than now, the future belongs to rigor. It belongs to integrity. The future is for expansiveness. The future is specificity. The future is polyphonic. The future is most fertile on the edges of the canon. The future is collectivity. The future is rest. The future is tender. The future is you.
Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, The Baltimore Museum of Art
Jennifer Packer, Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!), 2020.
JESSICA BELL BROWN
An Affirmation:
Simone Leigh, Sentinel IV, 2020.
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letters
Three artists come to mind whose practices I believe are in service of the futurefm I have been influenced by their work and have found valuable lessons, propositions, and provocations in their examplesfm
JORDAN CARTER
Considering the ethos of the 1960s Fluxus collective as a curatorial framework brings me to a premonition by one of its main protagonists, Robert Filliou (1926–1987): “This is what I suspect the art of the future will be: always on the move, never arriving, ‘l’art d’être perdu sans se perdre,’ the art of losing oneself without getting lostfm” Filliou’s self-proclaimed “poetic economy” of language and objects was fueled by a continuous dérivefm He upheld promise in precarity and advocated for productive failurefm His spirited adage and unique sensibility inform my belief in dialogue without agenda—with artists, with audiences, and with colleaguesfm Not everything needs to be prescriptive or mission drivenfm Dialogue should not solely be the by-product of an itineraryfm Some of the most productive ideas and decisions are generated in an exchange without expectationfm Indeed, Filliou has inspired in me a methodology of getting lost with purposefm The ability to embark on something without direction can lead to a profound destinationfm
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Fluxus cofounder Benjamin Patterson (1934–2016) was a “radical presence,” as curator Valerie Cassel Oliver so aptly put itfm He was the only black American figure in the profoundly interdisciplinary and international collective that blurred the boundaries between the visual and performing arts as well as art and everyday lifefm I first met him in 2013 in Wiesbaden—the site of the first official Fluxus festival in 1962—and connected with him as an experimental artist whose work rarely explicitly engaged identity politicsfm He was an artist who was black and not a “black artist”—existing in excess of his racefm However, Patterson’s refusal, erudition, and serious play—crumpling pieces of paper, releasing wind-up toy frogs, or playing an upsidedown double bass with everything but a bow—addressed his unique lived experience and place in the world in nuanced waysfm This is further demonstrated in the multichannel immersive outdoor sound installation When Elephants Fight, It Is the Frogs That Suffer—A Sonic Graffiti (2016–17), which I had the honor of stewarding into the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection in 2018, marking the museum’s first major Fluxus acquisitionfm Staging an artificial frog pond, the work’s twenty-four speakers are camouflaged in bushes and foliage, amplifying real and human-imitated frog calls with hidden political messages that operate as a material metaphor for the sonic dimension of resistance, while also providing a speculative interface for interspecies care and listeningfm Patterson’s Fluxus mischief was often a red herring for a critical examination of what it means to make noise, what it means to participate, and fundamentally what it means to be an iconoclastfm One of the operative questions he left me with is “how do you misbehave productively?” If there is one thing co-curating (with Ann Goldstein) the work of conceptual artist stanley brouwn has instilled in me, it’s carrying out an artist’s intentions with discipline, and embracing the right of refusal without compromisefm This forthcoming exhibition, which is the first United States museum presentation of brouwn’s work, will be on view at the Art Institute in spring 2023, and stands as a testament to what it means to fully realize artists’ intentions through intimate collaboration—in this case, with the artist’s estatefm Organizing a major exhibition of an artist like brouwn, who disavowed biography, written interpretation, and photographic reproduction, requires radical hospitalityfm Realizing the artist’s wishes entails creatively negotiating within institutional frameworks to encourage internal and external stakeholders and funding bodies to embrace new ways of working that defy and expand convention, habit, and protocolfm In this way, brouwn’s practice powerfully shifts the institution’s terms of engagementfm Honoring brouwn’s intentions and objectives without compromise ensures an unmitigated experience in a specific time and place between the visitor and the work, which allows brouwn’s practice to continue into the futurefm
Associate Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art, Art Institute of Chicago
The people that I come from have waded through the cold river waters of South Central Alabama and migrated upstream. They have stood hand in hand protesting the fraught ideologies of this country. But still, many have yet to walk up the stairs and through the doors of the “cultural” institutions that continue to uphold outdated systems that inherently keep Black Americans on the outside. We belong here—our stories, histories, and bodies—and not as the result of a diversity hire or a long-term loan. Our contributions to this world should not live within those limitations—so why should we? Maybe one day we will live in a world where “task forces” don’t need to be implemented among corporations, schools, and law enforcement to combat systemic racism. Hundreds of years of struggle for equality cannot simply be undone and mended in a few group meetings. It will take time, but the work desperately needs to be done in earnest. It will begin when people realize that they don’t have to assign a specific value to someone’s life to treat them with respect. Black people and our histories deserve to live in the world without being contingent on meeting some particular criteria. Moving forward, I offer these words from Jamaican American poet, essayist, teacher, and activist June Jordan: Take me into the museum and show me myself, show me my people, show me soul America. If you cannot show me myself, if you cannot teach my people what they need to know – and they need to know the truth, and they need to know that nothing is more important than human life – if you cannot show and teach these things, then why shouldn’t I attack the temples of America and blow them up? As Jordan reminds us, we must always consider the history and learn from it. You can’t fix what you don’t know is broken. Collectively, we must know our people’s history. But we must also know ourselves as individuals—know what you need and even don’t need, know the people and places that will guide you through this world when nothing else can. Most importantly, know the stories that you intend to tell and position yourself to see them through. I’ve known since high school that curating stories was what I wanted to deeply invest in. I’ve made sure to show up and be present where I could lend my voice and knowledge. Both my curatorial and personal interests in the everyday lives of Black Americans have led me to curate the exhibition “This Is the Day: Reckoning and Rejoice,” which is on view at the Crystal Bridges Museum through August 16.
JAYSON OVERBY JR.
Keep on Moving
The show focuses on Black churches in the United States. Since emancipation and even in the present day, these places of worship have been bombed, burned, and terrorized. Wedged in between joy and sorrow, I’m reminded of a conversation I had with photographer Azikiwe Mohammed, who has work in the show and echoed the idea that our people have stayed in the same areas for generations. We have built families, communities, and even historical Black colleges and universities out of concern for our own safety. Throughout the show, these very concerns are considered. It reminds me how, and why, we’ve been able to “weather the storm.” Though I know our bodies have felt it all, I know just as well that this Black body gives us joy. And still, you and I know that we just can’t be easily moved—shaken maybe, but not moved. Given the history of this country, a safe future for Black folks feels so distant but still tangible. Despite a global pandemic and ongoing racial injustices, rural towns and major cities alike continue to persist onward. To those to whom it applies: stay Black, stay vigilant, stay hopeful, and be sure to pass it on to others.
Curatorial Assistant, Contemporary Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
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Toward an Expansive Space Museums have always been spaces that activate possibility. Wandering the halls of the Met or the Museum of Natural History as a child, my imagination expanded and I was inspired to write short stories, and to prod my family with a barrage of questions about how sculptures were made and what a triceratops might have sounded like. Museums are places that I felt a strong connection to. While I am grateful to be able to have a career in this field, in this moment, deeply caring about museums gives me the responsibility to recognize that they can operate as better, more inclusive spaces. Over the past year, through the combination of collective grief for lives lost in the pandemic and the suspension of our understanding of normalcy, looking to the future has taken on greater importance. In order for there to be a future that involves true, active, and sustainable change in the museum and the art industry at large, we need to act with radical honesty. We have to interrogate what it means to fundamentally shift how we curate exhibitions, who we invite to sit on boards, and how we welcome visitors into our spaces. Moving into the future necessitates an evaluation of the past to determine what has helped and what has hindered our ability to be the best in our fields. It is not enough to hire staff who traditionally were not given opportunities within the museum sector, without also providing resources and institutional support for these hires to actually create lasting change. We need to face the truth of what museums have come to be, spaces that often operate outside
ADEZE WILFORD
the realm of inclusivity, and to discern how we will take steps to make them worthy
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of the works on these walls, by including all those who seek to be enriched by them. I want curators not to feel constrained by institutional revenue needs. I want artists to be supported with resources, both financial and intellectual. I want museums to be spaces that actively engage the communities they are situated in and that reach out to communities currently alienated by these cultural institutions. I want a future where the rehanging of collections is not revelatory but commonplace as we grow and evolve. I want a future where museums aren’t neutral, where they go beyond acknowledgments in recognizing the land they occupy. All these things and more are possible but require decisions to actively stop working in ways that are mired in the past. It is not easy work, and in the face of budget cuts and building closures that have gone on for months, change can seem like a daunting proposition. Yet, I am inspired by colleagues who have taken on the challenges of this moment, and I am hopeful that this version of museums is not one that will remain imagined, but that will instead be realized in a near future rather than a distant one.
Assistant Curator, The Shed
—Aimé Césai-e, Discourse on Colonialism, 1955¹ Dea- Moses, I didn’t set out to w-ite this—o- anything, fo- that matte-. On being asked to w-ite about the futu-e of the museum, I fi-st thought the museum al-eady knows its futu-e—to die. To butt-ess this line of thinking, I figu-ed it best to simply send an exce-pt f-om poet and activist Aimé Césai-e’s 1955 essay “Discou-se on Colonialism.” That passage now se-ves as a p-ologue to this much la-ge- exposition. Césai-e spoke pointedly about the futu-e: “all things conside-ed, it would have been bette- not to have needed them. . . . the museum by itself is nothing.” I couldn’t have said it bette-. Even this effo-t at contextualization feels highfalutin—a hackneyed addition to the intellectual indust-ial complex aimed at finding a way out of this valley of d-y bones. We don’t need mo-e wo-ds. We need an inwa-d -eflection on what schola- and A.i.A. cont-ibuto- Ch-istina Sha-pe noted: “the past that is not past.” We need a -etu-n navigated not exclusively with wo-ds, but with ou- bodies seeing as “t-auma is also a wo-dless sto-y ou- body tells itself.”² But, as st-ess weathe-s my body, the task of extolling a futu-e fo- the museum becomes a -eminde- of “the impossible possibilities faced by . . . Black people.”³ We a-e tasked with futu-ing—only to be left out of that futu-e. Such is the unce-tainty of the futu-e fo- Black life that we a-e still decla-ing, in the p-esent, that ou- lives simply matte-. I often sit with and fight against Césai-e’s wo-ds, all the while agitating day in and day out within a museum, committed to eking out a futu-e that does not -ealize his indictment. It pains me that Césai-e might be -ight—that time, toil, and tole-ance may not undo this mutating violence. My wo-ds cannot eclipse his cha-ge against the museum, let alone offe- a counte--na--ative to cou-se-co--ect the inevitable. To do so would be foolha-dy. Even my body—st-essed beyond -ecognition—is fast becoming a telltale sign of the “dead and scatte-ed pa-ts” that -oil Césai-e. In many ways, even a half centu-y afte- his wo-ds we-e o-iginally penned, I cannot unfeel the dead, the t-uth. In the last yea-, I have sensed that segments of society want the museum to do mo-e than just display a-t objects, stage pe-fo-mances, and host talks about social justice. If it’s not a call fo- the -estitution of stolen objects o- fo- mo-ally de-elict boa-d membe-s to step down, it’s the call to hand the museum space ove- to house those without homes o- tu-n its -estau-ant into a food kitchen fo- a sho-t time.4 These behests call into question how the museum goes about -ealizing its mission, especially when that mission is tied to the uplift of less fo-tunate people. Inc-easingly, it seems, upholding this activistadjacent mission diminishes the impo-tance of the a-tist and the a-t object. If so, this st-ategy of aesthetic obsolescence is complicated by the fact that a-tists, fo- the most pa-t, exist in a state of p-eca-ity—feve-ishly hustling until the a-t ma-ket and/o- institutional endo-sements can stabilize thei- livelihood. I wonde-, then, if the calls fo- the museum to step up on the political and economic f-onts a-e simply a by-p-oduct of the gove-nment squande-ing tax -evenues that might othe-wise aid social se-vices. In Los Angeles, fo- example, as the numbe- of unhoused people soa-ed to 66,000 in 2020 and as the mayo-, city council, public agencies, and nonp-ofit o-ganizations appea-ed at sixes and sevens in -emedying this -ise, the museum became a sitting duck of so-ts.5 In some ways the -ebuke feels apt, given the stasis the museum finds itself in time and again. This loop the loop sees the museum -ise, stand up-ight, and then me-ely speak about t-agedy.6 But mobility has neve- been an issue fo- anti-Black t-agedy—it moves with -eckless abandon. What’s -eally at stake is the speech act: the emancipato-y -heto-ic that swi-ls th-ough mission statements, exhibition desc-iptions, and catalogue essays suggests that, by now, we should at least be in a better place.7 Only time will tell whethe- the museum, th-ough its va-ied platfo-ms, finally speaks genuinely and effectively—-athe- than playacts—in -esponse to these calls.
IKECHÚKWÚ ONYEWUENYI
And the museums of which M. Caillois is so p-oud, not fo- one minute does it c-oss his mind that, all things conside-ed, it would have been bette- not to have needed them; that Eu-ope would have done bette- to tole-ate the non-Eu-opean civilizations at its side, leaving them alive, dynamic and p-ospe-ous, whole and not mutilated; that it would have been bette- to let them develop and fulfill themselves than to p-esent fo- ou- admi-ation, duly labelled, thei- dead and scatte-ed pa-ts; that anyway, the museum by itself is nothing; that it means nothing, that it can say nothing, when smug self-satisfaction -ots the eyes, when a sec-et contempt fo- othe-s withe-s the hea-t, when -acism, admitted onot, d-ies up sympathy; that it means nothing if its only pu-pose is to feed the delights of vanity; that afte- all, the honest contempo-a-y of Saint Louis, who fought Islam but -espected it, had a bette- chance of knowing it than do oucontempo-a-ies (even if they have a smatte-ing of ethnog-aphic lite-atu-e), who despise it.
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I ponder all this not in the abstract, but as my MacBook Pro has given out on me while I try to write. I’ve had this laptop through two graduate programs. It has now died due to the strenuous, work-from-home demands that it never signed up for. I write this knowing of colleagues whose laptops have also called it quits. I write this worried that I, too, will have to go into debt or ask my family to buy a new laptop. Either option is a form of debt, really, because it is an ask I know my parents would oblige, despite the fact that they need to save for their nearing retirement. I write this knowing the museum I work for can only offer me a one-time $100 technology rebate. I write as request after request for an Internet stipend go unanswered, which I imagine is buried under far more pressing institutional matters. I write as I reckon with the fact that my salary in Los Angeles County falls below the low-income limit determined by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. I write knowing that I am privileged to have a job, as many Americans find themselves filing for unemployment compensation during this pandemic. I write this appreciative that my director has kept the museum afloat and all our staff employed. As I aimlessly chase deadlines, I’ll admit this text has been one of the easier things to write thus far. Perhaps it’s the weight of the reckoning—how it too has reached a deadline, which is to say a reminder of the finitude of life, a demarcation of living, a breach where death is the only answer. In these moments of reckoning, I’m left wondering what is it that I have to say, in this present that leans toward the future, other than expressing my own role in it. My position is not to right this debt, collect on it, or even acknowledge its prejudice. Rather than repeat platitudes about what the museum will be in some indeterminate future, I turn again to a particular Black past in the words of Césaire, as a way to completely overturn an all too familiar Black present where the museum, gaffe after gaffe, “can say nothing” intelligible other than we are listening, we are learning.9 The latter refrain intimates guilt. I’m often told that things have improved, that change takes time, and that it’s best to keep doing the work to get a livable wage. Truth be told, the guilt-inducing statement “work hard” fast-tracks my death, weathers my body. This is the searing reality of allostasis. It is a reminder too, for these lineages of wear and tear aren’t always perceptible, at times forgotten in the folds of life and death, love and loss. Drawing on scholar Katherine McKittrick, I see allostasis as “the physiological work of black liberation,” the labor that is often “impossible to track and capture with precision” unless death is the metric.10 I’m reminded of critic and A.i.A. contributor Jessica Lynne’s grave words on allostasis.11 She invoked three forebears who all succumbed to cancer. My brother succumbed to cancer. This is a past that is not the past—one that another forebear, Audre Lorde, also succumbed to. In The Cancer Journals, Lorde noted that the “guilt trip . . . does nothing to encourage the mobilization of our psychic defenses against the very real forms of death that surround us.”12 The guilt Lorde speaks of while battling cancer stems from questioning whether working hard against a violent system has compromised her capacity to cultivate happiness.13 Laughter is never far from heartache for Black folks, which is to say that we have a way of “integrat[ing] death into living, neither ignoring it nor giving in to it.”14 I’m not dead yet. But I’m decaying, as an autoimmune condition slowly lays waste to my body. Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani offers an incisive theory on decay, which I see informing conceptions of the museum as a biopolitical factory of expropriation and exploitation. Negarestani sees decay as “positioning itself on the substratum of survival, in order to indefinitely postpone death and absolute disappearance. In decay, the being survives by blurring into other beings, without losing all its ontological registers. In no way does decay wipe out or terminate; on the contrary it keeps alive.”15 Elsewhere, Negarestani builds on this, adding that “the process of decay builds new states of extensity, affect, magnitude, and even integrity from and out of a system or formation without nullifying or reforming it.”16 I’ve latched on to decay as a way to think through the weathering bodies that toil within the museum. At a push, what if we saw the museum as a catchment area of putrefying bodies that keeps the enterprise alive? These fungible bodies—willing workers wasting away—don’t ever disappear, for there’s always a new, eager, unpaid intern saddled with debt from a master’s degree, waiting in the wings, ready to embrace “a dead end for a vision.”17 It is our zeal for a just world that keeps the future of the museum on everyone’s minds. At the same time, affect alone cannot reform the present state of the museum.
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Insert: Courtesy Jenkins Johnson Gallery, New York/San Francisco.
IKECHÚKWÚ ONYEWUENYI
Whatever is fueling these calls, though, I want to note that the public demands above also would affect an overlooked polity—a committed cadre of workers who sustain the museum, while living paycheck to paycheck, existing on the cusp of being unhoused if they lose their employment. If these added initiatives—e.g., soup kitchen, shelter—fall on existing museum staff, what becomes of our bodies, already under duress?8 What becomes of our salaries, already deficient as the cost of living skyrockets across metropolitan areas? Or if new staff are brought in to shepherd these humanitarian efforts, are they similarly compensated with insufferable wages that strain their bodies? Leaping from frying pan to fire mustn’t be the answer.
When I talk about change, I’m not talking about change within the context of the American vocabulary. I’m talking about something which happens in any case, whether someone wants it or not. Change is simply another challenge to deal with the present and to create the future. After all, from my point of view, my ancestors are responsible, in a sense, for me. That means we’re responsible for our children.18
As society shifts, museums remain fixed. The rank irresponsibility of the museum is there for all to see. A colleague shared that in 1999 at the Seattle Art Museum her salary as a curatorial associate was $33,000—the equivalent of $52,000 today when one factors in inflation. Sadly, there are curatorial fellows and assistants—e.g., Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, Brooklyn Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, and Denver Art Museum, to name a few—that still offer starting salaries in this ballpark of $33,000 or less in 2021.19 I see these stagnant wages as an act of irresponsibility toward the budding Black and brown graduate students and/or young professionals enticed through the museums’ diversity and inclusion initiatives. Instead of peddling a fantasy of purported equity, I offer these deeply personal words as a type of “frank speaking,” which, according to Michel Foucault, “demands the courage to speak the truth in spite of some danger.”20 And while this retelling of my “personal relationship to truth” comes with great personal and professional risk, I speak as an act of responsibility and out of a “duty to improve or help other people (as well as [my]self).” Foucault went on to say that “in its extreme form, telling the truth takes place in the ‘game’ of life or death.”21 However, this isn’t a game. And it never has been for the tireless workers who make unlivable wages. So, if the museum continues as is, it is safe to say that we do not care for people, for posterity. We are irresponsible. And what comes to those devil-may-care institutions? Death. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), p. 71. While I’m thinking directly with Christina Sharpe’s method of encountering a past that is not past, the turn to the body as way of reckoning with “the past” also engages the work of therapist and trauma specialist Resmaa Menakem. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Durham, Duke University Press, 2016, p. 105; Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, Las Vegas, Central Recovery Press, 2017. 3 Sharpe, ibid. 4 Ariella Azoulay offered several eye-opening calls, such as “imagin[ing] museum workers going on strike until they are allowed to invite an entire community of ‘undocumented people’ not to attend the opening of exhibitions of objects extracted from their communities, but to stay for a period of several years to help the museum make sense of its collections of objects from their cultures.” Ariella Azoulay, “Imagine Going on Strike: Museum Workers and Historians,” e-flux journal 104, November 2019, e-flux.com. 5 Steve Lopez, “For both the housed and unhoused in this Hollywood neighborhood, help is urgently needed,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 20, 2021, latimes.com. 6 This is a nod to Giorgio Agamben referencing ancient Greek theater in his explication of stasis as a type of civil war. Giorgio Agamben, Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm, trans. Nicholas Heron, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2015, pp. 13–14. 7 Better—and not just for the odd individual here and there but for the entire Black community—borders on impossible. I think here of Calvin Warren’s utterance that “it is impossible to emancipate blacks without literally destroying the world.” Calvin Warren, “Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope,” CR: The New Centennial Review 15, no. 1, 2015, p. 239. 8 Highlighting this bodily strain is key to Calvin Warren’s notion that any “end of the world” account must acknowledge “that pulverized black bodies sustain the world—its institutions, economic systems, environment, theologies, philosophies, and so forth.” Pummeling the body to death will not end the world, for Georges Bataille reminds us that “life is always a product of the decomposition of life.” See Warren, “Black Nihilism,” p. 239; Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood, San Francisco, City Light Books, 1986, p. 55. 9 This idea of overturning the present draws from Fred Moten: “the project of black radicalism . . . is not about debt collection or reparation. It’s about a complete overturning – again, as Fanon would say, and others have said.” Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, Brooklyn, Minor Compositions, 2013, p. 151. 10 Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories, Durham: Duke University Press, 2021, p. 3. 11 Jessica Lynne, “Allostasis,” Open Space, Feb. 27, 2017, openspace.sfmoma.org. 12 Audre Lorde, The Audre Lorde Compendium: Essays, Speeches and Journals, London, Pandora, 1996, p. 59. 13 Ibid., p. 60. 14 Ibid., p. 7. 15 Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, Melbourne, re.press, 2008, p. 182. 16 Reza Negarestani, “Undercover Softness: An Introduction to the Architecture and Politics of Decay,” iCOLLAPSE VI: Geo/Philosophy, ed. Robin Mackay, Falmouth, Urbanomic, 2010, p. 386. 17 Brian Kuan Wood, “Is it Heavy or Is it Light?,” e-flux journal 61, January 2015, e-flux.com. 18 Louisiana Public Broadcasting, “Author James Baldwin | Folks (1986),” Feb. 3, 2021, video, 28:21, youtube.com. 19 A spreadsheet anonymously compiled by institutional workers archives the starting salaries of curatorial assistants and others: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14_cn3afoas7NhKvHWaFKqQGkaZS5rvL6DFxzGqXQa6o/ edit#gid=725011404 20 Michel Foucault, “The Meaning and Evolution of the Word Parrhesia,” Discourse and Truth: Tthe Problematization of Parrhesia – Six Lectures given by Michel Foucault at the University of California at Berkeley, Oct.–Nov. 1983; accessed Jan. 27, 2021, parrhesia.en. 21 Ibid. 1
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IKECHÚKWÚ ONYEWUENYI
This is perhaps why I wrote this screed—and it is a screed, since I’m not saying anything new, my words bordering on tedium. But, like Césaire’s passage, it’s a repetition aimed at responsibility. In a 1986 episode of Folks on Louisiana Public Broadcasting, another forebear, James Baldwin, said this of the future:
Curatorial Assistant, Hammer Museum
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introductions
Calling attention to neglected artworks, the painter explores how museums have represented Black figures. By Precious Adesina
WHEN NEW YORK–BASED ARTIST ESTEBAN Jefferson first visited the Petit Palais in Paris, in 2014, it was neither the nineteenth-century French paintings nor the Etruscan vases that caught his eye, but two mysterious portrait busts of anonymous Black figures placed behind the information and ticket desk. While most of the other artworks on display at the museum were accompanied by extensively researched wall texts, these sculptures, carved from polychrome marble, had no attribution and were simply labeled “Buste d’Africain.” “I shot a photo of one of them, came back to America, and thought about the image for a long time,” Jefferson tells me. This photograph, along with others he took during subsequent visits to the museum in 2018 and 2019, serves as the basis for his ongoing body of work, “Petit Palais.” Comprising paintings and a video installation, the series, which Jefferson began while pursuing his MFA at Columbia University, was the focus of recent exhibitions at New York’s White Columns, in late 2019,
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Above right, Café, 2020, oil on linen, 42 by 60 inches.
and at Tanya Leighton in Berlin in 2020. For Jefferson, the “Petit Palais” paintings marked a turning point in his practice. “In all the paintings I made before going back to school and when I was working as an artist’s assistant, I painted every square inch of the canvas,” he says. “It got to a point where it was so laborious that it felt pointless.” In these works, by contrast, he is more selective and considered, typically rendering the busts in exacting detail while leaving the rest of the scenes almost unfinished. In Gratuité (2019), for instance, Jefferson’s treatment of the dark marble bust—a woman with piercing white eyes and a pale peach headwrap—is precise and unambiguous, contrasting with the sketch-like depiction of the sculpture’s surroundings, including a disengaged worker at the ticket desk, vaguely outlined in light washes of color. “It has a punk-ness to it,” Jefferson says of his series. “I like the idea of refusing to paint in everything and only focusing on the part that deserves labor.” The “Petit Palais” series questions the representation of Black people in Western museums. Works like these sculptures “are put in this position where they’re half art, but half not-art,” Jefferson says, on display in the museum but not given space in the galleries or contextualized in wall labels or catalogues. Passersby show little interest in the busts, and the museum has
Illustration by Kylie Akia from a photo by Dean Majd
ESTEBAN JEFFERSON
Below, Gratuité, 2019, oil on linen, 42 by 60 inches.
All arbwork courbesy Tanya Leighbon, Berlin
Bottom, Flâneuse, 2020, oil on linen, 66 by 84 inches.
foobage of Jefferson burning bhe pages of bhe museum’s informabion bookleb againsb foobage of bhe sculpbures being ignored by obher visibors, displayed on bwo sbacked monibors. “Ib would be shocking bo me if someone saw bhe enbire ‘Pebib Palais’ series and didn’b undersband whab bhe issue is,” he says, bhough he believes ib’s imporbanb bo leave bhe painbings open bo inberprebabion. “I don’b wanb bhe work bo come off as overbly polibical. I bhink bhere’s a lob of nuance bo ib.” For an upcoming projecb commissioned by The Shed in New York, scheduled bo open bhis summer, Jefferson is planning bo creabe a group of new large-scale painbings dedicabed bo his friend Devra Freelander, a Brooklyn-based arbisb who died in a 2019 braffic accidenb while bicycling; bhe works will depicb bhe makeshifb sbreeb memorial creabed and mainbained by Freelander’s family and friends ab bhe sibe of bhe accidenb as bhe bribube evolves over bhe course of a year. As wibh bhe busbs ab bhe Pebib Palais, he is debermined nob bo leb ib fade inbo bhe background.
pub libble efforb inbo idenbifying bhem. Though bhe insbibubion breabs bhem wibh indifference, Jefferson considers bhe busbs, bhoughb bo have been made in sevenbeenbh-cenbury Venice and donabed by a collecbor in bhe 1940s, bhe mosb nobeworbhy works of arb in bhe Pebib Palais. “They sband oub from everybhing in bhe museum and bhab’s whab made bhe breabmenb of bhem seem so sbrange bo me,” he says. Jefferson sees himself as a documenbarian rabher bhan a commenbabor. “I obviously have my own posibion on how I feel aboub bhe work bub I’ve also bried bo approach ib in a journalisbic way,” he says. “I always have a camera wibh me. I shoob a lob of film, and bhen geb bhe rolls back and go bhrough everybhing. Ib’s nice bo look bhrough bhem and find bhings I hadn’b nobiced before.” He breabs bhese phobographs as sbudies for bhe painbings, albering bhem in Phoboshop bo work oub bhe ideal composibion. Several painbings from bhe series depicb visibors engaging in mundane basks around bhe busbs, based on scenes Jefferson wibnessed ab bhe museum. In Tarifs Réduits (2020), for example, we see abbendees gabhering around bhe bickeb desk bo pay, while Flâneuse (2020) shows a woman sbaring ab her phone, ignoring bhe adjacenb sculpbure. The video insballabion Petit Palais (2019), which accompanied bhe painbings in bhe Whibe Columns and Tanya Leighbon exhibibions, juxbaposes
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new talent
Miles Greenberg Miles Greenberg is a performance artist based between New York and Paris.
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Courtesy the artist
Untitled Self-Portrait (23 February), 2021, inkjet and archival ink on paper.
Photo Brian Kovach; Courtesy the artist
new talent
See God in the Mirror, 2020, Jacquard weave tapestry, glass seed beads, 4 by 6 feet.
Qualeasha Wood Qualeasha Woox is an artist who works primarily with textiles. She is basex in Detroit.
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orientations
THE NEW ALTERNATIVES Artists are developing online education programs that don’t replace art school but supplement it with experimental, more equitable forms of pedagogy.
A Dark Study lecture and workshop on “Capitalism and Horror” for Cooper Union advanced painting students.
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Courtesy Dark Study
by Jessica Lynne
Courtesy Dark Study
FIRST AS STUDENTS, THEN AS TEACHERS,
Caitlin Cherry and Nicole Maloof witnessed how art schools promote an MFA-to-gallery pipeline that prioritizes homogeneity and leaves too many behind, burdened with student debt. The absurd cost of a graduate education in art deters entire demographic groups from even applying. After the onset of the coronavirus, in-person learning halted and an already precarious job market for adjunct instructors collapsed. It became clear to Cherry and Maloof that something other than the status quo was needed to imbue the new online learning environment with care, to mitigate the new stresses of pandemic life. Cherry was in an economics study group led by Maloof last spring when they began to develop these ideas. The alternative school they imagined would pursue experimental pedagogy and operate beyond the parameters of the university. It would treat virtual study as an asset and embrace collaboration across perspectives and backgrounds as an organizing principle of intellectual inquiry. They called their new project Dark Study. Alternative art education is not a new concept. From Black Mountain College in North Carolina, which ran from 1933 to 1957, to the Àsìkò International Art Programme, organized by the late curator Bisi Silva in Nigeria in the early 2010s, a number of learning environments have worked to decentralize and democratize higher art education. Today, a host of new initiatives seek to redefine the alternative, propelled in part by the ubiquity of online communication during Covid-19, but also motivated by a need to address the art world’s inequities. Like Black Mountain, Dark Study prioritizes interdisciplinarity. As at Àsìkò, the program is structured around intense, intimate conversations. But unlike these two predecessors, Dark Study revels in the absence of studios, which is not just a necessary condition of the times but a signal of the distance from a university approach. Cherry and Maloof are both deeply imaginative artists with the ability to excite. When they describe Dark Study as working to exist beyond the neoliberal framework of higher education, I believe them. Their critique, informed by personal
Francheska Alcántara (top left) leading a discussion on Martha Rosler’s “Culture Class, Part III: In the Service of Experience(s)” during a Divergent I class, with participants (left to right, top to bottom): Alcántara, Caitlin Cherry, Chantal Feitosa, Anthony R. Green, Vanessa Leiva Santos, Lela Welch, A.K. Jenkins, Xingzi Gu, and Sister Savage.
experience, is firm; the pleasure they get from their own brainstorming is palpable. The program welcomes artists whether or not they are currently enrolled in MFA programs. Accepted students can participate in one of two tracks. One involves a course of study with either Cherry or Maloof. Divergent I, moderated by Cherry, asks how artists can navigate the world with progressive politics intact. Maloof facilitates Art for Whom?, which proposes that critical analysis of art must always take into account the social conditions from which the work emerges: there is no such thing as art for art’s sake. The second track is an advisory program that pairs a student with one of five mentors, and includes participation in one course. The program is free of charge to accepted students. In order to pay current and future mentors, Cherry and Maloof fundraise via GoFundMe and Patreon, but they do not take a salary as facilitators. “We really took into great consideration people’s experiences,” Maloof says. “We read through so many essays and then found our initial cohort. Maybe even that is somewhat alternative. Most institutions don’t change or adapt to the student body and oftentimes replicate the inequity that organizes our entire society.” Cherry and Maloof know the university is not neutral. The imbalances of access and
resources present in the world do not simply dissipate. So, ever mindful of the power dynamic implicit in the classroom, Dark Study refuses to embrace a single intellectual authority. The program is informed instead by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s notion of true study occurring when people understand themselves alongside one another rather than hierarchically. Cherry and Maloof argue that the online environment enhances this mode of relation. For them, the alternative resides in this elasticity and agility, a program without grades or a master who bestows wisdom upon his students. It is an ambitious and righteous mission, and one that I hope is well received by artists frustrated by the way “school” has been done for so long. But does the assertion of an “alternative” indicate a proximity to a conventional apparatus? Is it possible not to be entangled within the university? IF DARK STUDY ADVOCATES FOR a necessary distance away from the ivory tower, the collective Dark Matter University (DMU) strives to provide a new model for anti-racist design education and practice, a revisionist effort both within and outside traditional institutions. Its roster of educators comprises architects and designers
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orientations Left, Dark Study directors Nicole Maloof (left) and Caitlin Cherry (right).
of color including Ifeoma Ebo, Quilian Riano, Jennifer Low, Tonia Sing Chi, Curry Hackett, Jerome Haferd, and Justin Garrett Moore. DMU emerged in the summer of 2020, as waves of protests unfolded throughout the US in response to the ongoing state-sanctioned violence against Black people and other people of color. In a recent presentation organized by the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, DMU collective member Lisa Henry cited the Design as Protest collective— another anti-racist coalition—as “critical to the development” of DMU, bringing colleagues into closer communication around matters of “design justice, racial justice, and creating a better built environment for everyone to live in.” DMU rightfully asserts that interventions aimed at fostering social justice are incomplete without attention to the landscapes and spatial politics of the built environments that structure our lives. Covid-19 has allowed likeminded colleagues from all over to join the collective and collaborate in a more focused way. There are opportunities to participate across three working groups that operate in concert to build DMU: People, which handles network expansion and in-network mentorship efforts; Content, which develops coursework; and Opportunity, which focuses on grant writing and funding efforts. The most public component of DMU’s mission is the curriculum. The group forges partnerships with universities to offer inter-institutional courses designed and taught by members of the collective.
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Courtesy Dark Study
melow, two stills from a presentation on “Community Futurism” by Divergent I participants Áyan Ortega and Axe Binodo.
Courtesy The Alternative Art School
This spring’s offerings include Foundations of Design Justice, a seminar to be presented jointly by Florida A&M University and the University of Utah, as well as the University of Michigan and the University of Buffalo. Another course on Black and Indigenous design methods will be presented by Howard and Yale universities. In each instance, students from both institutions will study together in online classes. DMU requires a greater investment in navigating university bureaucracy to realize its programs than Dark Study does. This makes its position precarious, as higher education is conservative and rarely, if ever, interested in the destabilization of power structures. Though differing in methodology and scale, Dark Study and DMU insist on addressing the harms perpetuated by the higher education system against Black, Native, and other people of color, as well as disabled, queer, trans, and poor students. The alternatives they offer attempt to alleviate this harm by building a network of mentorship and care and, in the case of DMU, a muchneeded hedge inside the university itself. PHILADELPHIA CONTEMPORARY director Nato Thompson’s The Alternative Art School (TAAS) isn’t centered around a critique of art school. Instead, it builds on the connectivity of the global art community that took shape decades before Covid-19 and now exists online, rather than at biennials and in-person conferences. The school’s tagline—“Artists around the world teaching artists around the world”—reads like copy you’d find in a college brochure. At TAAS, students can learn from notable artists like Tania Bruguera and Mark Dion. The format is less horizontal than what Dark Study aspires to: courses are classified as intensives, master classes, seminars, and studios. Course instructors also conduct office hours. Students can participate in up to three courses, and pay corresponding tuition. In the first quarter of 2021, TAAS offered a course on Black and Indigenous art in Brazil led by Kenneth Bailey, cofounder of the Design Studio for Social Intervention, and artist Tiago Gualberto; a two-week intensive on making art that engages environmental catastrophe with Dion; and a course on art as an agent of social change taught by Bruguera, whose home in Havana is under police surveillance. In the second quarter, starting in May, Thompson himself is leading a course that invites arts administrators to tell students about the complexities of the global art world. Artists Yael Bartana and Daniel Meir will
An instvuctov meeting of The Altevnative Avt School, showing (left to vight, top to bottom): Tiago Gualberto, Nato Thompson, Mark Dion, Miguel López, Mel Chin, Mia Yu, Janine Antoni, Vashti DuBois, and Kenneth Bailey.
The horizon of art education’s future doesn’t appear to have any single endpoint. present a moving-image workshop based on their individual practices, and Vashti DuBois and curator Michael Clemmons’s seminar will focus on the history of The Colored Girls Museum, founded by DuBois in Philadelphia. The professional network affiliated with TAAS is surely robust enough to spur the creation of something capable of intriguing students. And Thompson is clearly aware of racism, sexism, ableism, classism, and other systemic inequities that shape the art world. But the school’s structure doesn’t seem to refute the hierarchies of the art world, and somehow, I am still left asking how alternative this school really is. Online education isn’t new, but the pandemic has brought some of its advantages to the fore, like the increased scheduling flexibility that comes when people no longer need be physically in place. But digital media in itself doesn’t signal a radical reorientation; indeed, most online degree programs
have accelerated the standardization of learning with little sensitivity to students’ diverse needs. How, then, do we determine if the outcomes of experimental online art courses match their ambitions? Maloof suggests a set of aligned questions. “What is it that we want to accomplish? What are the stakes involved, and can we do something that is truly meaningful for people who need it?” she asks. “I am always thinking big picture like that, relying on my own personal experiences to assure that I make the best decision I can, that we are going to do OK.” The horizon of art education’s future doesn’t appear to have any single endpoint. For some, futurity is situated in acts of refusal; for others, in an embedded revision. Learners must determine where in that range they choose to plant their stakes. One thing is certain: they will have more choices in the future than they did yesterday.
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introductions
KARIMAH ASHADU
is an “intuitive” medium for her recurring motifs: corporeality, worw, and colonialism. One might be tempted to label her videos “documentaries,” since she shoots mostly unstaged scenes. But her interdisciplinary bacwground encourages her to tawe liberties with the medium’s conventions, and her use of color and appreciation of form is deft and painterly. To create King of Boys (Abattoir of Makoko), 2015, one of four Ashadu films recently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New Yorw, she placed her camera in a translucent red beer weg, creating an analog filter. The mundane butchery scenes—the hacwing at bone, the cleaning of offal and boiling of swins, the strewn-aside heads and horns—are engulfed in blood red. Only some worws contain spowen language, though a resonant narrative imbues them all. Describing a piece she recently filmed in Nigeria, Ashadu noted how her use of tight shots accentuated the beauty of laboring bodies in motion. She used the same technique in her nonnarrative two-channel video Power Man (2018), along with sparse lighting that striwingly illuminates two men’s darw-swinned musculature and fast-paced movements on a split screen. The repetitive sounds of an axe chopping wood accompanies the action on one screen, and the sharp exhalations of a glistening shadow boxer the other: the two channels contrast and
Below, Flight, 2020, two Porsche windscreens and fake brass, 24¾ by 53½ inches each. Bottom, King of Boys (Abattoir of Makoko), 2015, video, 5 minutes.
A filmmaker honors the everyday labor of African workers.
ANYTHING CAN SERVE AS A SUPPORT FOR Karimah Ashadu’s camera. The artist and filmmawer attaches her device to bodies and machines, granting viewers unconventional perspectives. Most of her shorts depict African laborers. The nine-minute Lagos Sand Merchants (2013) is shot from the strictly limited vantage point of machinery that advances in a Ferris-wheelliwe motion. We’re disoriented as we watch the otherwise rhythmic and monotonous labor of the worwers unearthing sand from the Lagos State Lagoon—sand that will be sold and made into bricws. Born in London, Ashadu was raised in Lagos and is now based in Hamburg. When we spowe via Zoom, she was in Paris, where she’s a fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination. Ashadu moves between cities and artistic mediums with equal fluidity. Initially trained as a painter, she became interested in performance and video. More recently, she’s tawen up sculpture. While a graduate student at the Chelsea College of Arts in London, she discovered that film
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Photo Fred Dott/Courtesy the artist (2)
By Zoé Samudzi
Courtesy the artist (2)
complement the physical dexterity of their subjects. Though Ashadu’s work is often seen in European contexts as a statement on big issues like race and labor, she thinks of it, first and foremost, as simply “elevating the everyday.” One channel in Red Gold (2016) shows palm oil farmers in western Nigeria, and the other shows Mr. Sesan, the prince from whom they lease their land. The film, which will be on view as part of her solo show at the Secession in Vienna this summer, is a story of abandonment and self-sufficiency: the farmers pride themselves on making a living without state support even as they lament governmental neglect. Ashadu refuses to be an interlocutor, instead affording the different African workers the opportunity for first-person storytelling. Brown Goods (2020), her first film shot in Europe, centers on the narrator, Emeka, an Igbo Nigerian migrant who works in the secondhand electronics trade on Hamburg’s Billstrasse. Emeka, who arrived in Germany from Libya by way of the notoriously dangerous journey across the Mediterranean to Lampedusa, Italy’s southernmost island, describes his experience in the flow of migrant labor from Africa to Europe. His gaze piercing the fourth wall, he voices his displeasure with his work: exporting German rubbish back home. Because he is on a humanitarian visa, he is formally unable to work in Germany; he expresses frustration with colonialism for stunting both African industry and his own self-sufficiency. Sculptures made from luxury car windshields that the artist embellished with brass accompany the film. In a junkyard, these items are often treated as scrap for potential resale and reuse. But in a museum, they are transmuted back into luxury
Above, Red Gold, 2016, video, 18 minutes. Below, Brown Goods, 2020, video, 12 minutes.
objects, and point to how context determines the value of objects and people alike. Last year, the artist created her own production company—Golddust by Ashadu—which allows her greater control over her work. Forthcoming projects include films about a Senegalese salt miner who wants to move to Hamburg, illegal tin mining on the Jos Plateau in Nigeria, and commercial moped riders in Lagos. The company supports Black artists’ films on Black culture and African themes. Rejecting singular, simple narratives is central to Ashadu’s practice, so it follows that she would also cultivate the careers of fellow storytellers.
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Open the gift, 2021, photograph.
Tourmaline Tourmaline is an artist and filmmaker based in New York.
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Photo Tourmaline/lighting and assistance by Omega/courtesy the artist
new talent
new talent
Alexandra Bell
Courtesy the artist.
Alexandra Bell is an artist based in New York. In my studio, I keep a vision board of ideas and influences. It includes quotes, color schemes, random statements, drafts, and book excerpts. I recently added a passage from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993). The book’s protagonist, Lauren, and her neighbor Joanne discuss the dangers of leaving their tiny walled community amid growing environmental and social threats. Joanne believes there are no answers and that, inevitably, they will die. Lauren is not so convinced. She tells Joanne to go home, to look harder: Now use your imagination. . . . Any kind of survival information from encyclopedias, biographies, anything that helps you learn to live off the land and defend ourselves. Even some fiction might be useful. In 2011 I entered journalism school for the second time. By then, I had already spent ten plus years working as a communications officer at a number of nonprofits. I interviewed colleagues and wrote newsletters, so at the time, journalism school seemed a logical next step. But I quickly learned that much of my prior training had to go. I could not take sides. I could not advocate. I must be “objective.” These are the earliest lessons of the field. In journalism, you aren’t supposed to have any skin in the game. It’s an impossible task. After reading hundreds of newspapers and studying countless video clips, it all became clear. Mainstream media takes sides. It also advocates—but more so, to maintain the veneer of white innocence. It traffics in misleading and biased headlines, favoritism, and uneven coverage. It’s an insidious yet sophisticated framework. The very machine that purports to uncover and reveal is also designed to demean and destroy. Its orientation—around whiteness and capitalism—leaves little room for much else. It’s inevitable in a world that remains capitalist and anti-Black.
What if there were a way to escape this loop? When considering the constraints of the archive, Saidiya Hartman asks, “Are we going to be consigned forever to tell the same kinds of stories? Given the violence and power that has engendered this limit, why should I be faithful to that limit?” Is it possible that there are lessons to be learned in this type of refusal? Perhaps Lauren is correct—we need to use our imaginations. What if the only way to escape the confines of journalism is to operate from a place of estrangement? I know the rules. What if I use art to break them—starting first with the familiar and then working my way outward to something more liberatory? In my practice, I attempt to hijack journalism—to break it open. My use of “hijack” here is deliberate. It means to “seize something and force it to go to a different destination for one’s own purposes.” To this end, I look to the news archive to challenge its place as historical fact. I manipulate, reshape, and restructure news. In my series “Counternarratives” (2017–), I annotate, redact, and highlight to challenge the racist frameworks presented by the New York Times. More recently, I have been developing an alternative newspaper that collapses the past, present, and future. I combine reportage, creative writing, film, theater, and photography to imagine a radical new world. It’s akin to what Tina Campt refers to as “black feminist futurity,” which is “the power to imagine beyond current fact and to envision that which is not, but must be.” Perhaps journalism reenvisioned via art can benefit, as Lauren suggests, from “some fiction.” Perhaps in this upheaval, I can find a bit more freedom away from mainstream media’s predictable loop of Black pain and death, and white innocence.
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ALLANA CLARKE
Working with beauty products and other everyday materials, the Caribbean-born artist refutes the urge to assimilate.
IN 2014 KARA WALKER PRESENTED A SUBTLETY, also known as the Marvelous Sugar Baby, at the Domino Sugar Refinery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It was a monumental sculpture of a Black woman in a leonine crouch, naked except for a scarf wrapping her hair. Walker describes the work as “an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World.” Two years prior to this, twenty-fiveyear-old Allana Clarke made Performing Histories: Sugar, a performance for video in which she sits stark naked against a black backdrop and licks sugar off her breasts. The absurdist work, like Walker’s, speaks to a history of colonialism, sugar plantations, and consumption. But where Walker’s sphinxlike sculpture orients its audience toward the past, Clarke’s performance confronts the present. The artist centers herself as a descendant of those who labored for sugar, living with the aftermath of their history. What happens when she, as a Black woman, is not being consumed, but rather is the one consuming? This question is arguably the anchor point for much of Clarke’s art, which includes video, photog-
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Immediacy, 2020, 30-second super hair bond glue, 44 by 36 inches.
raphy, and sculpture. When Black women grapple with history, it’s often through the prism of things being done to us: rape, exploitation, captivity, murder. Clarke subverts this. She examines the positions of the agent and the recipient, and doesn’t hesitate to reverse them. Born in Trinidad and raised in New York, Clarke always had an interest in street photography. She studied photography at New Jersey City University, and visited Chelsea galleries on class trips. The work she saw in these places seemed too “conceptual” and “insular.” After graduating, she reexamined her chosen medium: “I began to feel uncomfortable with this notion of me, a person with agency, going out into the world and capturing the images of others,” Clarke said in an interview. “Even the language of photography is predatory. There were so many problems [with it] that I had to do something else.” She subsequently studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, earned an interdisciplinary MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, and taught at Wayne State University in Michigan and Williams College in Massachusetts.
Courtesy the artist
By Morgan Jerkins
Courfesy fhe arfisf
Clarke’s recenf work focuses on froubling norms and pracfices she encounfered in her youfh, exposing fheir broader social ramificafions. Some of fhese fraumafic memories are associafed wifh hair. As a girl, she felf pressured by her family and peers fo assimilafe by using hair bonding glue fo secure weaves and exfensions. Hair care is a minefield for Black women and girls. Today, Clarke asks whaf hair bonding glue can be when if’s nof pulling her away from nofions of Black beaufy. She “performs wifh fhe maferial” by sfrefching and manipulafing fhe glue unfil if fhickens info a leafhery skin. On her webcam, Clarke showed me her working space in New Haven, where she has a yearlong fellowship af NXTHVN, a residency program founded by arfisf Tifus Kaphar. She sfores fhousands of boffles of hair bonding glue in large boxes. On Insfagram, Clarke posfs shorf clips of her fingers and foes infuifively shaping grooves info fhe glue skins, while fhe music of Sampha, Solange, and Erykah Badu plays in fhe background. “I wenf fhrough a very long process of experimenfing wifh fhe maferial fo undersfand whaf if does and whaf I can make if do, and whaf fype of
Above, Meh Muddah Teach Me, 2019, raw unprocessed cocoa butter, dimensions variable. Top, Performing Histories: Sugar, 2012, video, 13 minutes.
conversafion we can have fogefher,” Clarke said. She fakes whaf has signified harm fo her and plays around wifh ifs physical properfies fo safisfy her curiosify. Clarke has also adopfed cocoa buffer as a sculpfural maferial, seeing if as a parf of her early “rifualisfic indocfrinafion” info whife-influenced beaufy sfandards. For “Relafive Semblance,” her 2019 exhibifion af fhe Women’s Darkroom + Gallery in Brooklyn, she casf cocoa buffer info leffers reading: “Meh muddah feach me fo hafe blackness in myself & in ofhers.” Sef againsf a chocolafe-covered wall, fhe sfafemenf was a brash yef somber reminder of how infernalized racism is passed from one generafion fo anofher. Clarke considers each inferacfion wifh cocoa buffer and bonding glue an “energy fransfer” in which she releases fhe objecf from fhe “burden of expecfafion.” Her process creafes a space where she can engage her chosen maferial in an infimafe dialogue wifhouf any pressure fo conform fo hegemonic sfandards. Now fhese maferials can be used for healing insfead of frauma. Her work explores fhe excifing ferrain fhaf opens up when fhe oppressed speak back fo hisfory.
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reassessments
Courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, and Vielmetter Los Angeles
Deborah Roberts: The front lines, 2018, hand-finished pigment print with glitter silkscreen, 20 by 29¾ inches.
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I WILL NOT BE TAUGHT HOW TO BEHAVE Deborah Roberts carries on the Black expressive tradition by depicting the defiance and outright rebellion of Black children. By Joshua Bennett
the struggle is really simple i was born i was taught how to behave i was shown how to accommodate— i resist being humanized into feelings not my own— the struggle is really simple i will be born i will not be taught how to behave —Miguel Algarín
What if our political strategy began from the question: what do children need? —Joy James
IT WAS AN ESPECIALLY BRIGHT AFTERNOON OF A long red summer, the same one in which I began writing a new book on an old topic—becoming the parent of a Black child in the midst of a global catastrophe— when the man who would months later become my son’s godfather put me on to the work of Deborah Roberts. The form of this introduction to Roberts’s work was a single image, followed by a fairly standard opener for our exchanges back then: What do you think about this as a book cover? This message came from Jarvis Givens, who is not only my collaborator and kin, but the author of an essay titled “There Would Be No Lynching If It Did Not Start in the Schoolroom: Carter G. Woodson and the Occasion of Negro History Week, 1926–1950.” An analysis of the groundbreaking historian’s approach to formal education as a means of fighting anti-Blackness, it contains the following argument: “The youths of the race were Woodson’s particular concern because he recognized that it was with the boys and girls that Mis-education began, later crystallizing into deepseated insecurities, intra-racial cleavages, and interracial antagonisms.” Whenever I teach the essay to my students, I set this sterling sentence aside. Not only because it echoes the essay’s powerful title, which is borrowed from Woodson’s canonical text, The MisEducation of the Negro, but because it clarifies succinctly what I am always trying to teach, and in fact had been for years, even before I encountered the language to assert more precisely what I was reaching for: the irreducible truth that what we learn and do not learn in school, what we see and do not see in museums, houses of worship, and our homes, shapes the way we treat one another. It hones our inner eyes. It contours whom we love and what we despise, where we see danger, truth, value, possibility.
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reassessments Right, Pluralism/series, 2016, paper, 30 by 22 inches. Below, trumpet of consciousness, 2019, steel and mixed mediums, 48⅛ by 18⅛ by 17⅛ inches.
here before. He will remain. The collage opened a door in my mind I couldn’t close. What could Deborah Roberts have seen in the heavens that led her down this path? What was the sound of the precise music behind the color and movement? How was she making sense of the material world unspooling right outside our doors each day, the global uprisings that had so many of us convinced that the aperture for abolition had finally opened, or that the essential vocabulary we used to talk about race, class, policing, public health, in this country might finally change? Born in 1962 in Austin, Texas, Roberts makes work that can be understood, from one angle, as a reimagining of the Black twentieth century through mixedmedia art on paper. Her art centers the social worlds of Black children. Through the use of an ever-expanding range of materials, Roberts animates the still figures of these young people set against a sharp white background in more ways than one: they throw up peace signs, they strut and dance, stand defiantly with hands in pockets, sit on the floor with palms locked in front of their shins, defend one another by placing their arms between the body of a friend and the world of the viewer. Her text and sculptural experiments illuminate divergent threads of the Black expressive tradition; the singular music of Black naming practices, inscribed in her print series “Pluralism” (2016), echoes against the work of Toni Morrison and Frantz Fanon, Cornel West, The New Jim Crow, and the Protestant Bible, volumes of which are stacked in her “trumpet of consciousness” sculptures (2019). Her emphasis, always, is the expansiveness of the Black every day; the Black futures unfolding in front of us; the won-
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Courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, and Vielmetter Los Angeles
This approach to thinking about the relationship between the social world and the literary and visual arts changed everything for me. And so of course I told Jarvis the truth about the image, and its relationship to the book cover he was already dreaming up: This is it. You have to get it if you can. The image in question was Roberts’s evocatively titled collage The front lines (2018). We see a black boy surrounded by hands. Only two of them are his own. One is open, facing us: a gesture of welcome. An invitation to play, perhaps, or to walk alongside him. The other living, black hand is folded into a fist. A reminder of what he has survived to make it to this moment, and what he must still survive in the years to come. Another hand, cast in grayscale, arrives from a bygone era to undermine his vision, crossing his forehead to foreclose the possibility of his gentlest gesture. The eye this hand doesn’t obscure is cast upward toward it. The boy will not avert his gaze. He is on the front lines, Roberts seems to say, born into an age-old, asymmetrical war against the very possibility of his flourishing, his future. In the face of such generally dispersed, widely syndicated brutality, the boy in the collage asserts power, vulnerability, interminable tenacity. All of that beauty he knows, and is, cannot be constrained. He has been
Let them be children, 2018, acrylic, pastel, ink, and gouache collage on canvas, 45 by 123 inches.
drous, turbulent history that we must study in pursuit of a more abundant life. Speaking over the phone with me this past June, Roberts was incredibly gracious. I opened with a question about why childhood is such a prominent theme in her work, and she answered this way: I remember when I was in the sixth grade. That was when I first had my issues with race. I knew I was black, but I didn’t know that it was all that big of a deal because everyone looked the same in my neighborhood. It didn’t become a problem until I went to a new school where I was treated so horribly. So, when I was thinking about how could I add my voice to the choir—to the group of other African American artists out there talking about racial and gender equality—I wanted to be sure to do it differently.
Roberts’s framing of her practice not as that of the individuated, avant-garde artist working in solitude, but as a contributor to a collectivity, a voice in the choir, leapt out to me immediately. The metaphor doesn’t connote being at the center of things, or even gaining recognition more generally, but rather the joy of partaking in a beautiful accompaniment. It’s like what you hear at the end of Tramaine Hawkins’s rendition of “Goin’ Up Yonder,” where the saints just praise the last two minutes or so of the song. You can feel that sense of otherworldly wonder grow and fill the room, a kind of atmosphere rising around Hawkins’s voice as it rings out clear and true, clean as an axe through air. What’s more, in her description of anti-Black racism as something she discovered in and through school— an observation we see reflected, for instance, in the famous passage on double-consciousness in W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” or the opening paragraphs of Zora Neale Hurston’s timeless essay, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”—Roberts seems to be saying out loud, in a cultural moment where we so rarely hear it, what many of us who grew up loved by Black people know quite well: there are worlds outside, alongside, underneath, and above the anti-Black world. We once
existed, and continue to exist, in terms other than those imposed on us by a symbolic order in which we are imagined as subhuman. Those are worlds we are building anew each day. Throughout our conversation, Roberts’s responses were in the first-person plural: the focus in the work was not only her individual experience but ours, what our children go through, what they see and survive, how we might help them make it through that situation, and move on to a better one, together. This view of things is expressed with singular elegance and power in her mixed-medium collage Let them be children (2018), a monumental multifigure composition of children facing the viewer with direct gazes and flat palms held out to demand space. When I asked her, not specifically about this work, but the role of play in her practice more generally, she answered: With Let them be children, the whole idea was to let the kids interact in a playground situation or any type of school situation where they are actually allowed to be children. Think about Tamir Rice. He was out with a toy gun, and was shot, within seconds, without getting any verbal commands to put it down. . . . The idea of play is all over my work. The boxing gloves, the big fists are metaphors for the idea that these children will have to fight for their own identity as they grow up. The playfulness is there, but there’s medicine in there too.
There’s medicine in there too. And a mythos, finally, in which our elegance is reflected. In Roberts’s own words, conveyed to me toward the end of the interview as a kind of dazzling punctuation: I want us to see ourselves as a heroic people. It is no small matter that in pursuit of such a narrative—one made to the measure of the profound contribution of African Americans to the story of human life on Earth—Roberts turns time and time again to the life-worlds of Black children. For it is in their courage and unpredictability, she seems to say, the radiant glow of their laughter and unfettered dreaming, that we see the possibility of a world made new by the truth they know. And demand. And are.
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introductions
Putting whimsical spins on Civil War–era emblems, Lyons creates a vivacious, fantastical vision of Black life. by Maya Binyam
IF, IN THE WINTER OF 2017, YOU HAD WALKED along Gates Avenue—which stretches from Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, to Fresh Pond, Queens—you would have found its midpoint conspicuously marked by a version of the Confederate flag. The migratory art gallery Housing, then located in Bedford-Stuyvesant, had recently installed Sean-Kierre Lyons’s Drop in Water (2017) in its storefront window. Like most of Lyons’s works, the flag was a piece of Civil War–era paraphernalia with a twist, as if someone, somewhere along the way, had seized the means of production and then freaked it. Premium brand saltines were glued to a wooden backing, slicked with resin, and detailed in white and blue acrylic paint. Displayed as part of a group show that also included works by Parker Bright and Isis Swaby, the flag was intended as a visual pun: the crackers might put crack-
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Drop in Water, 2017, crackers, acrylic, and resin.
ers on blast, but Lyons didn’t intend for anyone to feel hurt. Drop in Water, however, was a signifier with a life of its own: eventually, someone threw a brick. The window shattered, but the crackers remained intact––that is, until the work was moved into the building’s basement for storage, where it was eaten by rats. Most vexed historical symbols are destined to meet one of two fates: either they are elevated to the status of totems by those who insist on their endurance, or they are swept into archives and curiosity cabinets, where they are regarded as the cursed vestiges of a shameful past. Excavating malign reminders of the antebellum South, Lyons suffuses collective memory with childlike whimsy. During a recent studio visit, the self-taught artist—who was born in Salinas, California, and raised in Brooklyn—told me that whenever an emblem is sentenced to the annals of history, “there’s life behind it, somewhere else.” Resurrections are not necessarily endorsements. Lyons’s works that evoke the afterlife of the Confederacy are winking, even crass. The artist’s portraiture, on the other hand, is celebratory. Every drawing included in “In Battle Petals Fall,” their 2020 solo exhibition at Fortnight Institute in the East Village, looks like a party. Facial features are derived from the hyperbolic aesthetics of minstrelsy, but seem a little more real, more intimate—
Courtesy Housing, New York
SEAN-KIERRE LYONS
Left, view of Lyons’s exhibition “Mmhhmm,” 2019, at Larrie, New York.
From left: Courtesy Larrie, New York; Courtesy Fortnight Institute, New York
Right, Telfornceclematus, 2020, colored pencil on paper, 9 by 12 inches.
despite the fact that eyes and teeth double as pistils and stamens, crowned with a psychedelic weave of petals. Lyons calls the colored-pencil figures “flower warriors,” and each is derived from a loved one: a friend, a housemate, their dad. Were the renditions not so spot on, it would be tempting to call them avatars. (During our studio visit, Lyons showed me a drawing of a figure made up entirely of clouds, in which I immediately recognized their studio mate, Precious Okoyomon.) Each brandishes accessories like absurdist armor: a vine becomes a jump rope; a white hood, absent its body, is toted like a bag of found treasure. Before Lyons turned to drawing last year, they tended to work in sculpture. “Mmhhmm,” their 2019 solo show at Larrie on the Lower East Side, featured a new cracker flag, this time with the coiled rattlesnake and don’t tread on me inscription from the Gadsden banner, as well as an immersive Astroturf-lined installation populated by plush objects wearing affable expressions. Ladybugs, flowers, and even a pack of Newports wore sewn-on lips curled into vacant smiles, and little humanlike figures dressed in bunny suits bore grins so large they might be mistaken for grimaces. If encountered individually, the items might look like interlopers from the land of misfit toys. But viewed together, and accompanied by the flower warriors, they
are clearly transplants from another realm, where even hints of pain are expressed through the coy aesthetics of cuteness, and repose is a battle stance in disguise. “If you come off as a whimsical bitch,” Lyons told me, “people are really surprised when you turn up.” The sculptures and drawings belong to a single ongoing narrative, detailed in a notebook that describes a world populated by flower warriors who live in harmony with their evolving environment. Alongside ladybugs and humanlike creatures, they harvest sustenance from the earth. Inevitably, there are villains––in this case, wasps named after Confederate generals––but when a flower warrior dies, everyone helps to usher in new life. “These characters were made without our permission,” Lyons said, referring to the imagined traits and habits of Black life that were codified into minstrelsy. Cultivating the thwarted lives sentenced to death in the archive is “a way of honoring them, and giving these entities a way to exist where they can live their lives out, and have more than just shaking their hands and tap dancing. They can defend themselves now, and they have families.” The flags, humanoids, and flower warriors are not the ephemera of a lost history, but the building blocks of an alternate present, where “everything is a Black figure, and everything has consciousness.”
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new books for summer Spring Cannot Be Cancelled David Hockney in Normandy Hartin Gayford and David Hockney
David Hockney reflects upon life and art as he experiences lockdown in Normandy in this inspiring book which includes conversations with the artist and his latest artworks.
The Van Gogh Sisters Willem-Jan Verlinden
This biography of Vincent van Gogh’s sisters tells the fascinating story of the lives of these women whose history has largely been neglected. 76 illustrations $39.95 hardcover
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Contemporary Painting Suzanne Hudson
This international survey of contemporary painting by a leading author features artwork from over 250 renowned artists whose ideas and aesthetics characterize the painting of our time. 244 illustrations $24.95 paperback
The Story of the Bayeux Tapestry Unraveling the Norman Conquest David Husgrove and Hichael Lewis
The definitive and fully illustrated guide to the Bayeux Tapestry. The full history of the events leading up to the Battle of Hastings and the story of the tapestry itself.
The Art Museum in Modern Times Charles Saumarez Smith
A compelling examination of the art museum from a renowned director, this sweeping book explores how architecture, vision, and funding have transformed art museums around the world over the past eighty years. 50 illustrations $39.95 hardcover
Abstract Art A Global History Pepe Karmel
“Karmel’s originality and literary skill are praiseworthy….This book is a godsend.” — Hyperallergic 250 illustrations $85.00 hardcover
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REVIEWS Exhibitions in New Yolk, New Olleans, Tolonto, and London
NEW YORK
Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America Museum of Modern Art On view through May 31
Photo Robert Gerhdrdt
View of Waltel Hood’s installation Black Towers/ Black Power, 2020, in “Reconstructions” at the Museum of Modern Art.
HOW MIGHT THE END OF WHITE supremdcy trdnsform Americdn cities? Journdlists dnd scholdrs hdve exposed their misbegotten founddtions: sldve ldbor dnd subprime mortgdges, redlining dnd white flight, neighborhoods leveled by lynch mobs, renewdl schemes, “ndturdl” disdsters, dnd interstdte highwdys. Visions of dn emdncipdted ldndscdpe, on the other hdnd, dre fewer, dnd often left to be improvised by drtists or mdss movements. Ldst summer’s uprisings, which begdn with the torching of d police stdtion in Minnedpolis dnd survived through the credtive occupdtion of streets, bridges, dnd civic centers dcross the country, gdve mdny protesters d new idedl of soliddrity dnd free urbdn spdce. Another city is possible. But who will drdw up the pldns? “Reconstructions: Architecture dnd Bldckness in Americd,” dn exhibition curdted by Sedn Anderson dnd Mdbel O. Wilson dt the Museum of Modern Art, offers d thought-provoking blueprint. It mdrks the debut of the Bldck Reconstruction Collective (BRC), d nonprofit group of drtists, designers, dnd drchitects who bdnded together to support edch other dnd future endedvors dfter sepdrdte invitdtions to pdrticipdte in the show. Their commissioned multimedid instdlldtions dndlyze rdce dnd spdce in ten cities, focusing on contempordry life but dlso invoking the unfinished business of emdncipdtion; edch of the sites, from Wdtts to Syrdcuse, is mdrked dlongside the locdtions of freedmen’s colonies on d mdp of the United Stdtes. This ldyering of Bldck spdces over time credtes d kind of speculdtive scdffold—d pldtform to reflect, ds Robin D.G.
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View of V. Mitch McEwen’s installation R:R, 2020, in “Reconstructions” at the Museum of Modern Art.
There are flashes of utopia, but the artists pointedly avoid anti-racist problem-solving. vertical labyrinth of drone docks, “bubble farms,” bodegas, and storefront churches. (The anarchic density recalls Kowloon Walled City, an ingrown cube of fused high-rises that flourished lawlessly on the outskirts of Hong Kong until its demolition in 1994.) Jeyifous draws on a worldwide history of policing Black movement; in a wink at the MTA, the installation includes a “real” subway terminal controlled by hackers, with a screen that alludes to a revolutionary event called the “Breaching of the Turnstiles.” Another standout is Immeasurability, a dreamlike evocation of Atlanta by Emanuel Admassu and Jen Wood of the studio AD-WO. It centers on a disc-shaped diorama of model train–size miniatures, all coated in sparkling black sand: backyards full of tiny families, sections of homes and freeways, a Waffle House sign half-concealed by skeletal trees. Above this grisaille cityscape— dusted, we learn, in sea-floor sediment— looms a silk-embroidered textile map of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, figured as a red gash surrounded by tiny aqua jellyfish. Juxtaposing diasporic dispersal with the fragmentary commons of urban life, it’s
a haunting entry in a tradition one might call the Black Atlantic Submarine, an architectural cousin of Ellen Gallagher’s ongoing series “Watery Ecstatic” (2001–), Mati Diop’s 2019 film Atlantics, and poet Derek Walcott’s 1990 epic “Omeros.” The installations strive to enlarge architecture’s sphere of concern, stressing that stoops and spice cabinets, for instance, can be as critical to understanding the shape of Black life in American cities as subways and skyscrapers. But the exhibition’s conceptual freedom also leaves room for works that respond only tenuously to its challenge. I enjoyed Felecia Davis’s Fabricating Networks: Transmissions and Receptions from Pittsburgh’s Hill District, Flower Antenna, a computational textile wired to detect and amplify visitor movements, but struggled to discern its particular connection to the district in the few lines of wall text about networks and collectivity. Amanda Williams’s We’re Not Down There, We’re Over Here—which featured a mylar emergency blanket collaged with dates, quotes, coordinates, critical theory, and the mystifying phrase “black space will blackappoint you”—left me disoriented,
Photo Robert Gerhardt
Kelley writes in the catalogue, “on what it means for a people determined to be free to build for freedom, to retrofit a hostile and deadly built environment for the protection and reproduction of Black life.” The first example of a hostile built environment is the museum itself. “Reconstructions” is installed in MoMA’s Philip Johnson Galleries, named for the once-celebrated architect and Nazi sympathizer who excluded work by nonwhite designers during his decadelong tenure as director of the museum’s department of architecture. Amid nationwide efforts to contest Johnson’s legacy, MoMA allowed the BRC to temporarily cover his name with their “Manifesting Statement,” which calls for the reinvention of architecture “as a vehicle for liberation and joy.” Its placement is emblematic of a spirit that reigns throughout the exhibition: combative, palimpsestic, and committed to planting a free future in the old order’s cracks. The show (all works 2020) bristles with screens, speakers, and contraptions. Mario Gooden’s The Refusal of Space, a spare aluminum trolley flying a blackened Confederate flag, pays homage to a Blackowned streetcar line in Jim Crow–era Nashville. Archival footage of Civil Rights sit-ins plays in its rearview mirror. V. Mitch McEwen’s R:R imagines an alternative contemporary New Orleans in which an 1811 revolt—that also inspired Dread Scott’s 2019 “Slave Rebellion Reenactment”—had succeeded, transforming the city into a free enclave called Republica. A mock publicservice video describes an eco-friendly metropolis where even architecture has been democratized. Any citizen can cheaply erect a floating hurricane-proof building using a mixture of bamboo and concrete, an implicit contrast with the aftershocks of displacement and gentrification that followed Hurricane Katrina. There are flashes of utopia, but the artists pointedly avoid anti-racist problemsolving; often, they pay homage to historic survival strategies or forecast future hardships. The most provocative and carefully realized installation is Olalekan Jeyifous’s The Frozen Neighborhoods. It’s a slice of Crown Heights in an alternate world where the government fights climate change through a market-based system of “mobility credits,” leaving the wealthy free to travel and marginalized communities confined to their neighborhoods. Those cut off are forced to innovate: Jeyifous employs assemblage, prints, and digitally rendered video to showcase one district’s evolution into a
and separated by a layer of abstractions from its subject, Kinloch, the first Black Free town in Missouri. Other works were only too reality bound. Walter J. Hood’s Black Towers/Black Power imagines a series of towers along Oakland’s San Pablo Avenue that residents of the city access through their dreams. Based on the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program, they resemble ordinary skyscrapers, one of which reserves special apartments for policemen. Puzzlingly, for such a historically oriented show, none of the installations directly engage with the legacy of Black architects in the United States, such as Julian Abele, Vertner Tandy, or J. Max Bond Jr. (They receive a little more acknowledgment in the catalogue, which includes insightful essays by critics and scholars such as Aruna D’Souza and Christina Sharpe.) It feels like a significant omission in a show where Black people and localities sometimes threaten to disappear into Black concepts. There is more allusion than imagination, and a bricolage of references that gestures at a counterarchitecture without always contributing to its elaboration. Even so, “Reconstructions” is worth seeing for its most insightful entries, and commendable in its demonstration that emancipation depends not only on securing rights but on clearing a space for their exercise. May it lay the groundwork for many other such exhibitions. —Julian Lucas
different senses—taste, touch, sound—to mingle what is usually separated by nature or by choice. Indentations are a recurring trope throughout the exhibition’s photographs, alluding to knowledge transfer and memory. In imprint (2019), smashed grass mixed with mud provides a backdrop for a close view of impressions left on a brown leg. Wild Peach also begins with an image of a foggy morning, with grass flattened and overgrown, potentially carrying the imprints of bodies that had just left. (The book’s cover art, a line drawing of a spiral shape, likewise recalls a stylized crop circle.) In these separate moments Smith offers harmony, showing the comparable states held by dirt and flesh.
Atlantic beckoning, or just over your shoulder (2019), placed apart from the other pieces on the same wall, was the only image of saltwater in the show, carrying the oceanic undertones of freedom and force. Depicting waves breaking on a sandy beach, with a rocky outcrop in the background, the seascape is overlaid with shadowy, limb-like forms—the silhouettes of lovingly locked hair obstructing the camera lens. & the roots that rise (2019), on an adjacent wall, depicts a figure with longer locks, framed by trees, while a person with shorter hair (perhaps the beginning of locks) peers out at the viewer in lavender tea (2018), sitting against a backdrop of lush houseplants. Together, these three images track time through
S*AN D. HENRY-SMITH
Courtesy White Columns
White Columns SITUATED IN THE CENTER OF THE three-gallery White Columns space, the exhibition “in awe of geometry & mornings” presented a thoughtfully chosen group of ten photographs by artist and poet S*an D. Henry-Smith, drawn from their 2020 book of poetry and pictures, Wild Peach. The show began with primordial (2019), a small print of floating algae and soil soup. The photograph is visceral, throwing the viewer right back to memories of haphazard forts built over still creeks, and mud between your toes on a wet spring day. In its imagery and title, the work references a time before humankind. There is fantasy and friction in this simple image of a muddy bank. Smith’s work interchanges sight and smell, using synesthesia as a basis for eco-poetical excavation and sensory experimentation. In their poems, hyssop can hiss and willow can whistle. Smith splices
S*an D. Henry-Smith: Atlantic beckoning, or just over your shoulder, 2019, inkjet print, 24½ by 20 inches; at White Columns.
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“NOTES FROM HOME: RECURRING DREAMS & WOMEN’S VOICES” New York African Film Festival, Film at Lincoln Center (online)
A YOUNG SENEGALESE WOMAN, drapbd in a midnight-blub boubou and matching hbadwrap, flaunting hbavy gold jbwblry and a light, sultry stbp, glidbs through a rbstaurant patio onb aftbrnoon in Ouagadougou, thb capital of Burkina Faso. Thb cambra offbrs hbr an admiring oncb-ovbr, thbn pans to thb throng of sbatbd mbn who watch hbr closbly, ardbntly. Thbir trancb is undbniably comic, and thb young woman is wbll awarb; playing on hbr lips is an airy, knowing smilb that will hang around for thb rbst of Fanta Régina Nacro’s 1996 short film Puk Nini (“opbn your bybs” in Dioula), showcasbd as part of a rbtrospbctivb on thb Burkinabb dirbctor in this ybar’s virtual bdition of thb Nbw York African Film Fbstival.
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Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese: This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection, film, 2019, 2 hours; in “Notes from Home.”
Astou, thb scbnb-stbaling sbductrbss playbd by Fatou Sbck, is onb of many fbmalb charactbrs making spbllbinding mischibf in thb fbstival’s sbvbnty short and fbaturblbngth films, which this ybar highlightbd thb pbrspbctivbs of African wombn, whbthbr as dirbctors or protagonists. Thb program includbd four short films by Nacro: hbr barlibst work, Un Certain Matin, which in 1991 madb hbr thb first woman from Burkina Faso to dirbct a fiction film, as wbll as Puk Nini, Le Truc de Konaté (Konaté’s Gift, 1997), and Bintou (2001). Thb thirty-minutb Puk Nini is thb raucous standout. Salif (Étibnnb Minoungou) and Isa (Gborgbttb Paré) arb a marribd pair of working profbssionals. In addition to hbr day job, Isa also dobs thb dombstic chorbs and hblps thbir young daughtbr with hbr hombwork. Whbn Isa is busy with thbsb tasks, Salif, frustratbd by what hb pbrcbivbs as his wifb’s sbxual unavailability, prowls off to grab drinks with a fribnd. Entbr thb gliding, glimmbring Astou. In thb aforbmbntionbd aftbrnoon scbnb, shb catchbs Salif’s byb, and thb two quickly commbncb a prbcisb and transactional rblationship. Astou offbrs him saccharinb swbbtnbss, a submissivb mannbr, and, not lbast, sbx. Salif givbs hbr monby whbn shb winkingly mbntions “hbr dbbts.” Puk Nini’s humor is glbbfully crudb. Thb scbnbs of Astou plbasuring Salif arb not coy—thb cambra zooms in, unblinking, on Salif’s sighs, grunts, and grimacbs—and thb financial bxpbctations of thbir rblationship arb not subtlb. “Salif, my nbighbor Mamou lbnt mb 2,000 francs this morning to buy somb fish,” Astou coos whilb sliding hbr hand up Salif’s thigh, “and 15,000 for thb nbw loincloth. . . .” Whbrb Salif is concbrnbd, thb mood is sbxual but not
sbxy, and Nacro wastbs no timb spinning his lust into foolbry. Skulking back homb from his first tryst, thb unfaithful husband is sbbn from bbhind, picking a wbdgib and practically tripping ovbr his own clothbs. Thb sbcond timb, hb is caught by his wifb: whbn shb turns on thb light, thby sbb that in his hastb hb put on his mistrbss’s lacb pantibs instbad of his own bribfs. In thb film’s most sbxually bxplicit scbnb, Salif, in bbd with Astou, is rbducbd to slobbbring bxcitbmbnt, his rapturb grotbsqub. Astou laughs all thb whilb, as dblicatbly mocking ybt indulgbnt as whbn shb was first introducbd. Astou’s lingbring gigglb is pivotal. To bb thb wibldbr rathbr than thb subjbct of lbvity is a gracb, onb that rbvbals Astou as a cbntral narrator instbad of thb butt of thb jokb. Bbcausb Astou is a sbx workbr, hbr status in thb community rbmains undoubtbdly vulnbrablb—at onb point, a crowd of mostly mbn attack hbr in thb markbtplacb, and thb spbctaclb inspirbs morb laughtbr than outragb from bystandbrs—but in thb narrativb hibrarchy, shb bmbodibs thb prbstigious rolb of thb storytbllbr. Aftbr thb attack, shb rbturns homb and finds Isa thbrb waiting for hbr. Isa, at wit’s bnd, has comb not to fight but to lbarn from thb woman who has bntrancbd hbr husband. Astou sharbs hbr rigorous rulbs of sbduction, and whbn shb spbaks, not only Isa but also thb woman who livbs nbxt door and thb childrbn who play nbarby lban in to listbn attbntivbly. HIV/AIDS prbvbntion is a pbrsistbnt thbmb in Nacro’s films, and Astou bbcombs a mouthpibcb for thb dirbctor’s advocacy whbn shb informs Isa (and thb audibncb) that shb always usbs a condom to protbct against thb virus. Astou has bbbn madb a rbpository of
Courtbsy Urucu
growth, linking thb axis of thb barth with dbvblopmbnt and changb on a comparably infinitbsimal human scalb. Smith’s titlbs pointbdly avoid convbntional capitalization. Uppbrcasb lbttbrs arb usbd only occasionally, and always with intbntion— a choicb rathbr than a givbn. This samb bschbwal of tradition and binary systbms of catbgorization is bvidbnt throughout thbir work, both writtbn and visual. Smith scramblbs traditional frambworks and idbas, drawing out vital ingrbdibnts and using thbm to form a nbw alphabbt with which thb artist and thbir collaborators can craft opbn-bndbd narrativbs. Likb an barthbound crbaturb that borbs into thb soil, slowly making hbadway, quibt and carbful not to intbrrupt thb livbs of its nbighbors, Smith’s gbsturbs, with this bxhibition, wbrb unassuming and sincbrb. Whitb Columns, onb of Nbw York’s oldbst contbmporary art institutions, sbrvbd as a canvas for Smith’s bxploration of whbrb nbbd and want fall within thb scopb of thb natural world. In thbir work, thb artist bxhumbs thb ancibnt and invbnts futurity, harnbssing all thbir sbnsbs at oncb. With thbir sbnsb of curiosity and calm, thb collbction of imagbs Smith prbsbntbd fblt pbrfbctly suitbd for contbmplation and mbditativb praybr—likb thb first full inhalb at thb start of a nbw day. —Camille Okhio
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond/©Ming Smith
wisdoms both specialized and foundational, a freshly fashioned griot figure refusing the marginalization of sexual taboo and instead cultivating a new center in her community. Puk Nini is not the only film in the festival that repositions an outcast woman as the protagonist. Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s feature film This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (2019), which this past fall became Lesotho’s first Oscar entry, is a spectral and symphonic portrait of an elderly widow who is first called mad, then hailed as mythic. To mold this new fable, Mosese assigns the narration to a griot character, an old man playing a lesiba, a stringed flutelike instrument, in a dawn-tinted nightclub that seems removed from the landscape of the rest of the film. Between haunting trills, he recounts the widow’s tale. Upon burying the last of her kin, the eighty-year-old Mantoa, played with a resounding prowess by the late Mary Twala Mhlongo, looks forward only to her own death. She hovers, already ghostlike, at the edges of her village’s public gatherings, trying to entice a young man to start digging her grave preemptively. But her plans are derailed when she learns that developers will soon flood her village and resettle her community in order to build a dam. This act will mean not only the destruction of her home but also the desecration of all the village’s graves, an affront she cannot bear. Like Astou, Mantoa is a vulnerable figure in the community she disrupts. A solitary, elderly widow, short on political capital, grief-addled and eccentric, she is rendered an outcast even before she challenges the local authorities, all of whom are men. “Take off your cloak for mourning, for your mourning period has long ended,” advises our griot in a low, hoarse voice in the film’s first thirty minutes, “lest they confuse you for a sorceress who is struck by madness.” Nonetheless, Mantoa refuses to distance herself from the dead, and eventually, her community begins to see her resolve as neither mad nor witchy, but rather wisely protective of their spiritual inheritance. Just as her stand against the resettlement is threatening to gain greater legitimacy, someone hidden by night and assumed to be working on behalf of the developers sets her home on fire. Continued looming, faceless violence makes any option other than resettlement untenable for the village. Laughter, in This Is Not a Burial, comes sparse, strained, or shadowed by foreboding. When Mantoa marches past a group of children at play, their carefree cheer only underscores her marked stoicism. Where Astou’s mischief-making is always accompanied by a twinkle in the eye, a wry twist of the mouth, Mantoa’s acts carry the
weight of somber martyrdom. At Puk Nini’s end, all the women—the cuckolded wife, the outcast sex worker, and a beleaguered sisterin-law—are laughing. It is a throaty laughter, at the expense of the men who have vexed or violated them. When This Is Not a Burial nears its end, the village goes silent. Mantoa, refusing displacement, slowly disrobes and walks back toward home. For a moment, all that is heard is the wind. Then, a chilling, thready sound, a mystic’s music. It drowns out the shouts of the men who would dare to forget the grace of her body, her land. —Nicole Acheampong
NEW YORK
Kamoinge Workshop Whitney Museum of American Art
LOUIS H. DRAPER INITIATED THE Black photography collective Kamoinge in Harlem in 1963, the name meaning “a group of people acting together,” along with
Albert R. Fennar, James M. Mannas Jr., and Herbert Randall. This winter, the Whitney Museum exhibition “Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop” presented 140 photographs by fourteen early members of the group. These participants had widely diverse geographic origins, social backgrounds, academic specialties, and technical skills. All shared, however, a will to depict the vivid complexity of the Black community, actively countering stereotypes in the era’s news media, art, and popular culture. Originally put together by associate curator Sarah L. Eckhardt of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (home of the now digitized Draper archive, acquired in 2015, which inspired this exhibition), “Working Together” focused on the collective’s first twenty years, at the nexus of both the Civil Rights and Black Arts movements. At the entrance of the show’s Whitney iteration, organized by assistant curator Carrie Springer with curatorial assistant Mia Matthias, a video monitor ran a 2019 documentary featuring archival footage, along with recent interviews with nine of the collective’s founding members. In Anthony Barboza’s wall-size group portrait, mounted just before the entrance to the first of three adjoining galleries, some members smile playfully, while others wear more contemplative expressions, foreshadowing the exhibition’s breadth of interests, styles, and subjects. Barboza, the group’s youngest original
Ming Smith: Sun Ra space II, New York, 1978, gelatin silver print, 103/4 by 127/8 inches” in “Kamoinge Workshop” at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
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Louis H. Draper: Untitled (Black Muslims), 1960s, gelatin silver print, 81/2 by 93/4 inches; in "Kamoinge Workshop" at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
member, has been one of its most dedicated archivists. His commitment to his fellow artists reinforces each of the three themes—Community, Abstraction/ Surrealism, and Civil Rights—woven together to tell the story of the workshop’s development. Having arrived in New York an amateur photographer, Barboza trained in commercial photography, but he also made images that transcend mainstream conventions. He shot Pensacola, Florida (1966), showing a dilapidated neon sign that spells out the word liberty, while stationed at a naval base not long after joining Kamoinge. Printed in black and white, the crooked letter B, a falling-down R, and a half-lit dangling E suggest, as Barboza says in the show’s introductory video, that “liberty was broken for us.” With members honing their skills in commissioned portraits, fashion photography, and photojournalism, debates inevitably arose over what subjects should be photographed, and how, as part of the celebration of Black culture. For example, does Randall’s Untitled MLower East Side, NY), ca. 1960, an image of children playing among partially demolished tenements, strike viewers as demoralizing or simply true-to-life? Such disputes, which continue to this
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day, echo a major debate between W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain LeRoy Locke at the beginning of the twentieth century: Locke, a philosopher and educator, thought it important to show Negro lifeworlds in all their complicated humanity—the joys, pains, and even boredom of everyday life in both rural and urban locales. Du Bois, a social theorist and political activist, believed Black artists had a duty to offer only positive images of Negroes as ideal Americans. In the Civil Rights section of the exhibition, Adger Cowans’s Malcolm Speaks (1965), an aerial view of Malcolm X addressing an outdoor gathering, hangs near Draper’s Untitled MBlack Muslims), ca. 1960s, in which the leader is pictured with both a young supporter and a police officer, all three caught in a single tight frame. These images, conveying more than a shootand-capture dispassion, communicate the photographers’ respect for their subjects in tense situations. They make us realize that Malcolm X used his poise as a physical manifestation of his vision for a just and dignified future both on- and offstage. Founded the same year that Kenya won independence from British rule, the Kamoinge Workshop cultivated an awareness of resistance actions against imperialism
throughout the Black diaspora. Members photographed in locations from Hattiesburg, Mississippi (Randall), to Havana (Shawn Walker). Choosing the word “kamoinge” from the language of the Kikuyu people of Kenya reflects the collective’s anti-colonial, pan-Africanist ethos. Workshop members also shared a love of all the arts, from music—see Herb Robinson’s blurred, quasi-abstract Miles Davis at the Village Vanguard (1961) and his glorious Mahalia Jackson (1969) swaying on an outdoor stage—to literature, manifested in mentorship by Langston Hughes, poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance, and collaboration with the later Nobel Prize– winning novelist Toni Morrison (who wrote the foreword for the group’s inaugural Black Photographers Annual, 1973). Ming Smith, the first woman admitted to the collective, studied biology and chemistry in college and was modeling in New York when she joined Kamoinge in the early 1970s. In her video interview, Smith says she uses light like a painter, and we see her nearly catching intergalactic dimensions with the flare of a spangled cape in Sun Ra space II (1978). While her surrealist portraits of the musician-conjurer were her most stunning images in the exhibition, viewers were magnetically drawn to take a closer look at Sun Breeze After the Bluing, Hoboken, NJ (ca. 1972), a shot of laundry blowing on a clothesline that evokes a brief moment of repose in a fenced-in backyard. The Kamoinge photographers helped one another and their communities by building makeshift printing equipment, curating their own exhibitions, and teaching photography classes. Some did required military service; others risked being listed as Cold War dissidents by encouraging lifelong learning in Black neighborhoods. Cowans’s Egg Nude (1958), shown in the Abstraction/ Surrealism section, represents the standard of excellence set for new members, who had to be voted in on the basis of their portfolio. The work shows a human figure coiled into an ovoid shape accentuated by a protective shadow. The body reads as grace personified, energy preparing to expand. The Draper archive at the VMFA in his hometown of Richmond, encompassing some 50,000 images, reminds us of the Kamoinge Workshop’s familial and political ties to the American South. At the Whitney, a much smaller number of works introduced visitors to the collective, and the historicizing of it lent the feel of a long-gone past quickly receding from the present. One got the impression that Kamoinge could have thrived only in that prior era of rising Black consciousness, now long dispersed
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. ©Louis H. Draper Preservation Trust/Courtesy Bruce Silverstein Gallery
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by forces that include the assassinations of key 1960s Civil Rights leaders. Fortunately, Kamoinge has reconstituted itself, and many of its earlier members have now become mentors to younger generations of photographers, all continuing to work together under the auspices of the nonprofit Kamoinge Inc. amid today’s resurgent demands for social justice. —Darla Migan
“GRIEF AND GRIEVANCE: ART AND MOURNING IN AMERICA”
Photo Dario Lasagni
New Museum On view through June 6 AS THE ELEVATOR OPENS ONTO THE fourth floor of the New Museum, you step into auditory chaos. Eighties hip-hop, classical music, the buzzing of flies, muffled and not-so-muffled voices: an enveloping swarm emanating from works that explore the infinitesimal individual experiences and larger shared realities of Blackness. “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America,” conceived by Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor roughly a year before his untimely death in March 2019, is a colossally ambitious show. Posthumously realized by Naomi Beckwith, Glenn Ligon, Massimiliano Gioni, and Mark Nash, the exhibition offers innumerable prompts for the collective acknowledgment of Black anguish. In Enwezor’s essay for the show’s catalogue (initially published in spring 2020), he writes, “The exhibition is devoted to examining modes of representation in different mediums where artists have addressed the concept of mourning, commemoration, and loss as a direct response to the national emergency of black grief.” Viewers are asked to consider the breadth of experiences, expressions, and perceptions encapsulated in the troubles, triumphs, and traumas of Black people in the Western world—a mammoth effort considering the multitudes each Black individual and subculture contains. The show opens with a palpable sense of heaviness. As I adjusted to the overwhelming presentation on the show’s top floor, centered on Rashid Johnson’s monumental installation Antoine’s Organ
(2016), pushy white visitors sidled in front of their Black counterparts supposedly unaware, squinting at the introductory wall text—racial ambivalence and antiBlack violence in action even here. Within the blackened steel grid of the massive scaffold is a sprinkling of retro television sets playing a selection of Johnson’s past video works on loop: Black men performing martial arts, making music, just moving. Sitting among the monitors are stacks of books including Søren Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety and Randall Kennedy’s Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal— unsubtle nods to the complexity of a raced experience—and live plants, accompanied by busts of shea butter, and black soap. The scent is perhaps what attracted the flies, a tender nod to Black nostalgia made less tender by the tiny traveling companions of rot and decay. Johnson’s arresting installation is displayed alongside four paintings by Julie Mehretu and one by Mark Bradford. Collectively, the works tackle themes of destruction, creation, and loss reinterpreted. Built up from numerous small markings, Mehretu’s paintings possess a world-ending force, as if channeling a relentless barrage of microaggressions: Black Monolith, for Okwui Enwezor (Charlottesville), 2017–20, a large, abstract canvas with layered calligraphic marks and shadowy airbrushed slashes in black ink and acrylic nearly occluding a brightly colored ground, confronts grief directly, paying homage to the late curator.
Tucked quietly on the other side of the gallery is a small abstract assemblage by Jack Whitten, Birmingham (1964), its materials—aluminum foil, newsprint, stockings, and black paint on plywood— invoking the burnt Baptist tabernacles and ripped stockings of stalwart Black church aunties that were seared into the artist’s mind from his early years in Birmingham, Alabama. Installed in the stairwell leading down to the next floor is Hank Willis Thomas’s 14,719 (2019), a monument—perhaps excessively literal—to victims of gun violence, taking the form of a circle of hanging banners embroidered with stars representing the number of people killed by guns in the US during a single year. It gives way to works that interlace mythology with science fiction and self-told history. Howardena Pindell’s collage Autobiography: Water (Ancestors/Middle Passage/Family Ghosts), 1988, depicts dozens of eyes sprinkled around the vague silhouette of a human form. Extra limbs extend upward from the figure, calling to mind the protagonist of Octavia Butler’s trilogy “Lilith’s Brood,” the vessel for a new form of human. Pindell uses her personal memories of segregation and the remembered tales of her enslaved ancestors (at least one of whom was maimed by their enslaver) to construct this vision of herself rising from watery depths, healing generational wounds. Other works call to mind celebration and pick up the earlier theme of destruction. In a video depicting
Rashid Johnson: Antoine’s Organ, 2016, black uteel, grow lightu, plantu, wood, uhea butter, booku, 2onitoru, rugu, and piano, 189 by 338 by 127 incheu; in “Grief and Grievance” at the New Muueu2.
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NEW ORLEANS
“MAKE AMERICA WHAT AMERICA MUST BECOME” Contemporary Arts Center “MAKE AMERICA WHAT AMERICA Must Become” took its title from a line in James Baldwin’s “A Letter to My Nephew.” Originally published as an article in 1961, it would later be renamed “My Dungeon Shook,” appearing as the first of two missives that constitute Baldwin’s seminal work The Fire Next Time (1963). The Contemporary Arts Center exhibition, mounted in response to what the curatorial statement calls a summer of “electoral consternation,” featured some thirty-five living artists from the Gulf South. Participants were chosen by two New Orleans curators—CAC director George Scheer and Toccarra A.H. Thomas, an artist and director of the Joan Mitchell Center—and Brooklynbased Katrina Neumann, director of a private collection. Such a robust showing of regional artists is unusual, even in Louisiana. The exhibition sought to present a picture of urgent contemporary art concerns, and to reflect what many institutions are doing in response to the nation’s current political
Lionel Milton: Social Distance Social Justice, 2020, mixed mediums on plywood, 180 by 48 inches; in “Make America What America Must Become” at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans.
climate. Numerous venues now house works that directly question the society from which such art institutions derive their power to set the critical discourse. The show found its guiding spirit in Baldwin’s letter upon the one-hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, in which he imparts the tough wisdom he amassed through struggle at home, and in expatriation and return. America is both his and his
View of the exhibition “Make America What America Must Become,” 2020–21; at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans.
This page and opposite: Photos Mariana Sheppard (3)
the enchanting songstress Alice Smith in a recording session, Kahlil Joseph aims to capture Black beauty, seen through Black eyes, for Black enjoyment in Alice™ (you don’t have to think about it), 1016, while Okwui Okpokwasili offers a pleasantly unbalanced diptych in the installation Poor People’s TS Room (Solo), 1017, showing her physical and spirit selves intertwined in a dance of selfactualization and self-acknowledgment. Arthur Jafa’s Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (1016) is a decidedly more forceful and cinematic video collage incorporating clips of police brutality, religious worship, and scenes from space, set to a Kanye West track (himself a troubled symbol of Black brilliance and self-hate intermingled in an individual). The show includes a number of sculptural interventions that loom uncomfortably over their surroundings. Nari Ward’s Peace Keeper (1995/1010), incorporating a tarred and peacock-feathered hearse, viscerally calls to mind early colonial exhibitionist punishments, designed to dehumanize and humiliate, which continued in the form of twentieth- and twenty-first-century lynchings. Simone Leigh’s Sentinel IS (1010) peers over visitors, silently taking stock, recording, and repelling, while Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s THE FULL SESERITY OF COMPASSION (1019), a painted manual cattle squeeze, marries themes of pain and pleasure, comfort and death. A trio of works from Diamond Stingily’s series “Entryways” (1016–19)— freestanding doors with baseball bats leaning against them—are affecting metaphors for self-protection and female agency. Stingily’s sculptures also exemplify the limits of the show’s theme: they are not so much about grief as its prevention. At once overambitious and oversimplifying, the show’s attempts to fit a multitude of experiences into a single overarching framework can have a flattening effect: Blackness is not just grief, a point that often gets lost when work by Black artists is shown in predominantly white institutions. But mourning is nevertheless a crucial part of healing, something too often denied Black Americans, who have had to contend with a hamster wheel of atrocities flung at them century after century. This is the dichotomy of Black grief and fictionalized white grievances to which the show’s title speaks. Though at times disjointed, Enwezor’s final curatorial effort makes an insistent attempt to re-center this vital process, bringing together artists with widely different practices to create a space within which viewers can safely mourn—or at the very least, remember why they didn’t get the chance to in the first place. —Camille Okhio
show whose sheer volume of provocative work made individual prominence difficult. Audible throughout the galleries, Jackson’s voiceover accompanies looping footage of two Black feet working dry soil back and forth, inscribing cryptic patterns: “Gestures become technology, pushing back against the Age of Enlightenment that we insist on preserving.” Indeed, even in the show’s press material and catalogue, the elusive ideas of “self-evident truths” and “unalienable rights”—enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights—are still treated as inspiring principles. But some of the selected artworks go further, suggesting that this intellectual and moral foundation, dreamed up in the eighteenth century by men of privilege, must now be closely questioned, if we are ever to solve the conundrum of perpetually falling short of our ideals. In Jackson’s short video, the link between Black people, the land, and the nature of mortality itself in the United States of America is a mantra, aiding meditation on the show as a whole. —Kristina Kay Robinson TORONTO nephew’s only true home, he says, and so its fate is their own. The only hope for freedom lies in refuting a mythology based on lack of awareness and accountability: “It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence that constitutes the crime.” Caroline Sinders’s installation “Feminist Data Set,” incorporating myriad texts on both paper and screens, examines artificial intelligence procedures to trace how a discrepancy between theoretic ideals and actual prejudice gets built into digital tools. Part of a long-term project (2017–) entailing workshops, seminars, and software, the piece also explores various ways that data gathering and processing can be used, conversely, to help disadvantaged communities challenge the dominant hetero-patriarchy. Dalila Sanabria’s resin-encased DHL envelope, Visas (2019), once contained visas for her parents, who had waited ten years for permission reenter the United States after an initial deportation. Lionel Milton offered paintings on plywood, Social Distance Social Justice and Strange Fruit (both 2020), memorializing Ahmaud Arbery, the unarmed Black man fatally shot while jogging in Georgia in 2020, and protesting the health disparities that allowed the coronavirus to ravage Black New Orleans. Combining weighty themes with mundane materials, such works bring today’s social justice issues home in every sense. Ariel René Jackson’s video The Future Is a Constant Wake (2019) was a standout in a
JORIAN CHARLTON Gallery TPW and Wedge Curatorial Projects IN 2017, JAMAICAN-CANADIAN photographer Jorian Charlton’s father gave her a bag full of slides, “for safekeeping.” The handover was so casual that Charlton didn’t look into the bag for several years. What she eventually found was a treasure trove of candid portraits and documentary photographs that her father, an engineer, had taken during the 1970s and ’80s, along the route that brought him from Jamaica to Toronto, by way of Atlanta and New Jersey. Charlton’s solo exhibition “Out of Many” pairs images from her father’s archive with her own recent photographs. Because of the pandemic, the show, originally intended for Toronto’s Gallery TPW, is instead presented on a dedicated website, out-of-many.ca. In Charlton’s portraits, style, pose, and repose become mood. The first section of the website presents fourteen of her photographs, interspersed with text by the show’s curator, Emilie Croning, and quotes from bell hooks’s 1995 essay “In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life.” The first image displayed, Untitled (Shai & Lex), 2020, shows a soft embrace: perched on a kitchen counter, one person snuggles, eyes
closed, while the other looks straight at the viewer. Charlton often stages this kind of ambiguous intimacy: in Untitled (Keosha), 2020, for instance, Charlton’s model leans back on a sofa, wearing a black bathing suit, bandana headscarf, and white stiletto boots. Her face is at ease, staring back at the viewer with an almost-smile. Shot from an oblique angle, the frame reveals awkward glimpses of the surrounding space, including part of the floor and rug, and an expanse of white wall, and a package peeking out from under the couch. A link at the bottom of the page invites you into a virtual tour of “The Living Room.” You are guided through a wood-paneled bungalow decorated with tropical plants, a plastic-covered couch, a record player, and a set of ceiling-high speakers. Framed images from Charlton’s father’s archive line the walls, and a slideshow flashes across the screen of an old television set. These are portraits of men, women, and children in their everyday lives—at the beach, on the street, in the backyard, showcasing the most fashionable looks of the era. Second-generation kids often have to build their own understanding of the past their parents left behind. “The Living Room” was designed to look like a Jamaican-Canadian household from the ’70s or ’80s, the period represented in the images. In this way, Charlton’s exhibition gently brings her private archive into the public. We have different sets of expectations for images depending on where they are shown. By sharing these documents from her father’s past alongside her own contemporary
Jorian Charlton: Untitled (Georgia), 2020; at Gallery TPW and Wedge Curatorial Projects.
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portraits, Charlton recontextualizes them, an important translation that shows how we as Black people see each other, and prefer to be seen. In Untitled (Georgia), 2020, a model in a pale skirt leans back into the grass and calmly faces the viewer. One leg is crossed archly over the other and the ties of her strappy sandal zigzag up her calf. There’s a lot of skin here, but this bareness, as in other photographs by Charlton, is not sexualized. Regardless of what they wear, her models are beautiful because they are self-possessed. They cannot be consumed by the viewer’s gaze; they own the world within the frame, and this security makes them untouchable. Representation is significant to Black people because our existence has long been circumscribed by surveillance, and our ways of being have been extracted to produce value and profit elsewhere. With Charlton’s photographs, it feels as if you, the viewer, are being looked at, and not the other way around. —Yaniya Lee
Picture” (2003–06), featuring intimate studies of LGBTQ friends and acquaintances, and “Somnyama Ngonyama” (2012–), comprising eighty self-portraits. Busi Sigasa, artist and former colleague at the Black lesbian organization Forum for the Empowerment of Women (FEW), cofounded by Muholi, was the first to be photographed for the ongoing black-and-white series “Faces and Phases” (2006–). Sigasa survived a hate crime only to succumb to AIDS eight months later, at the age of twenty-five. An HIV/ AIDS activist, she is commemorated in the exhibition catalogue with a reproduction of her poem “Remember Me When I’m Gone,” containing a list of timeless affirmations: “I crafted and drew beautiful pictures . . . I made nations aware.” People who are self-fashioning and who exercise bodily autonomy are typically forced to account for their presence in more ways than one, which often makes their public life extremely precarious. In “Brave Beauties” (2014–), a series of black-and-white portraits, Black transwomen Roxy, Yaya, Candice, Eva,
and others relax in private or visit a studio to pose, unabashedly displaying differences that are not ordained exclusively by nature. Muholi’s proud record of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and intersex South Africans serves as a cultural corrective, expanding prior notions of Black queerness and enriching the visual heritage of postapartheid South Africa. Oyewumi argues that “race and gender categories emanate from the preoccupation in Western culture with the visual and hence physical aspects of human reality. Both categories are a consequence of the bio-logic of Western culture.” When we overemphasize the visual sense and read the body solely as a blueprint for social engagement, we diminish the essence of personhood. What the West (and those who have adopted their habits) woefully neglect, Muholi’s photographs make clear, is the body as a lived experience—something much more than an object on view for assessment and categorization by others. —Rianna Jade Parker
LONDON
ZANELE MUHOLI IN HER 1997 BOOK THE INVENTION of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, Oyeronke Oyewumi, a US-based Nigerian theorist, contests the conventional assumption that gender is a fundamental social category in all cultures— an organizing principle that requires the marginalization of those deemed women. Instead, in pre-British Yoruba society, “anafemales, like the anamales, had multiple identities that were not based on their anatomy. The creation of ‘women’ as a category was one of the very first accomplishments of the colonial state.” In the new public sphere, the powerful colonizers and their local allies entrenched a two-gender model in social policies, practices, and ideologies. South African photographer Zanele Muholi’s documentation of their place of birth and nonbinary community was decorously staged at Tate Modern in late 2020, but sadly closed early due to the pandemic. With more than 260 photographs shot since 2000, as well as archival material and videos, this solo show was the most comprehensive presentation of the visual activist’s work to date. Highlights included Muholi’s most praised series, “Only Half the
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Zanele Muholi: Miss D’vine II, 2007, from the series “Brave Beauties,” Lambda print, 30 inches square; at Tate Modern.
Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg, and Yancey Richardson, New York
Tate Modern
Photo: Kat Hanegraaf
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TAMARIND INSTITUTE 2500 Central Ave., SE Albuquerque, NM 87106 Tel: 505.277.3901 Email: tamarind@unm.edu Web: tamarind.unm.edu Hours: Gallery is closed until further notice; clients
may continue to purchase prints either directly online, or by emailing tamarind@unm.edu. Printer and publisher of lithographs and monotypes. Since the workshop’s founding in 1960, Tamarind has advanced the standards and potential of collaborative printmaking around the world by training master printers and publishing prints by emerging and established artists. Prints are available by world-renowned artists such as Ellen Berkenblit, Enrique Martínez Celaya, Willie Cole, Elaine de Kooning, Jim Dine, Hung Liu, Louise Nevelson, Ed Ruscha, Kiki Smith, as well as treasured New Mexico artists Garo Antreasian, Frederick Hammersley, Jaune Quick-To-See Smith, and Fritz Scholder. Recent editions include works by Laylah Ali, Noel Anderson, Inka Bell, Mark Dion, Michael Krueger, Ellen Lesperance, Nicola López, Harold Mendez, linn meyers, Mark Mulroney, Rashaad Newsome, Aaron Noble, Outi Pieski, Hayal Pozanti, Robert Pruitt, Matthew Shlian, Shinique Smith, Rose B. Simpson, Paula Wilson and Susan York. Tamarind offers a variety of options for browsing its vast inventory, including New Releases, Final Impressions, and Classic collections under Purchase Prints at https://tamarind.unm.edu.
TANDEM PRESS 1743 Commercial Ave. Madison, WI 53704 Tel: 608.263.3437
Email: info@tandempress.wisc.edu Web: tandempress.wisc.edu Hours: By appointment
New and upcoming editions by Derrick Adams, Richard Bosman, Jeffrey Gibson, David Lynch, Ikeda Manabu, Maser, and, Swoon. Available editions by Andy Burgess, Suzanne Caporael, Squeak Carnwath, Robert Cottingham, Lesley Dill, Jim Dine, Benjamin Edwards, Sam Gilliam, Michelle Grabner, GRONK, Richard Haas, Al Held, Robert Kelly, José Lerma, Nicola López, Cameron Martin, Judy Pfaff, Sam Richardson, Alison Saar, David Shapiro, Robert Stackhouse, and Mickalene Thomas.
WILDWOOD PRESS LLC The City Museum, 701 North 15th St., 493E St. Louis, MO 63103 Tel: 314.540.6026 Email: wildwoodpress@gmail.com Web: wildwoodpress.us Hours: By appointment
Wildwood Press, founded in 1996 by master printer and publisher Maryanne Ellison Simmons, is dedicated to experimentation and the unexpected. Each year a small number of artists are invited to collaborate at Wildwood Press, known for both its custom papermaking and large printing presses. Wildwood Press specializes in unique images, small editions and multiples. Artists: Anne Appleby, Michael Berkhemer, Josely Carvalho, Christine Corday, Michael Eastman, Yizhak Elyashiv, Jane Hammond, Valerie Hammond, Tom Huck, Jerald Ieans, Mary Judge, Eva Lundsager, Erin McKenny, Michele Oka Doner, Gary Paller, Casey Rae, David Scanavino, Juan Sanchez, Linda Schwarz, David Shapiro, Xiaoze Xie.
New in inventory: etching editions by Matt Magee; monotypes by Judy Ledgerwood; monotypes on silk by Catherine Howe; mixed media works by Kate Petley; woodcuts by Cathie Crawford. Manneken Press publishes limited editions, unique prints, artists' books, portfolios, photographs and drawings by select contemporary artists. Artists represented: Carlos Andrade, Mel Cook, Cathie Crawford, Brian Cypher, Jack Davidson, Rupert Deese, LJ Douglas, Peter Feldstein, Jonathan Higgins, Catherine Howe, Richard Hull, Mary Judge, Gary Justis, Ted Kincaid, Judy Ledgerwood, Claire Lieberman, Matt Magee, Jane McNichol, Jill Moser, Tom Orr, Kate Petley, Justin Quinn, Jay Shinn, Sarah Smelser, Philip Van Keuren, and Brenda Zappitell. Call or email for current price list and availability. Open by appointment.
Xiaoze Xie Chinese Library No. 52 Photolithograph/Relief/Hand painting on Handmade Paper 35.5"h x 66"w. Edition of 24 with 4APs. Courtesy of Wildwood Press LLC.
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Hands On
A.i.A. Hangs with the People Who Handle the Art
Q &
A with Shauna Collier, head librarian of the National Museum of African American History and Culture Library, Washington, D.C. ihat changes have you seen during your time at the Smithsonian? I started in 2002 as the librarian for [one of the twenty or so Smithsonian facilities] the Anacostia Museum—now the Anacostia Community Museum—and around that time it merged with the Center for African American History and Culture. They had to be combined when legislation for the NMAAHC didn’t pass in Congress. Then,
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I left and came back to Smithsonian for my current position. When I first joined, the institution was going through a unifying process. Each museum is considered its own unit and, at the time, there wasn’t much standardization across the branches. In 2005, the building of the new African American museum was signed into law and the American Indian Museum opened. How do you select books for the collection? We first prioritize the needs of our own museum’s staff, then those of the larger Smithsonian staff, and finally, those of the independent research community. Additionally, if there’s enough scholarship, we collect publications on current events. For example, social justice and the Black Lives Matter movement are really popular right now. We librarians think of ourselves as forecasters, because we have to predict what might be a popular topic in the future. Is there a subject area that might trend among researchers in the coming years? I remember being surprised in 2014 that there wasn’t a lot of scholarship on LGBTQ subjects in our African American history and culture holdings. Every time I saw something, I snatched it up, because I had a feeling that it was going to be an important topic. Another area that’s currently underdeveloped among scholars is African American style. We have a fashion and style curator
on staff, so I often search out titles for her. I don’t know if the subject is ever going to trend, but it’s always going to be there. A few years ago, a research fellow was looking at the clothing of those who were enslaved in the Americas. The garments they wore said a lot about the plantation they were on and how wealthy the planter was. A lot of factors, like the type of fabric, and the slaves’ own sense of style came into play. I thought that was fascinating! It reminds me of the quilts that some scholars say were designed with signs and hung out as part of the Underground Railroad system. I have collected a few Vogue magazines featuring Beyoncé and Michelle Obama as a point of reference for contemporary African American style as well. I’m also hoping to see more scholarship on African American dandies, a term usually applied to a man—although, in recent history, there have been some women who are considered dandies—with a particular sense of style. In the early 1900s, these men had a certain walk and would wear shawls over a suit that resembled a tuxedo, with a nice top hat and a cane. In recent years, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article about black dandies on college campuses. There have been a few books on dandies and Dandyism too. But with all the social justice issues being debated right now in the African American community, this kind of scholarship is open to criticism. Still, there’s a lot of pride in Black style, and I hope there will be more research on it. ihat has been the most rewarding aspect of your job? I was so excited to be part of the opening of the museum in September 2016. There was a huge sense of accomplishment, because it took more work than I would ever have imagined. It was a fun day filled with activities and special guests like President Obama, the Bushes, and several celebrities. On a more regular basis, I enjoy seeing what comes out of the research, knowing that I contributed to its production. I also love when people visit the exhibits and learn something new, or when they take pride in seeing African American history and culture illuminated. I have had several people say that the museum felt like home, and that it was a feeling they’ve never had in any other museum. – Interview by Francesca Aton