Stitched in a critical intersection between art, sociology, and American fashion, the work of Nathaniel Mary Quinn forges a unique paradigm where visual language is used to highlight social invisibility and challenge conventional modes of perception. Quinn’s works on paper are orgies of intertwining pigments, textiles and dismembered limbs and the absence of the body highlights the lack of subjectivity in his drawings. Though the figure is undeniably a faint trace still visible in his works, the individual becomes trivialized and the clothes fetishized. In the artist’s own words, “the representation of people’s experiences seems more pronounced through the rendering of everyday objects, particularly clothing. In particular, it seems that media driven perceptions of clothing and contemporary urban black men work to exploit and integrate images traditionally coded for masculinity and femininity.” In highlighting the garment and the malleability of its form, Quinn both exposes and detaches imbedded stereotypes accompanying the clothing of specific cultures and sub cultures and opens up new space within which to discuss the difficulties of representation.

Quinn’s work is highly personal and committed to representing communities and concepts that are unrepresented or misrepresented in contemporary discourses on identity politics. The themes of separation and abandonment conjured in pieces like Champion, 2007 simultaneously confront the personal—the early death of Quinn’s mother—and the more collective experiences of social exclusion. This parallel between the socially invisible communities of the inner city housing that Quinn
grew up in and the ghostly presence of subjects in his drawings recontextualizes what Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man asserted half a decade back: identity politics are symbiotically linked to representation. Quinn and Ellison share an unapologetic approach to highlighting racial tensions in America and equally assert that the methods of addressing these issues are complex, varied and still worthy of critique and discussion. Quinn’s work questions the social constructs that challenge
representation and echoes Ellison’s fear that black identity is all to easily complicated by forces outside of individual agency and control.

Highlighting difference and oppressive binaries is something that Quinn has culled into a dynamic visual language that magnifies the various sites of objectification in contemporary art and media. Quinn further problematizes the issue of representation by introducing queer imagery and what he terms “the rubric of homoeroticism,” to challenge conditioned expectations of what a contemporary, urban, black art aesthetic is or could be. The title of this exhibition, The Majic Stick, is drawn from Lil’ Kim’s 2003 single “The Magic Stick”, a push-and-pull duet between Lil’ Kim and 50 Cent. The song is a frustrated duality of sexual empowerment and castration: the sex is mutually violent and both sexes are equally objectified. Quinn’s appropriation of this provocative text further taps into the stereotypes surrounding sexuality and hip-hop culture and authors a new perspective on the media’s depictions of blackness and loyalties to hyper-masculinity.

Quinn was born in 1977 in Chicago, Illinois and earned his MFA from New York University, Steinhardt School of Education in New York in 2002. Quinn has presented numerous solo exhibitions including The Great Lovely: From the Ghetto to the Sunshine at Five Myles Gallery in 2004 and Recent Works in Oil Pastel at Zion Gallery in 2005. In 2004, he was the recipient of the Five Myles Gallery Artist’s Grant Award and in 2001 won the National Arts Club First Prize. Quinn has illustrated children’s books including The Sharing Secret (2006), Giving Hands (2006), and Suit Shoes (2004) and currently teaches as Adjunct Professor of Art Appreciation at the College of New Rochelle.