Against Dystopia | Diane Rosenstein Gallery

Ray Anthony Barrett | Ashanti Chaplin | Phoebe Collings-James | Cara Despain | Andrae Green | Margaret Griffith | Jane Chang Mi | Olivia “LIT LIV” Morgan | Esteban Ramón Pérez | Adrienne Elise Tarver

Andrae Green, Divers X, 2023

Against Dystopia features artworks that inhabit a spectrum of anti-dystopian thought, from mobilizing conceptualism to overcome historic traumas and the precarity of the present, to envisioning future utopias against seemingly insurmountable odds. The exhibition is curated by nico w. okoro and includes ten international artists representing twelve cities across the United Kingdom, Jamaica, and all five regions of the United States. The drawings, installations, paintings, photographs, sculptures, and textiles on view are enriched by each artist’s distinct lived experience and actively resist inheritance of the status quo. Artworks are grouped into three thematic sections, each of which explores creative strategies of resistance and works against dystopia at all costs: field research, symbolic interactionism, and speculative fiction. 

Field Research

Ray Anthony Barrett (Missouri), Ashanti Chaplin (Oklahoma), Cara Despain (Utah/Florida), and Jane Chang Mi (Hawai‘i/California) use field research to map histories of frontierism, settler colonialism, and land politics onto ecological and socioeconomic systems today. With a focus on listening to the land and sea to both unearth and atone for difficult truths, these artists name and dismantle dystopian practices on the path to reconciliation. Embracing an appreciation for both hyperlocal traditions and the tenets of global citizenship, each underscores our shared duty to ensuring ecocultural sustainability and Earth’s habitability for future generations.

Ray Anthony Barrett, Cul-de-sac, 2021

Ray Anthony Barrett—an artist and chef who recently returned to his hometown of Kansas City, MO after living in Los Angeles for the past decade—takes an interdisciplinary approach to interrogating, “the evolution of agricultural and land practices and the impact of dispossession and colonialism on foodways.” His recent project, Go Tell It On The Mountain, which was commissioned by Active Cultures in 2021, documented a seven-month journey across the American West through writing, research, film and cooking. On view are three oil paintings, a photograph, and a sculpture that continue lines of inquiry explored on the road. Propelled by an impulse to, “reclaim agency around food security and survival in the midst of climate catastrophe,” Barrett looks to the land for answers, skills, and strategies, while also honoring the fraught histories of forced migration and displacement that it bears. In Uprooted, Barrett expertly illustrates this tension—and the enduring impacts of colonialism and slavery—by depicting the fractured nature of Black family trees, with missing or phantom limbs and roots.

Ashanti Chaplin, Untitled (Hidden Gospels of Dust) 1, 2024

Interdisciplinary artist Ashanti Chaplin characterizes her research-driven practice as, “a deep dive into materials and ideas with historical and archaeological significance.” A Tulsa, Oklahoma native, Chaplin finds inspiration in Oklahoma’s thirteen Historic Black Towns and what their rich red soil can teach us about, “the profundity of earth, the specificity and ambiguity of place, and a connection to a divine or cosmic life force.” In her recent body of work, Hidden Gospels of Dust, Chaplin conducted extensive research across all thirteen towns, gathering soil, clay, and dust in collaboration with community members, a process that engendered her groundbreaking work, Earth Elegy. Her works on view—which include an AI-generated photograph of an encapsulated dust devil, a series of meditative linseed oil and soil drawings, and an immersive sculptural installation with original score—extend from her ongoing research into dirt as subject of public spectacle and object of private ritual. While dust is often understood as the byproduct of Earth’s erosion or ruin, Chaplin channels its defiant endurance to render spiritual utopias that transcend Earthly limits. 

Cara Despain, slow burn (Factory Butte), 2022

Cara Despain is a multidisciplinary artist from Salt Lake City, Utah who grew up within a community of Downwinders impacted for generations by the fallout of nuclear testing conducted at the Nevada Test Site in the 1950s and 60s. In her drawing series, Operation Teapot —Turk Sequence, which at first glance resemble Rorschach tests whose, “splendor deeply betrays the harm,” Despain transforms mirrored stills from her video Test of Faith—which borrows declassified, archival footage of atomic tests—into dark yet delicate, “psychological abstractions.” Also on view are photographs from her Slow Burn series, where she ignites a dynamite fuse within the frame, “leaving a trail of destruction across a precious medium: landscape photography.” These powerful images—one of which depicts Owen’s Lake, a lake that was destroyed by the 1913 construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct and now sits as the greatest source of dust pollution in the country—caution us to protect nature from our ever-expanding ecological footprint, weapons development, and the man-made disasters both often leave in their wake. In her somber carbon painting Paradise, which is made of ashes she collected from the 2018 Camp Fire, Despain shifts her focus to the present and future tense, marking, “a changing climate and sustained forest mismanagement.” The work is part of an ongoing series of reimagined landscape paintings that—instead of depicting romanticized, Western utopias—“visualize large-scale systems change, and the consequences of human habitation on the planet.” 

Jane Chang Mi, Untitled - (Cocos nucifera (L.)), 2014 - present

Jane Chang Mi’s interdisciplinary artistic practice—which includes drawing, video, photography, textile, sculpture, and installation—is informed, in part, by her professional training as an ocean engineer. Adopting a research-based approach, she explores militourism, scientific colonization, and the post-colonial ocean environment to both expose, “the occupation and militarization of the Pacific Ocean by the United States,” and “express our contemporary relationship to nature and each other, enabling communication across cultures and barriers.” In Untitled - (Cocos nucifera (L.)), Mi considers how DNA analysis of more than 1,300 coconuts from around the world reveals that, “coconut genetics also preserve a record of prehistoric trade routes and of the colonization of the Americas.” Mi also celebrates the coconut as an abundant contemporary resource, whose milk, flesh, skin and coir can be used to sustain, “daily island and seafaring life,” in Hawai‘i where she and her extended family live. In Church of Life, she honors the significant contributions of Hawaiian activist George Jarrett Helm Jr. to the Aloha‘Āina movement, which advocates for collective stewardship of and care for the land. The felt banners are made of text from Hawaiian ‘ōlelo noʻeau, or proverbs, one of which reads, “100, Ako ‘e ka hale a pa‘a, a i ke komo ana mai o ka ho‘oilo, ‘a‘ole e kulu i ka ua o Hilinehu: Thatch the house beforehand so when winter comes it will not leak in the shower of Hilinehu. Do not procrastinate; make preparations for the future now.” 

Symbolic Interactionism 

While Margaret Griffith (California), Olivia Morgan (New York), and Adrienne Elise Tarver (New York) work through markedly different mediums and styles, they share a fearlessness in addressing ongoing tensions and questions surfaced amidst the political firestorm of 2020. Embracing tenets of symbolic interactionism, or the theory that individuals shape and are shaped by society through daily interactions and the co-creation of meaning from symbols, these artists remind us of the power of human connection to bridge difference. Each steers towards social cohesion by processing collective grief and the enduring impacts of the 2020 presidential election, the proliferation of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter Movement respectively. Whereas Morgan and Griffith subvert symbols that often polarize rather than unite us within physical space—such as fences, face masks, and smartphones—Tarver reaches into the past to pull forth reimagined symbols that speak to our spiritual interdependence. 

Margaret Griffith, 15th, 17th, and Pennsylvania, 2017/2019/2021/2024 

Margaret Griffith is a visual artist based in Los Angeles whose installations, sculptures, public art, and works on paper, “explore both the physical presence and psychological manifestations of boundaries and barriers found in the built environment.” In her work 15th, 17th and Pennsylvania, Griffith—who uses paper as both a 3D and 2D material—presents a life-size yet abstracted replica of the East and West gates of the White House in Washington, D.C.. She treats her delicate, hand-cut paper with metallic paint from The Home Depot to transform the gates—a symbol of power, privilege, and division—into a deceptively fortified proxy, “suggesting the power, decadence and ruin of an institution in crisis.” This work comes from a series in which Griffith critiques the ubiquity of gates, fences and walls in our daily lives, and their role in sowing division, parceling off community resources, and seeding dystopia within both urban and suburban landscapes. In State Drawings—a drawing project initiated in response to the 2020 presidential election that’s been expanded here to include all fifty states—Griffith depicts the, “uniquely shaped boundary of an individual state through a group of overlapping circles whose pattern [alludes] to early voting processes and the controversial butterfly voting ballots.” 

Olivia “LIT LIV” Morgan, In My Solitude, 2023

Olivia “LIT LIV” Morgan is a Jamaican–American photographer based in Harlem, New York, whose bold portraits both reflect her artistic journey as a queer woman of color and champion the, “emotional and physical narratives of overlooked and underrepresented people.” In discussing the significant role photography has played in her own life, Morgan states, “Photography helped me break away from my self-isolation; it allowed me to experience a new environment and meet new people.” In Chrome Heart Queens, Morgan depicts two Black women wearing chrome face masks that reflect both the abstracted visage of the other and their environs. Here, she takes an Afrofuturist approach to manifesting intimacy, connection and Black love amidst the pervasive isolationism and fear induced by the COVID-19 pandemic. In My Solitude, in contrast, depicts, “the disconnection we often feel, even when surrounded by people.” This striking black and white photograph invites viewers to consider dystopian forces at play within their day-to-day lives, preventing them from pursuing genuine connection and, “mobilizing collective resistance against shared struggles.” In When It’s All Said n’ Done, Morgan depicts two lovers smoking, following what one imagines was a tender moment of intimate connection, shattering conventional representations of gender binaries by depicting, “unbiased selves, pure and enthralled in love.”

Adrienne Elise Tarver, Devil Tapestry, 2023

Adrienne Elise Tarver, an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York, addresses, “the complexity and invisibility of Black female identity,” through her multifaceted practice. On view are three tapestries from her Manifesting Paradise series which began in 2020 against the backdrop of the Black Lives Matter protests and features symbolism inspired by tarot cards. Embodying Tarver’s, “desire to know that there is progress and beauty in the future,” the tapestries borrow an ancient divination framework to manifest the world one wants to see today. Tarver expounds, “More than just stating our existence (I am a man) or that we matter (Black Lives Matter), and similar in sentiment to Sun Ra’s ‘We are in the Future’, Manifesting Paradise ventures into unknown futures to decipher the messages that we need to hear in the present…Having come of age in a thriving economy and entering the workforce amongst its demise, my generation’s search for omens is related to a mistrust in institutions that destabilized futures we were promised and that in many cases never had our well-being or future interests in mind.” Also on view are two collages from Immersed, a series that triumphantly depicts nude brown women emerging from utopian landscapes and questions if these figures are real, or merely, “figments of desire and representations of another archetype—the mythological, the muse, the inhabitants of the unreal utopia?” 

Speculative Fiction

Phoebe Colling-James (United Kingdom), Andrae Green (Massachusetts/Jamaica) and Esteban Ramón Pérez (California) boldly envision alternative realities by using speculative fiction and symbolic allegory to sew threads of connection across time and space. Each resists linearity and subverts narrative tropes to instead materialize the fluid spiritual dimensions of lived experience. Through their layered ceramics, paintings, and sculptures, these artists mine the depths of their respective Jamaican/British, Jamaican/American, and Chicanx heritages to comment more broadly on social conditions today, prompting us to dream beyond what’s readily visible or knowable.

Andrae Green, Ode to Meta, 2024

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Andrae Green's artistic practice emanates from his early discovery of Marvel comics as a portal to transcend the economic hardship and social upheaval he experienced there. This discovery sparked a deep inner world, where Green envisioned whimsical characters and narratives that embodied hope and freedom, motifs that persist in his vibrant paintings today. Through imaginative allegory, Green explores, “the existential and phenomenological aspects of living a meaningful life through the lens of family relationships.” In his ongoing Divers series, Green stages a dialogue between his deceased father and his young son against the reimagined backdrop of Kingston Harbor, evoking nostalgia whilst embodying the power and importance of knowledge transfer between generations. In Ode to Meta, Green depicts Meta Warwick Fuller—an under celebrated artist of the Harlem Renaissance and, “an agent of change who worked against the dystopian realities of her time,”—overlooking a row of modern apartment buildings. A believer in hope as, “the best defense against dystopia,” Green connects historic struggles to contemporary life, reminding viewers of their agency and responsibility to enact change today. 

Phoebe Collings-James, The Preacher , 2023

British-Jamaican artist Phoebe Collings-James works across ceramics, drawing, and sound to excavate, “knowledges of feelings, the debris of violence, language and desire which are inherent to living and surviving within hostile environments.” On view is a selection from their new series of anthological sculptures that animate ceramic forms, exploring the, “relationships between heresy, faith, and orthodoxies of church, state, and society.” Here, Collings-James depicts four archetypes—the Guardian, Preacher, Silo and Infidel—placing their perceived societal roles in productive dialogue and imagining their collective action against forces of oppression. The speculative narrative Collings-James materializes is further nuanced by each individual sculpture’s formal treatment, which includes sgraffito, or surface scratches to reveal hidden symbols, patterns, and words within. Addressing the fraught sociopolitical histories that clay holds while also honoring its historic role in evidencing, “the earliest known forms of communication,” Collings-James deems its firing a political act that, “[sets] imperial wastelands on fire,” to make space for new narratives.

Esteban Ramón Pérez, You Are Not Your Body, 2023

Interdisciplinary artist Esteban Ramón Pérez draws upon his Los Angeles upbringing, Chicanx heritage, and formative experiences as an apprentice in his father’s upholstery shop to create transcendent artworks exploring the political intersections of social, cultural, and spiritual identities. Pérez renders evocative narratives and radiating compositions on scrap leather that stitch together fragmented postcolonial histories and collective memories. In, You Are Not Your Body, Pérez uses automotive tape to freehand draw, mask off, and paint his interpretation of the halo of the Mexican Virgin Mary, a supernatural mother figure who appeared as an apparition yet embodies hope for salvation. Resisting the aesthetics of the Mexican Baroque art through which she is most often depicted—and instead opting for a Postmodern, non-figurative portrait—Pérez offers meditative space in which to consider the role of idols in guiding our actions in times of crisis. While his more figurative paintings insist upon a close read by using scarring techniques, similar to that of a tattoo, to embed a narrative directly within the leather, this, “emanation-as-portrait,” demands that the viewer maintain a pensive distance from the work to take in its message. By transforming rasquache, or discarded materials, into loaded objects of spiritual, cultural, and artistic value, Pérez celebrates the ingenuity of Chicanx culture, and articulates a practice of dual reverence and resistance.

Conclusion

Against Dystopia is a far-reaching exhibition, both in terms of the diverse backgrounds and approaches of its featured artists, and the social, cultural, and geographic ecosystems those artists represent and critique. Presented on the eve of the 2024 presidential election, Against Dystopia transforms fear and anxiety surrounding the uncertainty of our shared future into a tangible site of hope—one where collective memory reminds us of our agency to enact change today, and rich cultural traditions empower us to imagine alternative futures. Of significance is the inclusion of artists who identify as multihyphenates, playing numerous social roles within their communities, such as advocate, change agent, chef, documentarian, educator, father, filmmaker, mother, musician, oceanographer, researcher, and too many more to name. Against Dystopia opens concurrently with The Getty's Pacific Standard Time: Art x Science x LA, which similarly explores, “opportunities for civic dialogue around some of the most urgent problems of our time by exploring past and present connections between art and science.” By convening an international group of visionary artists to help initiate these dialogues, Against Dystopia prompts viewers to pursue deeper understanding of shared challenges and solutions, on both the micro and macro levels.

AGAINST DYSTOPIA RESOURCE LIST

AGAINST DYSTOPIA READING LIST

  1. Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World, 2021

  2. Ray Anthony Barrett, Dispatches from the Western Wild, 2021

  3. adrienne maree brown, Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation, 2021

  4. Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, 1993

  5. Tanehesi Coates, The Message, 2024

  6. T.J. Demos, Radical Futurisms, 2023

  7. Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem, 2020

  8. Demian DinéYazhi´, WE LEFT THEM NOTHING, 2021

  9. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, 2024

  10. Woody Guthrie, House of Earth, 2013

  11. Epeli Hau‘ofa, We Are the Ocean: Selected Works, 2008

  12. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, 2015

  13. Noor Hindi, Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow, 2022

  14. Hannah Holmes, The Secret Life of Dust: From the Cosmos to the Kitchen Counter, the Big Consequences of Little Things, 2003

  15. Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, 2003

  16. Diane Lutz, Deep History of Coconuts Decoded, 2011

  17. Robert MacFarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey, 2019

  18. Ms. Lilly McEachern, Painting Hope: Selected Works by Andrae Green, 2024

  19. Hoodoo Sen Moise, Working Conjure: A Guide to Hoodoo Folk Magic, 2018

  20. Rodney Morales, Hoʻi Hoʻi Hou: A Tribute to George Helm & Kimo Mitchell, 1984

  21. Toni Morrison, Paradise, 2014

  22. Mary Kawena Pukui, 'Ōlelo No'eau: Hawaiian Proverbs and Poetical Sayings, 1983

  23. Frank Shyong, Column: Fences in Los Angeles Have Gotten Taller, Gone Horizontal, Redefining Neighborhood Life, 2024

  24. Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa, Sweat and Salt Water, 2021

  25. Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai‘i, 1999

  26. Derek Walcott, Omeros, 1990

AGAINST DYSTOPIA WATCHLIST

  1. Ray Anthony Barrett, Go Tell It On The Mountain, Active Cultures, 2021

  2. Ken Burns, The Dust Bowl, PBS, 2012

  3. Ashanti Chaplin, Dust to Dirge, ArtNow 2023, Oklahoma Contemporary, 2023

  4. Cara Despain, Carbon Paintings, Slow Burn, and Test of Faith, Vimeo, 2024

  5. George Helm, Kaho`olawe Aloha `Aina, YouTube, 1977

AGAINST DYSTOPIA PLAY LIST 

  1. Nina Chanel Abney, Jigsaw Puzzle, MoMA Design Store

  2. Derrick Adams, TLRAR Black Unicorn Pool Floatie, The Last Resort Artist Retreat Shop

  3. DARNstudio, G.O.A.T. The Art Game, Newark Museum of Art

  4. Cara Despain, Plastocene Swimwear Line, 2022

  5. Naima Green, Pur·suit, 2019

  6. Adrienne Elise Tarver, Manifesting Paradise Tarot Deck

AGAINST DYSTOPIA MIXTAPE

  1. Pastor T.L. Barrett and The Youth for Christ Choir, Like A Ship (Without a Sail), 2017

  2. Phoebe Collings-James, Soundcloud

  3. Chick Corea, Mad Hatter Rhapsody, 1978

  4. George Helm, A True Hawaiian, 1996

  5. Bob Marley, One Drop, 1979

  6. Aja Monet, When the Poems Do What They Do, 2023

  7. Serafine 1369 and Young Nettle, Sounds 4 Survival: We Make A Way To Invent The Rhythm Through Versions Of Our Shared Name, Counterflows, 2021

  8. Burning Spear, Marcus Garvey, 1975

Colored People’s Time: On the Aesthetics of Black Spatiotemporal Resistance | The Montclair Art Museum

Century: 100 Years of Black Art at MAM surveys far more than seminal artworks by visionary Black artists over the last hundred years; it also honors the profound beauty and unrivaled ingenuity of everyday Blackness. Along this spectrum between the eminent and the quotidian, we observe the social constructs, cultural innovations, and political gestures that have largely shaped Black life. Curatorially, we study these not as chronological phenomena to be subsumed by the dominant art historical narrative but rather as a constellatory body of evidence that testifies to the African diaspora’s enduring pursuit of spiritual sovereignty and refusal to be governed by Western conventions. Within the Black cosmos that is Century—where “century” is not a measurement of linear time, but rather a conceptual container to hold a rich cross-section of works from MAM’s collection that claim unapologetically Black space—we champion the subversive circuity of the Black radical imagination. Here, we are author and protagonist, the seer and the seen, and bold innovators of a spacetime continuum all our own.

While the cultural origins of time date back to ancient Egypt—and the sundials, water clocks, and astronomical practices designed by African people to live in harmony with the Earth and its seasons—timekeeping is not commonly spoken of as a Black invention. Rather, having been colonized by the West and repurposed as a tool of governance and oppression, timekeeping is often only attributed to Black Americans in the derogatory. Around the onset of the century that this exhibition surveys, Colored People’s Time—or CPT as it’s known in African American Vernacular English (AAVE)—emerged as a colloquialism to typecast Black people as habitually late and lazy. While CPT was in fact coined and circulated within the Black community itself, the dangerous stereotypes behind it have roots in the Antebellum South and the language slave owners used to dehumanize and devalue the people of African descent that they owned as property.

A little over a century after the so-called abolition of slavery, Black Literature professor Ronald Walcott published an essay in Black World Magazine entitled, “Ellison, Gordone, Tolson: Some Notes on the Blues, Style & Space.” In it, he repositioned Black people as keepers of their own time and holders of their own space, while recontextualizing CPT not as a derogation but rather as the strategic outcome of what I’ve termed Black spatiotemporal resistance. He argued, “CP Time actually is an example of Black people's effort to evade, frustrate and ridicule the value-reinforcing strictures of punctuality that so well serve this coldly impersonal technological society. Time is the very condition of Western civilization which oppresses so brutally. Yet if one, obviously, can no more evade time than one can escape from oneself, one can still seek to minimize its effects, which can only be done by finding solid ground on which to defend oneself, on which to operate.”[1]

This notion of defending against the violence of Western time and mitigating its negative impacts through resistance, innovation, transcendence, and the creation of cultural refuges is a central thesis of this essay. Unpacking both the rich cultural activity and active mechanisms of oppression that might prevent Black people from adhering to imposed strictures of punctuality, this research pulls forward for observation artworks that upset Eurocentric constructs of time and subjecthood. First, it will consider how Black artists have used photography as a worldbuilding device, reclaiming stolen time and forging safe space for Black culture to continuously reinvent itself. Second, it will observe vignettes of radical rest and leisure where Black interiority is expressed without inhibition and time stands still within safe spaces of our own creation. Across both areas of exploration, time is repatriated to its origins in the Black radical imagination and stripped of its colonial uses, and Black artists are celebrated for envisioning portals to transcend worldly limits, manifesting Black planets free from the often-oppressive gravity of whiteness.


Black Worldbuilding Through Photography

 

Throughout America’s sordid political history, Black photographers have demonstrated that capturing the breadth and depth of Black life against what writer Zora Neal Hurston termed, “a sharp white background,”[2] takes immense cultural aptitude. It demands the capacity to see art not only as a mirror reflecting what’s readily visible on society’s surface, but also as a multidimensional portal to rich countercultures and parallel universes. Considered two of America’s most influential Black photographers, James Van Der Zee and Gordon Parks feature in MAM’s collection as both historical anchors of the Black documentary photography tradition and as artists whose avant-garde aesthetic approaches transformed the very medium itself. Together, they augmented photography’s capacity to represent the plural dimensions of Black life and documented the myriad nuances of Black identity.

Long before the Western canon was able to perceive Black photography as art, let alone the lives that it documented as art worthy, Van Der Zee was celebrated within the Black community as a leading artist of his generation. He dutifully chronicled the Harlem Renaissance and its leaders, alongside the lives of everyday Black people, with technological precision and aesthetic innovation. In Van Der Zee’s Portrait of a Young Woman, 1930—which embodies the unique care that he brought to his craft—the artist adds a luminescent bracelet and ring to his sitter by hand-drawing directly onto the film negative, and further embellishes the print through applying rich greens, oranges, and pinks to accent natural elements within the composition (Fig. 1).

Across his expansive body of work, Van Der Zee used these same methods to balance shadows, retouch imperfections, and add fictional narrative elements that he felt augmented his sitters’ distinct auras. By transforming these staged portraits into transcendent works of art that imagined whom his subjects might be, free from the stereotypes imposed by dominator culture, he honored the rich complexities of Blackness and preserved the fluidity of Colored People’s Time. Additionally, by cultivating his Harlem studio as a safe space for Black people to express their intersectional identities, particularly amid the social upheaval and cultural reinvention of the Great Migration, Van Der Zee demonstrated the important role that art and artists played in shaping Black American culture in the wake of slavery.

While Van Der Zee’s commissioned studio portraits are celebrated as his defining contribution to the art historical canon, it was his mass-produced newspaper photographs, such as this one held in MAM’s collection and published in Negro World in August, 1924, that—as art history professor Emilie Boone asserts in her essay, “Reproducing the New Negro: James Van Der Zee’s Photographic Vision in Newsprint,” published in the Smithsonian’s American Art in 2020—“expand[ed] the possibilities of the role of photography during the New Negro era.”[3] A lesser-known yet historically significant body of work, these images, especially when viewed in aggregate, claim necessary space within the dominant historical narrative for a fuller, more authentic representation of Black public life (Cat. 1).

Here, Van Der Zee documents a group of Black Cross Nurses marching during the 1924 Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) Annual Convention Parade that celebrated the birthday of its founder, Pan-Africanist leader Marcus Garvey. The image, alongside the numerous others produced during Van Der Zee’s contract as the UNIA’s exclusive photographer, bears witness to a culture reinventing itself within the Black mecca of Harlem. As Boone argues, Van Der Zee’s photographic vision helped the UNIA to “regain the appearance of unity and progress,” and “establish a particular visual representation of the New Negro as a Black populace pridefully inhabiting its space.”[4] Van Der Zee bravely deployed photography in the creation, representation, proliferation, and ownership of unapologetically Black space, mobilizing a strategy of Black spatiotemporal resistance in Harlem with ripple effects that could be felt across the African diaspora.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, multidisciplinary artist Todd Gray similarly uses photography to establish a particular visual representation of Blackness and map altogether new spatial and temporal relationships within the African diasporic consciousness. Euclidean Gris Gris (Tropic of Entropy), 2019, consists of four framed prints, sourced from the artist’s personal archive, that are expertly manipulated and juxtaposed to evoke a palpable tension between the legible and the illegible, the objective and the subjective, and the real and the imagined (Cat. 64). Two rectangular photographs of lush Ghanaian foliage, washed in bright blue and neon pink color blocks, frame the overall composition which ascends skywards from the lower left. Between them sits an ovular image of a historic statue standing in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, the view of which is partially eclipsed by a tree in the foreground whose green leaves contrast with the transitioning yellow leaves of a tree in the background that litters the otherwise manicured garden. At the top of the composition floats a circular image, shot by the Hubble Space Telescope, of a celestial body cast against the infinite blackness of deep space.

This work is part of a series that compares geometrically designed European gardens with indigenous African landscapes to expose living legacies of colonialism, reimagine power relations between Africa and the West, and contrast constructs of beauty with the raw beauty of the natural world. Through his stacked, somewhat sculptural compositions, Gray intrepidly weaves together disparate elements, across time and space, to disrupt the linearity of history and subvert Western notions of causality. While the work is conceptual in nature, its title speaks concretely to Black spatiotemporal resistance: Euclidean refers to Western, geometric spatial prescriptions; Gris-Gris references an African Voodoo amulet endowed with protective powers; Tropic denotes a specific longitudinal or latitudinal position; and Entropy conjures a state of uncertainty shaped by forces of disorder. The artist’s profound use of poetics, coupled with his literal reframing of cultural binaries and iconographies, assert Black conceptualism as a powerful aesthetic strategy of resistance.

Nearby, Lorna Simpson—who began her career as a documentary photographer and moved on to conceptualism, carrying the tenets of documentary practice with her—similarly engages visual poetry to disrupt Western conceptions of time and space. In Coiffure, 1991, Simpson presents a horizontal triptych of black-and-white images that use the time-consuming photogravure printing method to cast her portraits against an inky black background (Cat. 33). On the left is the portrait of a woman with short natural hair, captured from behind, who wears a black top revealing her bare upper back. The central image is of an immaculately braided crown, looped in four concentric circles. And on the right is an image depicting the interior of a decorative African wood mask with a hanging wire running along its width.

The atypical perspective in these portraits—just like Simpson’s subversive use of cropping to “resist traditional ways of presenting the black female body while nevertheless insisting on her presence"[5]—is important in that it, like Black photography itself, reveals what’s behind or underneath Black subjectivities, as opposed to what’s merely legible on the surface. Beneath the triptych rest ten engraved plaques resembling object labels found in a museum, whose words annotate a script: “braid into four circles,” and “part into eight sections for the crown,” and so on. The ten plaques denote steps in a process, marking an abstract quantity of time while also conjuring the existence of concrete space, where two bodies might meet to perform these acts as an identity-affirming ritual.

That same year, Simpson produced a vertical triptych—Counting, 1991—which uses the image of the braided crown as a visual anchor, atop which she stacks the screen-printed image of a South Carolina smokehouse akin to those formerly used to house slaves; notably, the repetitive patterns found in the coiled braid are mirrored, albeit abstractly, in the circular brickwork of the structure (Fig. 2). Atop these, Simpson places the portrait of a woman, this time wearing a white top, captured from the front, and cropped just above her lips. The images are accompanied by texts that either mark the passing of time or allude to the construction of space: a series of time blocks caption the portrait of the woman; “310 years ago” and “1575 bricks” caption the image of the smokehouse; and a tally of twists, braids, and locks caption the image of the braided crown.

Across both works, Simpson improvises visual taxonomies and experiments with systems of enumeration that recall “the systems of documentary and anthropological photography in which pictures are regarded as evidence,”[6] while concurrently questioning the linearity of history and evidencing Colored People’s Time as a tool of its subversion. In the artist’s own words, these strategies are informed by her desire to “challenge the idea of subjectivity,” itself and to question “how we come to know the subject, and our desire to know the subject through details.”[7] Simpson's nuanced photographic explorations deliver us now to a discussion on the pervasive gaps and reductive tropes in popular representations of Blackness across history.

Black Leisure and Interiority as Resistance

 

In The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture, author Kevin Quashie explores these representational gaps, observing how popular depictions of Black culture often focus on performative Blackness and public gestures of resistance while overlooking intimate rituals and domestic expressions of interiority, such as those so boldly captured in Simpson’s work. He states, “The representation of black subjectivity as resistant has become a convenient simplification of what is surely more complicated; it is an easy template that does not encourage deeper, closer interrogation of cultural texts and moments. Our understanding of black culture becomes flat, and our sense of what characterizes black representation appears as a list of familiar terms—expressiveness, resistance, colorful, loud, dramatic, doubled. What would it mean to consider black cultural identity through some other perspective, like quiet, like interiority?"[8] Quashie’s prompt encourages us to consider the fraught historical relationship between Black expression and publicness—such as that captured across Van Der Zee’s work—while examining the outsize yet underrated role quietude and interiority play in shaping one’s identity and relation to self.

In unpacking this thesis, Black leisure becomes a launch point for the exploration of the rich inner life of a people systemically denied both the freedom of expression and the right to rest. Leisure is predicated upon access to free time, the resources to use that time for enjoyment, and the freedom of choice to do so in a self-defined way. As such, it’s no wonder that—in a country built upon the enslavement of Black people, the exploitation of their labor, and the extraction of their numerous resources—the sociological concept of Black leisure has remained as elusive as its materialization. Early portrayals of freed Black Americans often mistook self-care for indolence, and, in the wake of slavery, Black Codes emerged as a political tool to further govern our right to leisure. From controlling our movements through public space to dictating when and where we could congregate, Black Codes suppressed our human rights and freedoms in practice.

As independent historian Alison Rose Jefferson asserts in the curatorial statement for her exhibition, Black California Dreamin’: Claiming Space at America's Leisure Frontier, on view at the California African American Museum in 2023, “access to nature, recreation, and sites of relaxation—in other words, leisure—is critical to pursuing the full range of human experience, self-fulfillment, and dignity.”[9] Even under segregation and other tactics of racial persecution within the public realm, Black people boldly enacted leisure practices within their own homes and neighborhoods. From intimate weekend afternoons spent shaping rich oral history traditions on front porches, to late nights spent improvising jazz licks and blues riffs in packed clubs and speakeasies, we have situated Black identity within the specificity of our own cultural traditions, and pursued self-fulfillment against sizeable odds.

The life and work of American sculptor William Edmondson—who was born to freed slaves in Tennessee during the dawn of the Jim Crow era and went on to become the first Black, self-taught artist to have a solo show at MoMA in 1937—holds the many tensions and contradictions of what it meant at that time to be a free Black person in pursuit of dignity. Along his path to becoming a successful artist-entrepreneur who sold tombstones chiseled from discarded pieces of limestone out of his backyard, Edmondson worked at a hospital, a railroad company, and a stonesman’s studio, where he likely learned to wield the railroad spikes and hammer that he used to fashion his minimalist yet monumental sculptures. In Po’ch Ladies, 1941— “po’ch” being AAVE for “porch”—Edmondson depicts a pair of women, presumably sitting on their front porch, a familiar sight across Nashville’s numerous Black neighborhoods (Cat. 3). They gaze forwards—one with her arms crossed low across her lap and the other with her right hand draped pensively across her heart—observing what one imagines are passersby on the street in front of them. Despite their body language’s evocation of a broader scene, the two are clearly embedded in an intimate, leisurely moment of connection.

In her New York Times article, “On the Front Porch, Black Life in Full View,” journalist Audra D. S. Burch discusses the cultural and narrative importance of the porch, stating, “In its framed simplicity, the front porch has been a fixture in American life, and among African-Americans it holds outsize cultural significance…the front porch has served as a refuge from Jim Crow restrictions; a stage straddling the home and the street, a structural backdrop of meaningful life moments. It is like the quietest family member; a gift where community lives and strangers become neighbors.”[10] Here, Burch gives shape to the porch that Edmondson so brilliantly conjures through his work, proclaiming it as a shelter from Western forces of spatiotemporal oppression, and platform for staging the moments of social connection and cultural affirmation that define a community. Moreover, Burch celebrates the porch as a dual public and private space, where what happens inside the sanctity of one’s own home comes into often sobering political dialogue with the realities of the world around it.

While the porch may indeed hold outsize cultural significance, Faith Ringgold’s silkscreen quilt, Tar Beach 2, 1990, stages the rooftop of a New York City brownstone as the structural backdrop for a scene of radical Black leisure and the uninhibited dreams of Cassie Louise Lightfoot (Cat. 32). A fictional character inspired by Ringgold’s own upbringing in Harlem, the young girl discovers that—through harnessing the power of her imagination—she can teleport through time and space, taking in the sights and sounds of her neighborhood and rewriting its stories from a bird’s-eye view.

She soars over the skyline on a hot summer’s night, gazing pridefully upon a scene of her own invention; her family, the Lightfoots, playing cards before enjoying a meal with their neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Honey. Laundry billows on the line while she and her brother BeBe lie on their backs gazing skywards, surrounded by vibrant green plants that delineate the rooftop “beach” from the sea of skyscrapers that encircle it like an island. The scene is at once ordinary and extraordinary, earthly and otherworldly, as the work holds the tension of embodying the unbound Black imagination while questioning the capacity for Cassie’s dreams of physical and spiritual liberation to manifest in reality. An expert visual storyteller, Ringgold claims and cultivates space for collective Black leisure to unfold, while also celebrating Cassie’s fierce self-determination and commitment to building a prismatic universe in which to see herself and her community dynamically reflected.

While visual storytelling is deployed as a strategy of spatiotemporal resistance across the exhibition, it uniquely manifests in Carmen Cartiness Johnson’s depictions of Black leisure. A self-taught artist, Johnson believes that “art should break boundaries and challenge rules,” whereas it should not “require the viewer to have academic education in order to understand.”[11] A true storyteller and believer in art as an effective language to communicate the profundity of quotidian Black life, her intimate paintings and drawings depict Black people reading books, enjoying cocktails, lounging on the stoop, dancing at a party, sharing a family meal, and chatting in the yard.

Johnson wholeheartedly rejects the notion that, to be a subject worthy of art, one must subscribe to the politics of respectability imposed and governed by Western standards of beauty and decorum. Instead, she carves out unapologetic space for Blackness to reflect and define itself. This refusal is embodied in her lithograph Chit Chat and Apple Martinis, 2005, where a group of friends lounge around a coffee table, enjoying each other’s company as much as the martinis in their hands (Cat. 47). While there are no features or expressions rendered on their faces—as is typical in Johnson’s work, especially her group portraits—their nonchalant body language narrates the scene, with heads craned skywards in deep relaxation. Like Ringgold’s Tar Beach 2, the scene is depicted from a bird’s-eye view, giving viewers the sense that this is an intimate moment made possible by the sanctity of the Black home and the loving community that animates it.

Celebrated photographer Gordon Parks—perhaps best known for his striking images that documented American culture and Black public life between the 1940s and 2000s—was similarly interested in what scenes from Black private life could communicate about our humanity. This interest was in part shaped by his humble upbringing in a family of fifteen children living under segregation in Fort Scott, Kansas. In 1950, Parks returned to his hometown while working as the first Black staff photographer at LIFE magazine. His assignment—an ultimately unpublished photo essay that was pulled to make space for more “pressing” news—was to find his classmates from the Plaza Middle School Class of 1927 and document the lasting social, professional, and economic impacts of segregation on their lives. While the assignment originated in Fort Scott, where Parks discovered that only one of his classmates, Luella Russell, remained, it soon sent him to Black neighborhoods across the country, and the stoops, porches, and parlors of long-lost friends who’d left in pursuit of something.

Fort Scott, Kansas (Family in Living Room), ca.1950, is one in the rarely seen series that documents how Black families transcended the daily spatiotemporal aggressions of racial segregation and discrimination, making a way out of no way (Cat. 6). Here, Parks captures the Russell family during a leisurely afternoon in the parlor of their Fort Scott home. He shoots the image through an arched doorway, which—coupled with the fact that the curtains are drawn and the Russells do not directly engage the camera—frames the intimacy of the moment. Luella’s teenage daughter Shirley lies on the floor, one leg kicked up fancifully, while writing in a large notebook. Luella’s husband Clarence reclines on the sofa while reading the paper as she sits next to him, smiling radiantly while engaging in a domestic craft. They are at once together in space and alone in their respective activities; the power of their connection and ease of their alone togetherness  is palpable and affirms the rich interiority of the moment. However, there is something else at work here; some other essential quality of Colored People’s Time that embodies what Quashie has so poetically termed the “sovereignty of quiet.”

In the conclusion to his book, Quashie asserts, “Oneness is the interior as a place capable of discovery, of wandering, the risk and freedom to be had in being lost in one’s self. Recent scholarship has emphasized the importance of migration and movement as a way to expand what racial identities mean…what is often missing is a consideration of the mobility that is part of interiority, the inevitable human capacity to wander without ever taking a step.”[12] Here, Quashie delivers stunning language to the radiant truth emanating from this photograph; that, despite being the only family to remain in Fort Scott, perhaps the Russells need not venture so far afield—beyond rich moments such as this one, or the sanctity of the space they have co-created within it—to pursue adventure, enrichment, or opportunity.

As portals to parallel universes, the art, books, and cultural artifacts adorning their parlor exteriorize Quashie’s concept of the mobility that is part of interiority, reinforcing the sense that the Russells’ forceful collective imagination has materialized a cultural refuge; one defined both spatially and temporally on their own terms, and whose walls are impervious to the anthropological gaze of LIFE magazine’s predominately white readership. That this photograph, and the resilience and subtle resistance it exudes, was not considered newsworthy or art worthy enough to publish is perhaps a testament to the true sovereignty of Black quiet, and the sheer capacity of the Black radical imagination to resist cooptation, both knowingly and unknowingly.

While each artwork in Century indeed resists—be it overtly through the subject matter it depicts or covertly through the canonical art practices it disrupts—it would be an overstatement to claim that these works were created as acts of resistance in and of themselves. In fact, what’s more plausible is that each was produced during a moment of profound Black interiority, such as this one so transcendentally depicted by Parks; a moment where the unbridled creativity that is an utter fact of Blackness was set free to wander. That our society is still learning to see this interiority—as both a bold expression of identity and subtle act of resistance—speaks to just how limited popular portrayals of Blackness really are. If there is a call to action in this study of the aesthetics of Black spatiotemporal resistance, it is for Black people to continue to subvert time, consume space, and refuse flatness like our futures and the light of the whole world depend on it.


—

[1] Ronald Walcott, “Ellison, Gordone, Tolson: Some Notes on the Blues, Style & Space,” Black World Magazine (1972): 9.

[2] Zora Neal Hurston, “How it Feels to Be Colored Me,” World Tomorrow, 1928.

[3] Emilie Boone, “Reproducing the New Negro: James Van Der Zee’s Photographic Vision in Newsprint,” American Art (2020): 6.

[4] Ibid, 15.

[5] “Counting (X1992-1),” artmuseum.princeton.edu, artmuseum.princeton.edu/collections/objects/17592.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Andrianna Campbell, “Lorna Simpson,” Artforum (November 26, 2016), artforum.com/interviews/lorna-simpson-talks-about-her-recent-paintings-and-solo-exhibition-in-fort-worth-64979.

[8] Kevin Everod Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012, 133.

[9] “CAAM | Black California Dreamin’: Claiming Space at America’s Leisure Frontier,” caamuseum.org, caamuseum.org/exhibitions/2023/black-california-dreamin-african-americans-and-the-frontier-of-leisure.

[10] Burch, Audra D. S., and Wayne Lawrence. “On the Front Porch, Black Life in Full View,” New York Times, December 4, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/12/04/us/porch-detroit-black-life.html.

[11] “Featured Artist of the Month: Carmen Cartiness Johnson Feb. 2013.” TheArtList - Art & Photo Calls for Visual Artists and Photographers., www.theartlist.com/featured-artists/feb-13-carmen-cartiness-johnson#:~:text=I%20think%20art%20should%20break.

[12] Quashie, 125–126.

Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere: Freedom Dreams in Contemporary Art | The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art

Derrick Adams, The Black School & Bryan Lee Jr., Phoebe Boswell, Jesse Chun, Abigail DeVille, Zachary Fabri, Ja’Tovia Gary, Golden, Kordae Henry, Iyapo Repository, Jarrett Key, Yashua Klos, Miguel Luciano, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Zora J Murff, Jordan Nassar, Christie Neptune, Wanda Raimundi Ortiz and Xaviera Simmons

Cannupa Hanska Luger, New Myth, 2022

Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere: Freedom Dreams in Contemporary Art lauds the vital role of artists in dismantling broken systems, envisioning new shared realities, and building future alternatives. Drawing inspiration from Robin D.G. Kelley’s seminal book, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, the exhibition takes up his provocation that “without new visions we don't know what to build, only what to knock down.” From interactive, site-specific installations to meditative photographs, videos, and works on paper, the featured works pose a series of existential questions, including: What are we trying to change? What must be built and what must be knocked down to best advance our efforts? What wisdom can be borrowed from the past in charting new paths forward? And, How do we manifest bold futures envisioned by people of color amidst systemic imbalances in structural power?

In addition to contemplative space in which to consider the above, the eighteen artists and two artist collectives in this exhibition also offer tangible tools to help bridge the gaps between imagined utopias and the world as it actually is. The late Black poet Jayne Cortez described this site of convergence between dreams and reality as, “somewhere in advance of nowhere.” With its focus on unearthing strategies that can be shared between individuals fighting historical oppression and across social movements more broadly, Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere mobilizes our collective imagination to envision a freer society here and now. It prompts visitors to both radically and urgently orient themselves along a spectrum of liberatory practice, from individual expressions of agency to collective social action.

Because the very notion of freedom is undergirded by power relations constructed through the intersecting lenses of race, ethnicity, class, ability, and gender—to name only a few—the dreams articulated here are as distinct as the identities of the artists that envision them. While some artists are concerned with marking the imprints of historical events on our contemporary consciousness and capacities to dream, others articulate altogether new ideologies that empower us to transcend linear patterns of causation and embrace more fluid modes of existence. Regardless of their point of entry, each works to liberate the imagination from the traditional power structures that seek to confine or deradicalize it. And, by democratizing access to the practice of freedom dreaming—one often denied communities of color—Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere ekes out necessary space in which to center our own narratives of resilience through an aesthetic vernacular all our own.

Across the exhibition, the radical imagination takes many forms. Historical archives are refigured into dynamic sites of conscience through which to combat historical erasure and build contemporary representation. Migration is studied not solely as an index of colonial oppression but also as a practice of sustainability and strategy for surviving a precarious future. Joy and leisure are recast as modes of resistance and rights owed us all, and not just luxuries or pastimes of the rich. And meditation and restoration are asserted as vital practices accessible to each of us as we set about the arduous work of  getting free. While Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere focuses on freedom dreaming in contemporary art, the diversity of approaches adopted by its artists speaks to the importance of reading art in the context of the social, cultural, and political forces that shape it. The exhibition focuses on art, not as a static object to be consumed but rather as a revolutionary process that—as Kelly asserts—“can and must transform us.” 

La Petite Mort: On Art, Ecstasy & Death | The Brooklyn Rail, February 2020 Issue

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, 1647-52

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, 1647-52

In the colonial imagination, art and death have been bedfellows since the inception of slaughter as sport for the intellectual and spiritual elite. Beheadings, crucifixions, executions, rapes—these are the scenes of subjection to which art history’s early canonical pride is moored. If not for the artist’s hand, the acts themselves might’ve remained too wanton to fathom. That’s to say, without the roles of artist-as-witness and art-as-evidence, how were we to collectively imagine death, as both carnal practice and mortal eventuality?

In the Renaissance and Baroque periods, ecstasy typically entered an artwork on the countenance of the onlooker—the cherub, harpist, slave, or post-coital woman who, if not for their deference to the spectacle of man, would recede from the scene altogether. However, in rare acts—such as Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–52), a sculpture depicting the mystic in the throes of spiritual rapture induced by an angel rhythmically penetrating her heart with an arrow—these oft-peripheral characters are seemingly recast as complex protagonists. Teresa recounted the experience,

In his hands I saw a great golden spear, and at the iron tip there appeared to be a point of fire. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he pulled it out I felt that he took them with it, and left me utterly consumed by the great love of God. The pain was so severe that it made me utter several moans. The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one cannot possibly wish it to cease.

Teresa’s vision was brutal yet tender, and as much about locating pleasure on her own body as it was about surrendering to pain as a dutiful servant of God. While her individual, corporeal experience was central to her diary investigation, her findings about spiritual transcendence were cast as universal—“one cannot possibly wish it to cease.” In the eyes of Teresa, God’s love was not a lust-riddled object to be coveted, but rather a state of (un)consciousness, a collective faith, to be surrendered to.

Preceding Bernini’s masterpiece by a few years was the emergence of la petite mort, or “the little death,” a term coined by that same intellectual and spiritual elite to describe the weakening of consciousness that transpires after consuming great art, literature, and music—or being consumed by great sex. Teresa was Bernini’s case study in materializing la petite mort within art itself and—by colonizing her pleasure and objectifying her ecstasy—Bernini shifted Teresa out of the wings and into the spotlight for all to consume. A magician at bending stone to his will, Bernini rendered her little death in white marble, a strong yet deceivably soft metamorphic rock, that embodies the precarity of human life.

It is through this nearly 400 year old artwork that I find my way into a conversation on mortality and death in contemporary art, as it is my struggle with Bernini’s treatment of Teresa’s ecstasy that reveals the importance of ecstasy itself as a tool of survival for those artfully navigating a marginalized existence. Let’s now turn to the work of artist and filmmaker Ja’Tovia M. Gary who is celebrated for pioneering an experimental visual language that, “charts the ways structures of power shape our perceptions around representation, race, gender, sexuality, and violence.”

Ja'Tovia M. Gary, An Ecstatic Experience, 2015. Film, TRT: 6:00 min., color, sound. (still)

Ja'Tovia M. Gary, An Ecstatic Experience, 2015. Film, TRT: 6:00 min., color, sound. (still)

In her highly acclaimed 2015 film, An Ecstatic Experience, Gary repurposes Black archival media and remixes it with news footage from the Baltimore and Ferguson uprisings—alongside overlays of an original hand-drawn animation—to meditate on, “transcendence as a means of restoration.” Here, the existence being transcended is the condition of being Black and utterly disposable in America, and the justice being restored is found through both individual acts of resistance and collective, spiritual strength.

The film begins with footage of churchgoers fanning themselves amidst the barrage of summer heat, rendered palpable by Gary’s vibrant, celluloid abstractions. Alice Coltrane’s 1971 track “Journey in Satchidananda,” undulates in and out, on which Coltrane performs as both harpist and pianist, bending high notes to her will and gifting Gary aural peaks around which to frame her visual and temporal experimentations. The video cuts to a closeup of the late, great Ruby Dee performing a dramatic monologue in which she conjures Fannie Moore, a woman born into plantation slavery in South Carolina in 1849. Dee movingly summons Moore’s memory of an encounter between her mother and their master in the field. Dee says,

She’d pray every night for the Lord to get her and her children off that place. One day she was plowing in the field and all of the sudden she let out a big yell. My momma, she just smiled all over her face. And she say, ‘The Lord has showed me the way! I ain’t gonna grieve no more, no matter how y’all going to treat me and my children. The Lord has showed me the way! And some day we ain't never gonna be slaves no more!’

The moment is simultaneously life affirming and heartbreaking; the backdrop to Moore’s mother’s spiritual epiphany—her unapologetic, Black joy—is still the plantation field and her outburst results in a horrific lashing. But here is where ecstasy becomes the transcendental tool of Black resistance Gary imagines it to be. Despite the tether of pain for the physical body, the spirt was able to transcend the moment as Moore’s mother exalts, “I’m free! I’m free! I’m free! I’m free!” In that moment, she rejected the plantation owner’s objectification of her body and reclaimed her subjecthood in the story of her own mortality. And, as expert witness, Gary was there to heighten the moment by bending pixels and decibels to her will, unleashing a fury of rays, stars, and halos which emanate from Dee’s head—an angel on fire.

The video then pans out to picture the full choir singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Their voices carry the reverberation of Moore’s memory and Dee’s powerful performance, and they stand as an underlayer to superimposed images of protesters in Ferguson and Baltimore. Art Historian Kanitra Fletcher expounds on Gary’s approach, stating,

The layered, open-ended nature of the imagery draws connections from seemingly disparate moments of reality and performance, the past and the present. In particular, Gary suggests these different episodes convey a sense of the ecstatic. As a response to state sanctioned violence, she began ‘to think on the notion of ecstasy and what it means to search for 'an ecstatic experience' during this contemporary political moment.’ The video thus conveys how, in the face of oppression, black Americans have found this overwhelming feeling in various forms of resistance via religion, freedom, escape, and even rebellion.”

In An Ecstatic Experience, we bear witness to the importance of Black people telling our own stories. We learn that, for us, ecstasy does not descend from the heavens on the wings of an angel, entering our bodies by immaculate conception—rather, as Fletcher suggests, it is something we must be willing to search, fight, and die for. We witness the immortal strength and spiritual fortitude of the social institutions we have built—there is no white marble under the feet of the Black church. We celebrate women and people of color as protagonists in the art that we create to survive, and envy not as Dee steps forward into the spotlight to serve as key witness to what transpired on the plantation field that day. Because her version of events is our version of events, just like the protestors’ rage is our rage. We jive as Gary cuts to a rhythm that people of color know in our bones, infusing her work with an urgency and pulsating quality characteristic of blood and life. I’m glad that Bernini made Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, but I’m fucking ECSTATIC that Ja’Tovia M. Gary is making work like this, and that I am alive to experience it!

In Conversation with Dawoud Bey: Seeing Deeply | C&

Seeing Deeply is an essential monograph that covers four decades of celebrated photographer Dawoud Bey’s prolific career. It strives for far more than a mere survey, and instead profiles—through its nine essays and over 250 images—how a series of seminal projects and encounters have helped shape Bey’s singular vision. An artist whose craft draws forth the nuances of human expression, Bey shares as much about his subjects as he does about himself in this intimate and important book. In this interview, executive director of NXTHVN Nico Wheadon speaks to Dawoud Bey about the artist’s formative years, 1970s Harlem, and the subject's hands as vehicles of expression.

A Woman Waiting in the Doorway, Harlem, NY, 1976. Photograph by Dawoud Bey

A Woman Waiting in the Doorway, Harlem, NY, 1976. Photograph by Dawoud Bey

Girls, Ornaments, and Vacant Lot, Harlem, NY, 2016. Photograph by Dawoud Bey

Girls, Ornaments, and Vacant Lot, Harlem, NY, 2016. Photograph by Dawoud Bey

Contemporary And: In Seeing Deeply, Harlem features as a bookend of sorts, with Harlem, U.S.A. (1975-1978) introducing us to your early street portraits, and Harlem Redux (2014-2017) delivering us full circle to a drastically transformed neighborhood. Subjects, once captured in striking black and white, recede from foreground to background, as the street itself takes center stage, rendered in a palette of construction site oranges and greens. Can you talk us through some of these formal shifts? What transpired between 1978 and 2014 to inform this new approach to echoing the spirit of the street?

Young Man, West 127th Street, Harlem, NY, 2015. Photograph by Dawoud Bey

Young Man, West 127th Street, Harlem, NY, 2015. Photograph by Dawoud Bey

Dawoud Bey: I always feel that the form of the work comes out of a set of questions that I ask myself from the outset, usually questions about the “what” and the “how”; what to make work about, and how to give it form. When I started making the Harlem, U.S.A. photographs, I had spent a lot of time looking at the photographs of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Roy DeCarava, James Van Der Zee, and others from that kind of picture making. My work at the time was a conversation that wrapped this history around the contemporary Harlem community in 1979 and its history, adding something. And these works were in black and white, the material of the photographic past. Forty years later, I was a very different kind of artist and photographer. Whereas Harlem, U.S.A. was about making an honest representation of the people in the Harlem community, in 2014 I wanted to describe the way the landscape and geography was changing, to make work there while it was transpiring, and to describe the spatial shifts and disruptions that were happening around the people in Harlem. That required a different formal and material language to describe a very contemporary set of circumstances, including color, a direct material signifier of the now that underscores these images’ conspicuously contemporary nature. It took me a year to figure out the form, since it was the first time that the environment itself was the primary subject of my work.

C&: I’m interested in how the environment more broadly figures into your practice. I suppose I’m describing the space around your images, your extreme presence within it, and the imagined proximity between your body and other bodies in that space. In the chronology, you mention making your first museum visit to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET) to see Harlem on my Mind in 1969, a year after receiving your first camera. Around that same time, the Studio Museum in Harlem was burgeoning a social nexus for you. What does Harlem mean to you, on both the personal level and as a cultural ecosystem? How did these formative experiences help shape your understanding of self, both as an emerging artist at the time and in relation to your environment?

Mary and Ken Smikle (Dawoud’s parents) on their roof in Harlem’s Sugar Hill on W. 151st Street. Harlem, New York, 1947

Mary and Ken Smikle (Dawoud’s parents) on their roof in Harlem’s Sugar Hill on W. 151st Street. Harlem, New York, 1947

DB: Harlem is both the beginning of my personal narrative and the place where I first began to work out how to translate my experience of the world into resonant and meaningful photographs. My mother and father met in Sugar Hill in the 1940s in St. John’s Baptist Church on West 152nd Street, and settled just around the corner on West 151st St. When I was sixteen years-old, I encountered James Van Der Zee’s memorable photographs in the Harlem On My Mind exhibition at the MET and, a few years later, I started spending time at Studio Museum in Harlem (SMH). At the time, I was transitioning from a career as a drummer to becoming a photographer and artist, and was asked to teach a photography class at the museum which is how I met Carrie Mae Weems, then my student and now one of my closest friends. SMH was where I began to form my community, a community of Black artists my age and from an older generation, including Mel Edwards, Jack Whitten, LeRoy Clark, Barkley Hendricks, Willie Birch, and so many others. They were either exhibiting, in residence, or attending exhibitions there, and have everything to do with the values that informed my work, both then and now. It’s also where I had my first solo exhibition in 1979, the critical response to which began my career. It was important to me that the Harlem, U.S.A. photographs be shown first in that community.

Dawoud Bey playing with drummers and dancers at the Studio Museum in Harlem, 1977. Photograph by Marilyn Nance

Dawoud Bey playing with drummers and dancers at the Studio Museum in Harlem, 1977. Photograph by Marilyn Nance

Sunshine Bracey and a Friend, Brooklyn, NY, 1990. Photograph by Dawoud Bey

Sunshine Bracey and a Friend, Brooklyn, NY, 1990. Photograph by Dawoud Bey

C&: I imagine you are an artist who learns as much from your community of practice as you do from the community of subjects that you photograph. I was struck by Hilton Al’s response to your small camera work. He so aptly states, “…what he loved about the images was how each of the subjects held their own self-validation in their hands, their eyes, without being reduced to an ideology—you know, equating Blackness with nobility, that kind of thing. It was such a relief, to see works of art made out of real lives, as opposed to real lives being used to reflect the artist’s idea of it.” I hear in his words a palpable agency that feels hyper-visible in your black and white Street Polaroids of the late 80s and early 90s. The role your subjects’ hands play in foregrounding an essential aura is profound. What do a person’s hands invite you to learn about them?

A Young Woman Between Carrolburg Place and Half Street, Washington, DC, 1989. Photograph by Dawoud Bey

A Young Woman Between Carrolburg Place and Half Street, Washington, DC, 1989. Photograph by Dawoud Bey

DB: When I went to see the Charles White exhibition recently at MoMA, I spent a lot of time looking at the hands in his work—he does them marvelously. He clearly understood the hands as both expressive vehicle and gesture towards interiority, or the rich interior life of his Black subjects. And that’s what the hands are for me—they convey how a person feels about themselves and the world, how they interact within their own bodies and outwardly with the physical world that they inhabit. In my portraits, I’ve always been highly attentive to the hands and to gesture, directing the subjects to a gestural behavior that is theirs, that gives a resonant sense of who they are.

C&: Are there any parting thoughts you’d like to share about the genesis of “Seeing Deeply” as a title for this monograph? What do those words carry for you?

DB: When I was trying come up with a title for the book that suggested what it is I’ve tried to do in all of my work over these past forty plus years, the idea of seeing deeply, looking beyond the surface of a thing to describe its complexity, seemed to sum it all up nicely.

A Young Man at the Bus Stop, Syracuse, NY, 1985. Photograph by Dawoud Bey

A Young Man at the Bus Stop, Syracuse, NY, 1985. Photograph by Dawoud Bey

—

Dawoud Bey’s Seeing Deeply is out now from University of Texas Press, 29,2 x 31 cm, 400 pages.

Dawoud Bey (1953- ) born in New York City, began his career as a photographer in 1975 with a series of photographs, “Harlem, USA,” that were later exhibited in his first one-person exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. He has since had exhibitions worldwide, at institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Barbican Centre in London, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the National Portrait Gallery in London, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others. 

This text was commissioned within the framework of the project “Show me your Shelves”, which is funded by and is part of the yearlong campaign “Wunderbar Together (“Deutschlandjahr USA”/The Year of German-American Friendship) by the German Foreign Office. 

Artist Kevin Beasley Has Repurposed the Cotton Gin to Give New Shape to the History of Slavery | Artnet News

The Whitney Musuem of American Art | Dec 15, 2018–Mar 10, 2019

Kevin Beasley, A view of a landscape: A cotton gin motor, (2012–2018). Courtesy Casey Kaplan, NY. Photo: Ron Amstutz.

Kevin Beasley, A view of a landscape: A cotton gin motor, (2012–2018). Courtesy Casey Kaplan, NY. Photo: Ron Amstutz.

Perception is not the work of the eyes alone. Through his signature melding of sculpture, sound, and performance, genre-defying artist Kevin Beasley reminds viewers of just that. His solo exhibition at the Whitney, “A view of a landscape,” presents works that are at once immediate and historical—and are as concerned with giving shape to memory as they are with deconstructing the past’s contemporary resonance.

With roots in the Antebellum South, the conceptual landscape Beasley constructs transcends spatial, temporal, and sensory boundaries. The show examines the troubled, living legacy of cotton and centers on a repurposed relic of early American industrialization—the cotton gin motor—which Beasley has encased within a soundproof vitrine. The drone of the machine is captured, manipulated, and transmitted to an adjacent room, and this disjuncture between the visual and the aural, motion and silence, both draws us in and casts us out. A monumental offering, this sculpture serves as an anchor of the exhibition, and moors our investigations of labor, race, and class to the history of slavery in the United States.

Three large, two-sided slab sculptures stand in proximity to the motor, both directing and obstructing the visitor’s path towards the motor’s dislocated soundscape in the adjacent room. Wall labels expound on the origins of the slabs: “These narrative reliefs—a sculptural form that goes back to antiquity—chronicle Beasley’s experiences leading to his procurement of the cotton-gin motor upon which this exhibition is grounded, in 2012. The works were conceived as free-standing sculptures meant to be viewed from different vantages.”

On the left, Kevin Beasley’s The Reunion (2018); on the right, Campus (2018). Courtesy Casey Kaplan, New York. Photo: Ron Amstutz.

On the left, Kevin Beasley’s The Reunion (2018); on the right, Campus (2018). Courtesy Casey Kaplan, New York. Photo: Ron Amstutz.

The stories captured within the reliefs draw from personal and collective memory, augmenting the emotional depth of the world Beasley invites us to inhabit. Here, as he does throughout the exhibition, Beasley nudges viewers to shift their stances to fully absorb the dense layers of information embedded within his works.

The first slab one encounters is The Reunion (2018), a vibrantly saturated landscape that draws quite literally from the land. Using a markedly different visual language than that of the cotton gin motor—one of heightened material abstraction—Beasley assembles Virginia cotton, soil, twigs, pine cones, and needles as a backdrop to black and blue du-rags that dance upwards from the earth like weightless figures in a cool breeze. The du-rags bend and twist against a bright blue sky, and towards a dense pool of sunshine-yellow cotton in the upper right-hand corner.

This direct yet poetic reference to Virginia land, and specifically to property which Beasley’s family has owned for decades, materializes the tension between how dreams and trauma—the black imagination and systemic oppression—have been, and continue to be, tied to the land.

On the left, Kevin Beasley’s Campus (2018); on the right, The Acquisition, (2018). Courtesy Casey Kaplan, New York. Photo: Ron Amstutz.

On the left, Kevin Beasley’s Campus (2018); on the right, The Acquisition, (2018). Courtesy Casey Kaplan, New York. Photo: Ron Amstutz.

At a 90-degree angle to The Reunion is one side of Campus (2018), rendered in pastel greens and blues. This work’s thick clumps of resin-soaked cotton are deceptively soft, grouped in rectangular clusters that conjure aerial views of croplands and bodies of water. As one rounds the corner on the work, a second and even more detailed landscape pulls into focus, made of the artist’s personal effects: a Yale University School of Art graduation collar, graduation cap and gown, a Yale University sweater, and campus duffel bag. Pages from the Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, published by Yale University Press in 2015, are interspersed like islands throughout.

Three blackface clown masks peer down at viewers as they attempt to situate themselves in relation to Beasley’s re-figured map. A graduate of Yale’s MFA program, Beasley poignantly critiques the academy’s complicity in upholding systems of oppression and reinforcing problematic depictions of black people, drawing lines of inquiry between his own university experience and that of Eli Whitney (also a graduate) whose invention of the cotton gin in 1793 tied capitalism to slavery—and white profit to black suffering—in ways that resound against the lived experiences of Beasley’s Virginia ancestors.

The final slab sculpture, The Acquisition (2018), is distinct from the others and retains clear semblances of the original objects Beasley so masterfully embeds within the surface of the work. The most legible are a hoodie, work gloves, a bucket, wrench, Acer laptop, and a Samick SM-122 sound mixer, each suspended and buoyed to the surface by thick slabs of resin. These repurposed studio tools dutifully carry the exhibition’s overarching motif of labor, and the stark legibility of the technology snaps viewers back into our contemporary moment.

Installation view of “Kevin Beasley: A View of a Landscape” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Photo: Ron Amstutz.

Installation view of “Kevin Beasley: A View of a Landscape” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Photo: Ron Amstutz.

As we enter the dark, purple-carpeted listening room—illuminated only by the flickering lights of audio engineering equipment—the tension between what we see and what we hear washes back in. Prefabricated sound panels mounted to the walls take on a sculptural weight, yet almost immediately recede into the background, as the sonic and social sculptures in the room seem to consume more space.

During my visit, people traversed the room at a variety of speeds, meditatively riding undulating waves of sound, stopping only to retrace their steps in search of a lost harmony. Paths converged, diverged, and looped, bringing the inhabitants of the room into unwitting community. At some point along the route, I became acutely aware of Beasley’s genius: Not only has he remastered the cotton gin, a tool of domination, into a defiant musical instrument, he has also remixed its intrinsic rhythm to re-tell the history of slave labor in the United States through equal parts resistance and hope. In this striking work (which throughout the run of the exhibition is the site of various live musical performances) Beasley nods to the long legacy of music as communication—and to sound as a radical tool of spiritual transcendence.

Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940-1950 | The Brooklyn Rail

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART | NOVEMBER 4, 2018 - FEBRUARY 18, 2019

Gordon Parks, Tenement Dwellers, Chicago, 1950. Gelatin silver print, 10 3/4 x 14 inches. © and courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation.

Gordon Parks, Tenement Dwellers, Chicago, 1950. Gelatin silver print, 10 3/4 x 14 inches. © and courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation.

“We are with the new tide. We stand at the crossroads. We watch each new procession. The hot wires carry urgent appeals. Print compels us. Voices are speaking. Men are moving. And we shall be with them!” - Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States, 1941

If Wright’s “new tide” embodies the wave of social change that engulfed a segregated 1940 America, Gordon Parks was an essential gravity that washed the revolution ashore. An icon of the Chicago Black Renaissance and postwar Harlem eras, Parks was a self-taught, genre-defying artist whose talent spanned photography, music, writing and film. While he is lesser know as the pioneering director behind the first blaxploitation films of the early 1970s, Parks’s centering of resilient, black protagonists as the heroes of everyday life dates back to his early years as a celebrated documentary photographer. The New Tide, Early Work 1940 – 1950 bears expert witness to the impact of Parks’s formative assignments, capturing untold stories across the industrial Midwest and Northeast, on launching his prolific career. The exhibition is comprised of 150 black and white photographs, presented alongside rare, archival ephemera, including confidential files, magazine clippings, interpersonal letters, and family portraits. An illuminating early-career survey, it too foregrounds the haunting realities of post Depression-era American life, and honors the men, women, and children who struggled behind the scenes to endure it. The exhibition is laid out in five sections that chronicle the decade in which Parks found his voice as an artist, and honed his craft as a tool for social justice: A Choice of Weapons, Government Work, The Home Front, Standard Oil, and Mass Media.

Gordon Parks, Langston Hughes, Chicago, December 1941. Gelatin silver print, 13 1/8 x 10 5/8 inches. © and courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation.

Gordon Parks, Langston Hughes, Chicago, December 1941. Gelatin silver print, 13 1/8 x 10 5/8 inches. © and courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation.

In A Choice of Weapons, we begin at page one of Parks’s budding portfolio—a series of striking black and white portraits taken a little over a decade after the decision to buy his first camera from a pawn shop at twenty-five. In retrospect, Parks famously said, “I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs. I knew at that point I had to have a camera.” A bold proclamation of solidarity, his first professional portraits somewhat ironically depicted household names such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Alain Locke, Charles White, and Langston Hughes captured in simple, playful compositions. Over the span of four photographs, we follow Hughes as he moves through levels of consciousness, guided by Parks: a pensive moment leaned against the back of a chair; a rebellious insertion of his form behind a painting frame as a work of art; a joyful expression as he gazes into the distance alongside a figurative sculpture that he holds in collegial embrace; and a return to the frame where, this time, his somber expression and flat palm forebode an inability to break the plane between foreground and background, art and life.

In considering Parks’s humble roots—and his rapid raise from being the youngest of fifteen children on his family’s farm in a small segregated town in Kansas, to intimately capturing the nation’s most prized cultural luminaries through his self-run portrait business—it would be easy to position Parks as a proxy for upward mobility and pursuit of the American dream. However, as the exhibition unfolds, it becomes clear that—despite his artistic gifts and the rare opportunities they afforded him as a black man in a segregated country—Parks was still very much of and for the everyman. Government Work presents a series of photographs that reflect his time working as a documentary photographer for the Farm Security Administration, a funded position he secured through the coveted Julius Rosenwald Fund fellowship.

Under the conservative yet tutorial direction of FSA head Roy Stryker, Parks set out on national projects that sought to “humanize” the working poor as part of a documentary photography movement. Central to the political agenda of this government initiative was generating an accurate historical record, whilst also producing digestible images that could be publicized to show that American progress was in the works. However, Parks’ own experiences of racism and oppression in the capital city led him to take his assignments a step further, rendering visible the invisible and deploying his camera to celebrate survival as an artform in and of itself. Notably, his unparallelled vision and uncompromised style refigured the way a divided nation regarded its shattered reflection. In piecing the bigger picture together, Parks collapsed the perceived signifiers of class by representing all of his subjects in a dignified light, regardless of their socioeconomic status. Poor children and families photographed in naturally-lit, domestic scenes of simultaneous turmoil and triumph were captured with the same care, intention, and expertise as those Parks had staged of the Chicago elite basking in the bright lights of his studio.

Gordon Parks, Washington, D.C. Young boy standing in the doorway of his home on Seaton Road in the northwest section. His leg was cut off by a streetcar while he was playing in the street, June 1942. Gelatin silver print, printed later. 20 x 16 inch…

Gordon Parks, Washington, D.C. Young boy standing in the doorway of his home on Seaton Road in the northwest section. His leg was cut off by a streetcar while he was playing in the street, June 1942. Gelatin silver print, printed later. 20 x 16 inches. © and courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation.

One of the most striking images in this section is that of a young boy in his doorway, looking out longingly on the street. The view is from behind as he gazes at two young girls on a neighboring stoop, slouched as if returning home after play. It takes a moment to pull the full image into focus and understand the particularity of his silhouette—the boy stands atilt, with two wooden crutches propping up his form, which balances precariously on one leg after the boy lost the other under a streetcar. While sad in nature, there is nothing particularly tragic about the image Parks presents us with. The boy stands at the juncture of the dark interior of his home, and the bright wash of daylight on the street. Everything about his posture suggests that he is stepping into that light, determined to not let his circumstances define him. Another iconic set of photographs is of a young black family in the Anacostia, D.C. housing project. The first depicts a mother peeling potatoes and she lovingly regards her two children playing on the lawn through the window. The tenderness of this gaze will become a motif in Parks’ work, as many of his subjects are captured trapped in the delicate balance between necessary daydreaming and tending to the tasks of everyday survival.

In The Home Front, viewers are confronted with increasingly layered domestic scenes that recall the artist’s own experience of living in and enduring poverty in a small, single family home packed to the brim. In images like Washington (Southwest Section), D.C. Negro Children in the Front Door of Their Home (1942), we see Parks pull back and expand his focus—a loosening up of the taut portrait frame to make necessary space for figurative details and a more comprehensive representation. Five children spill through the screen door of their home, one stacked on top of the other, giving viewers the impression that an accurate portrayal of the emotional and psychological effects of poverty cannot be captured in a single countenance alone. Here, Parks redefines the traditions of portraiture to demand authentic context, and dares to challenge a status quo that struggled to depict poverty and those suffering through it in their full complexity.

In Standard Oil, we follow Parks’s adventures between 1944 and 1948 on assignment documenting laborers in industrial townships across Maine, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and even Canada. These images are strikingly different from the portraits of the first three sections of the exhibition—the lighting is dramatic, which produces a significantly higher contrast and almost graphic effect. We find Parks experimenting with location and scenery, a skill that will ultimately prove useful in decades to come when he begins making films. The most cinematic image in this section—Pittsburgh, PA. The Cooper’s Plant at the Penola Inc.Grease Plant, Where Large Drums & Containers Are Reconditioned (1944)—plays with lighting angles to draw out that slick patina of industry as a well oiled machine.

Gordon Parks, Untitled, Harlem, New York, 1947. Gelatin silver print, 7 x 6 7/8 inches.© and courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation.

Gordon Parks, Untitled, Harlem, New York, 1947. Gelatin silver print, 7 x 6 7/8 inches.© and courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation.

Towards the end of the decade that launched his career, Parks extended his vast range of subjects and subject matter to include international fashion models and movie stars for Ebony, Vogue, and Glamour magazines, whilst also documenting the toils and triumphs of a post-war Harlem in photo essays for Life Magazine. The final section of the exhibition, Mass Media, brings together a compelling collection of seemingly disjointed images—the portrait of a young boy choosing between a black and a white toy doll; a patient, head in hands, in a clinic waiting room; street scenes of Harlem, littered with trash and abuzz with life and death; model Sylvie Hirsch donned in a Dior striking a pose on a Parisian street; a young girl holding a baby in Portugal; a young boy aghast gazing upon Babe Ruth in his coffin; and a Harlem gang leader trapped in a house, waiting for the ever-lively street to die down just enough to escape. In this diversity of subject matter, one gets a final and lasting impression of Parks’s commitment to seeing, elevating, and representing the human condition in its complexity. This politic of equitable visibility was unheard of during his time, and perhaps it is only in retrospect that important exhibitions such as this one hold us accountable to confronting the glaring holes in the record of American history. Here, images carry truth in ways that words alone cannot, and Parks’s legacy is confirmed as a pioneering photographer who dared to situate subjects from all walks of life in positions of power, inviting their countenances to tell the true story.

Charles White: A Retrospective | The Brooklyn Rail

MoMA | OCTOBER 7, 2018 – JANUARY 13, 2019

Celebrated for his mastery in mark making that captured Black dignity, suffering, and triumph, Charles White has only recently gained acclaim as a devout educator and pioneer in social practice. While his artworks took many forms over the years—spanning the canons of painting, drawing, and public art—they share an emotive formalism, powerful enough to carry the torch of the Black Chicago Renaissance, and speak across the many binaries of the civil rights movement. White only lived to the age of sixty-one, however, his prolific career spanned four decades, and now—four decades later—the full extent of his legacy and influence on generations of artists is finally being lauded by mainstream arts institutions beyond his native Chicago. His stunning retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art is divided chronologically into six sections, each of which explores a defining era in the artist’s all too short, yet profoundly impactful life.

Charles White, Five Great American Negroes, 1939. Oil on canvas, 60 × 155 inches. From the Collection of the Howard University Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. © The Charles White Archives. Photo: Gregory R. Staley.

Charles White, Five Great American Negroes, 1939. Oil on canvas, 60 × 155 inches. From the Collection of the Howard University Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. © The Charles White Archives. Photo: Gregory R. Staley.

Throughout his career, White dutifully rejected the dominant images of African Americans in circulation, exercising his artistry as a tool for rectifying misperceptions and reclaiming the narrative of black culture within American history. He once stated, “Because the white man does not know the history of the Negro, he misunderstands him,” and many works in the first section of the exhibition embody this tension between perception and reality. For his 1939 WPA (Works Progress Administration) mural Five Great American Negroes—his first public mural and the first piece one encounters as they approach the galleries—White depicts Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, George Washington Carver, and Marian Anderson in vibrant colored oils on canvas. He plays with perspective in this large-scale work to foreground these pioneers in African American history, while simultaneously distorting the background—or terra firma—on which these greats so precariously stand.

White arrived at these figures by working with The Chicago Defender to mobilize the South Side in revisiting the contributions of African Americans to American history, and voting for whom they wanted to see represented on their walls. This gesture would become a recurring theme and position in White’s practice—that African Americans are the authority on the Black experience, and that art can carry this agency, even when the world it depicts can not. A graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and member of the Sponsoring Committee of the South Side Community Art Center, White’s commitment to arts education is evidenced not just in the social and cultural institutions he helped build there, but also in the collaborative processes behind the creation of his murals.

Charles White, Kitchenette Debutantes, 1939. Watercolor on paper. 27 × 22 7/16 inches. Private collection. © The Charles White Archives. Photo: Michael David Rose.

Charles White, Kitchenette Debutantes, 1939. Watercolor on paper. 27 × 22 7/16 inches. Private collection. © The Charles White Archives. Photo: Michael David Rose.

White came to prominence in an art historical moment of abstraction, thus making his choice to see and depict Black humanity through figuration a supremely political one. White’s early works share an illustrative, expressive style that boast both a formal and cultural accuracy in regarding the black figure—a striking aesthetic quality not, however, to be overshadowed by their blunt political commentary. In his 1939 watercolor Kitchenette Debutantes, White called out the horrific living conditions so many African Americans faced living in overcrowded apartments on the South Side. Here, he lends his skillful mastery of light and color to represent two local women, whose shapely forms occupy the near entirety of the angular window frame. The tension between curve and line—dark and light—amplifies the viewer’s sense of both their cramped quarters, and the vast distance between the American dream and the lived reality of African Americans at the time. Aside from its formal brilliance, the scene bears expert witness to the resilience of the Black spirit and imagination—despite the ways this world would render these women invisible, their gestures and facial expressions affirm their self-determination to find beauty in their surroundings and mirrored reflections.

An artist and advocate in touch with the struggles of his community, White was as committed to representing the injustices they faced as he was to depicting their strength to overcome. In the early 1940s, White continued to speak out against America’s legacy of systemic oppression, deploying the hyper-visible visual language of murals to educate and empower communities of color. During this short period of time, he produced three large-scale murals that drew on his experiences traveling to Mexico with Elizabeth Catlett—a formidable artist and his first wife—and the technical skills he gained working with Mexican printmaking collective Taller de Gráfica Popular. As the exhibition moves from White’s Chicago years to the formative time he spent in New York working under the influence of Catlett’s own distinct monumental representations of the bodily form, viewer’s are confronted with a notable shift in White’s work, one that take us from color to black and white, painting to lithography, and the site-specificity of murals to easily replicable works on paper.

Charles White, Harvest Talk, 1953. Charcoal, Wolff’s carbon drawing pencil, and graphite, with stumping and erasing on ivory wood pulp laminate board. 26 × 39 1/16 inches. The Art Institute of Chicago. Restricted gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert S. Hartm…

Charles White, Harvest Talk, 1953. Charcoal, Wolff’s carbon drawing pencil, and graphite, with stumping and erasing on ivory wood pulp laminate board. 26 × 39 1/16 inches. The Art Institute of Chicago. Restricted gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert S. Hartman. © 1953 The Charles White Archives.

In The Return of the Soldier (1946), he explores the historical and disposable role African Americans have played within America’s so-called democracy, first as slaves and unskilled laborers, and then as soldiers and veterans during World War II. Here, we see White making painstaking use of repetitive fine lines, the density of which produces a near-pitchblack scene from which the figures of a policeman and Klan member emerge, as they loom over three Black soldiers huddled together on the ground. White graphically deploys pen and ink to rewrite the story of the African American soldier in its sad truth—how many returned to social injustices in their own country, as violent and militant as war, and far worse than anything they’d seen abroad.

Charles White, Our Land, 1951. Egg tempera on panel, 24 × 20 inches. Private Collection. © The Charles White Archives. Photo: Gavin Ashworth. Courtesy Jonathan Boos.

Charles White, Our Land, 1951. Egg tempera on panel, 24 × 20 inches. Private Collection. © The Charles White Archives. Photo: Gavin Ashworth. Courtesy Jonathan Boos.

His pro-labor, socialist political stance was ever visible, and in the ’50s he increasingly elevated the image of the laborer by depicting large, spectacularly rendered hands, and bodies of monumental proportions in works such as Our Land (1951) and Harvest Talk (1953). As pre- and post-war America saw a rise in illustrative propaganda, White rode the wave, strategically reproducing his works on paper in ads for black-owned businesses, in leftists journals such as Freedomways, The Daily Worker and Masses & Mainstream, and on album and magazine covers. Iconic works such as J’Accuse #10 (Negro Woman) (1966)—which flanked the cover of a special issue of Ebony Magazine that same year—were widely and regularly circulated, which meant their political messages would reach the broadest possible audience. Despite their commercial or editorial contexts, these works maintained the status of high art, and transcended potential slippage into the flattened realm of illustration.

The exhibition then transitions into his later years, a time when his appreciation for the contemporary contributions of Black people to American history led him to entertainers who—like himself—carried the story and spirit of Blackness in their artistry. At the same time he was building community in Los Angeles amongst Black Hollywood, White began to teach at Otis Art Institute, where he influenced the budding practices of world renowned artists Kerry James Marshall and David Hammons. Through both his love of music and passion for teaching, White continued to explore the social aspects of art that intrigued him, celebrating the power of music and education to put forth a new vision for universal humanity. In his May feature in the Paris Review, pupil Kerry James Marshall finds the perfect words to capture White’s influence, legacy, and skill, stating: “He is a true master of pictorial art, and nobody else has drawn the black body with more elegance and authority. No other artist has inspired my own devotion to a career in image making more than he did. I saw in his example the way to greatness. Yes. And because he looked like my uncles and my neighbors, his achievements seemed within my reach.”

Marshall’s words are pregnant with the possibility that White inspired in others, but also speak to the internal drive with which White continued to push his own practice forward. One gleans in these final stages of the exhibition that teaching had a remarkable influence on White, as students pushed him to reexamine his own form and content. The last decade of White’s career was a period of bold experimentation during which he developed a collaged approach that layered oil painting, drawing, and text. Black Pope (1973), an iconic image for which he might be most well known, depicts a robed Black man in sunglasses wearing a sandwich board who, through a unique combination of gestures and props, takes on a regality and dignity despite the inference that his congregation might be on, and of, the street. A skeleton, crucifix, and the word “Chicago” looms overhead, leaving visitors exiting the exhibition to reflect on White’s message, and singular ability to deploy art as both a language of resistance and tool for social cohesion.

Charles White. Black Pope (Sandwich Board Man), 1973. Oil wash on board. 60 × 43 7/8 inches. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Richard S. Zeisler Bequest (by exchange), The Friends of Education of The Museum of Modern Art, Committee on Drawings Fu…

Charles White. Black Pope (Sandwich Board Man), 1973. Oil wash on board. 60 × 43 7/8 inches. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Richard S. Zeisler Bequest (by exchange), The Friends of Education of The Museum of Modern Art, Committee on Drawings Fund, Dian Woodner, and Agnes Gund. © 1973 The Charles White Archives. Photo: Jonathan Muzikar, The Museum of Modern Art Imaging Services.

Aruna D’Souza’s Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts | The Brooklyn Rail

Whitewalling-cover_Cover-image-by-Paul-Chan.jpg

Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts is an exploratory case study in institutional racism as it has manifested in the New York City art world over the past half century. Centering public protest as the platform of the oppressed—and, in Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words, “riot as the language of the unheard”—author Aruna D’Souza offers an uncensored look at the role black artists, activists, and their allies have played in forging more equitable practices within the field of contemporary art. In each instance—Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket (2016) in the 2017 Whitney Biennial; Artists Space’s 1979 exhibition The Nigger Drawings; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1969 exhibition Harlem on My Mind— “artistic freedom” emerges as the linchpin in arguments defending these lessons in cultural appropriation, exclusion, and fetishization. In response, D’Souza interrogates the ethical limitations of freedom,and brilliantly presents all sides of these moral arguments without slipping into an #AllSidesMatter perspective. Rather, she puts her own privilege at risk by applying her intimate knowledge and power of observation to rewrite art history through a broader lens. She adopts a clear stance as ally, defender of truth, and witness who—by her own confession—“strays from journalist to partisan to historian to protester,” as the book unfolds.

D’Souza disclaims her evolving editorial stance early on, characterizing it as a symptom of her shifting intimacy with the key players, institutions and protests that comprise each act. In “Act 1: Open Casket, Whitney Biennial, 2017,” she recounts a series of heated, public debates provoked by Dana Schutz’s aesthetic appropriation of the image of slain and mutilated Emmet Till. Instead of sensationalizing the outrage that the white painter’s appropriative gesture produced in the black community, D’Souza republishes unedited statements by black artists and writers issued on social media and during the Whitney’s public program Perspectives on Race and Representation: An Evening with the Racial Imaginary Institute, which was developed in response to the protests. Quoting Parker Bright, Lorraine O’Grady, Devin Kenny, Lyle Ashton Harris, Elizabeth Alexander, and Hannah Black to name a few, D’Souza abdicates the first pages of the book to those whose lived experiences inform her own art historical research. Through this subversive act, she transforms social media into powerful, primary source material that disrupts the historical role race has played in defining who holds the power to speak freely. While D’Souza publishes Black’s open letter in full, the following excerpt poignantly articulates a root issue explored in all three acts—the aesthetic appropriation, materialization, and commodification of black life:

Although Schutz’s intention may be to present white shame, this shame is not correctly represented as a painting of a dead Black boy by a white artist—those non-Black artists who sincerely wish to highlight the shameful nature of white violence should first of all stop treating Black pain as raw material. The subject matter is not Schutz’s; white free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights.

Adopting a journalistic yet emotionally invested tone, D’Souza places this art historical moment within the broader context of socio-political unrest and moral bankruptcy in this country. She expounds, “The statement went viral—a fact all the more extraordinary because this wasn’t, after all, a meme or a news article or a cat video. It was more like an aesthetico-political manifesto, an invitation to take part in a process of truth and reconciliation, and evidence of an open wound.” Here, D’Souza’s partisan voice rings loud and clear as she underscores the difficult work that lies ahead, and builds upon Black’s argument through a language all her own.

In one of the first reviews of the book, published on Hyperallergic, Steph Rodney criticizes D’Souza for “hedging her bets” through “wishy-washy” language in “Act 1,” a critique that disavows her unique ability to bridge the diverse perspectives she pulls into focus whilst simultaneously asserting her own political voice. Her measured approach is rooted in solidarity, placing deep trust in what has already been written, and inviting those voices to crescendo in unison, conjuring the energy and urgency of protest itself. Knowingly, D’Souza takes up the thread that weaves these complex arguments into coexistence, thus fortifying the protestors’ call for a code of ethics to which we can hold our public institutions—and the voices they themselves privilege—accountable. “Schutz’s claim that she seized on the image of Emmett Till as a way to process the state of recent murders of black youth sounded to many like sidestepping her own relationship to the historical processes that resulted in these deaths,” she explains. “Schutz made Open Casket from an aesthetic and social vantage point that left a glaring blind spot: the complicity of whiteness, and of white womanhood, in those events.” D’Souza practices what she preaches, asserting that empathetic allyship demands a readiness to cede power and privilege over to those doing the work to both dismantle and survive the injustice. 

In “Act 2: The Nigger Drawings, Artists Space, 1979,” D’Souza adopts a more distanced tone in retelling this art historical standoff between protestors advocating for publicly-funded institutions to adopt more inclusive practices, and defenders of “free speech” upholding anti-censorship by any means necessary. Here, the precarious intersections of liberalism, capitalism, institutionalism, and race shine through in her tightly-curated series of correspondences between The Emergency Coalition—comprised of pioneers in contemporary black art Janet Henry, Lowery Stokes Sims, Linda Goode Bryant, and Howardena Pindell—and the supporters of Artists Space’s decision to mount an exhibition by a white, male artist entitled The Nigger Drawings. In “Act 2,” D’Souza centers institutions—such as the New York State Council on the Arts and Artists Space—as the starting point of her investigation, a marked shift from her artist-centered approach in “Act 1.” Following suit, she does not begin her critique by discrediting Donald, the artist who arrived at the title of his exhibition by observing his white charcoal-covered arms and imagining himself a nigger. Rather, she begins by studying the cultural infrastructures through which Donald was both enabled and emboldened to outwardly and brashly exercise his white privilege.

D’Souza quickly exposes the glaring ethical and logical omissions to the liberal argument that The Nigger Drawings was a radical, subversive act capable of undoing the violent, racist and white supremacist history of the word nigger. She asserts, “There is a contradiction at the heart of our idea of open dialogue: while it seems to depend on leaving open space for ambiguity, uncertainty, and the contingent, it is grounded in—and perhaps even depends on—de facto limits of who can speak and what can be said.” Once more, D’Souza aligns with the protestors’ call for accountability and peels back the veil used by those in positions of power to assert their own first amendment rights whilst simultaneously sidestepping the difficult conversations that arise as a consequence of their actions. With due diligence, D’Souza also revisits the counterargument put forth by Donald and his institutional allies—that the exhibition delivered value to rather than drew value from conversations on race by ushering us all into a post-black era. D’Souza quotes art critic and editor Craig Owens to expose the absurdity of this claim: “‘Because of the nature of their work,’ he concluded, “the artists who show at Artists Space and avail themselves of its services have…been denied access to the commercial gallery and museum power structure. In this sense, they are all ‘niggers.’” Here, D’Souza delivers us to the same sad conclusion we drew from “Act 1”—that, when confronted with their own complicity, arts institutions and those they sanction would rather intellectualize and formalize racist practices, than take pause to audit and amend their behavior.

In “Act 3: Harlem on My Mind, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1969,” D’Souza steps into the role of archaeologist, unearthing the genesis of the contemporary art world’s selective moral compass when it comes to race and representation. She investigates the authenticity of The Met’s claim that the controversial exhibition—which did not include a single black artist—was dedicated “to the people of Harlem—past, present, and future—as a record of their achievements.” In this final act, D’Souza—much like The Emergency Coalition—explores what civic participation looks like between black communities and the cultural institutions that so often exclude and objectify them. She astutely observes that the exhibition “was subtitled Cultural Capital of Black America. The irony of the wording is perhaps only apparent in retrospect. It hinges on the double meaning of capital—a term that refers to Harlem as a place, of course, but also hints at the way in which blackness is traded as a currency, a form of that other kind of capital.” D’Souza resurfaces the forgotten details and unburies the ugly truth that African-Americans were never considered artists or experts in this context and were only granted a seat at the institutional table as artifacts for display.

Whitewalling is a strong call to action in which D’Souza summons her many identities—writer, art critic, feminist, educator, museum consultant, and protestor—to encourage those with a vested interest in sustainable culture to fight for social justice. She exposes the power imbalances that hide within the dark corners of our public institutions, and shines a light on those brave citizens tending to the arduous, daily work of dismantling systems of oppression. And despite its somewhat somber conclusions about the depth of white supremacist roots within the field of contemporary art, this book achieves small yet vital victories: it names those historical offenders who institutionalized racist practices without hesitation or consequence and offers a counter narrative to the biased, historical record; it galvanizes a community of practice and articulates a collective language of resistance across disciplines and racial lines; and it de-vilifies black protest by not just depicting us in our rage, but by also seeing and documenting us in our hope.

Phoebe Boswell: Take Me to the Lighthouse | The Brooklyn Rail

As I lay in that hospital bed, attached to the machine, in the high dependency cardiac wing, eye bulbous and blurry, the woman in the bed next to me kept calling out to the darkness, “Take me to the lighthouse,” delirious, and I kept wondering how on earth I got here, where on earth my lighthouse was, and how I was going to begin to process it all. 1

Phoebe Boswell, I Hear My Voice Clear, Here Between Things , 2018, Charcoal and Pastel on Paper, 48.0 in x 27.3 in (121.9 cm x 69.3 cm)

Phoebe Boswell, I Hear My Voice Clear, Here Between Things , 2018, Charcoal and Pastel on Paper, 48.0 in x 27.3 in (121.9 cm x 69.3 cm)

A profoundly layered and probing exhibition, Take Me To The Lighthouse posits a simple yet sage premise—that life cuts, water heals, and light reveals even in the darkest circumstances. Earlier this year, Kenyan-British artist Phoebe Boswell emerged from an unrelenting series of traumatic events that served as the genesis for this new body of highly vulnerable and deeply sentient work. In this selfless survey of loss, grief, and triumph, Boswell presents an interlocking web of artistic gestures, in which her trace and pain are perpetually felt.

Minute rectangular voids are clipped from her raging, charcoal seascapes and strewn about the gallery as remote islands, as in You Won’t Hear Me There (2018); intrepid, figurative marks are cast atop the sea of white walls, illuminating a horizon line along which the artist’s self-image rises and sets, as in her site-specific installation Take Me To The Lighthouse (2018); and intimate self portraits are clustered together amidst vast landscape portraits as if to balance the weight of—and collapse the distance between—the part and the whole.

As the titles suggests, the artworks in this exhibition ebb and flow around notions of homecoming and deliverance, each creating sacred space in which to anchor shared explorations of Diasporic consciousness, cultural inheritance, and ancestral debt. As a transnational, multi-disciplinary artist interrogating the complexities of global citizenship, Boswell embraces technology to help navigate various states of being, becoming, and belonging. From a video installation of her body adrift at sea—whose position on the floor demands a posture of reverence from its viewers—to the immersive and undulating waves of spoken word soundscapes that surround it, Boswell translates digital language into a raw, analog, and fluid aesthetic that conjures the mystery of the deep sea. Even her drawings on paper take on a digital aspect, as the voids she cuts from them come to embody pixels that abandon the image of origin to take refuge in those liminal spaces that characterize diasporic existence.

To truly appreciate this exhibition is to dive deep into the world Boswell generously shares and creates—to weigh the anchor on all we think we know of life’s pain, and transcend beyond the self to interrogate suffering as a shared, global reality. In conversation with Boswell’s gallery Sapar Contemporary, it became clear that these intense life events—which took a significant toll on the artist’s physical, spiritual, and emotional health—inspired Boswell to approach this body of work with a sense of urgency, and duty—not just for herself, but for her communities as well.

Perhaps due to the sheer weight of the load—the loss of vision in her right eye, the loss of a lover, the consequent rupture to her physical and emotional hearts, and the medical dependency on others this produced—Boswell entered into deep philosophical investigation, calling upon folklore, oral histories, and her own body to create a shared language for balancing grief. This exploration is strikingly captured in her video, A Broken Heart (2018), which grants viewers a glimpse into the artist’s pain in the form of an angiogram that illuminates her quite literally broken heart. Through this and other visual languages Boswell creates, she asks: Is grief a language in and of itself? If so, how does it sound and what does it look like? Where is it safe to grieve, to give utterance to grief? And which aspects of grief must we hold dear, and which can we cast out?

Phoebe Boswell, Ythlaf. Single channel video. Courtesy Sapar Contemporary and the artist.

Phoebe Boswell, Ythlaf. Single channel video. Courtesy Sapar Contemporary and the artist.

In her video Ythlaf (2018), the artist floats weightless amidst converging art, personal, and collective histories at the shoreline between Zanzibar and the Indian Ocean. A persistent soundtrack of intense breathwork—activated by visitors’ footfall on floor sensors surrounding the work—weaves together moving images of Boswell lying, dancing, grieving, playing, escaping, and free-floating on the shore, all of which were shot in collaboration with her father, using his drone. A moving meditation, this video affirms the power of water to bring one towards and drive one from the inner self, and notions of family and home. It celebrates the healing power of water whilst recalling the historic traumas water holds, such as the Middle passage and other sad freedoms, visualized in moments where the artist transcends and abandons her own body at the contemplative space between land and sea. Like all of us, water is in a constant state of becoming, and possesses the innate quality of constant change—it freezes, clusters, flows, steams, and ripples in response to its environment. Here, Boswell summons water as a superpower to freeze her pain, buoy her spirit, and flood the dams of her emotional blocks.

Boswell’s biography reads, “Although Boswell was born in Nairobi, she was brought up in the Arabian Gulf. Growing up as an expatriate, she reveals that she felt, ‘amputated from Kenya, in a way,’ admitting, ‘I do not exist there, it is not my place.’ The fragility of her Kenyan identity, and this rootless aspect of her being, ignites her work with a delicate search for belonging, through which her art becomes a vehicle that drives her on her journey home.” 2 Boswell is not alone in this feeling of disjointed or fractured identity—now more than ever, people live at vast geographic and emotional distances from their homelands. Again, enter the role of technology in Boswell’s practice. Recognizing the many living in Diaspora today that rely on the Internet to maintain familial relationships, Boswell uses selfies to shed light on how handheld technology can allow us to exist in multiple places at once, and belong to something greater than our immediate surroundings. In Sankofa (2018), Boswell puts forth a strong and unapologetic image of her nude form—arm flexed, breasts bare and glance direct, Boswell transcends her hospital room at the speed of light, along fiber optic cables and into the world, reborn.

Phoebe Boswell, Sankofa, 2018, Pencil and Pastel on Paper, 40.4 in x 32.5 in (102.6 cm x 82.6 cm)

Phoebe Boswell, Sankofa, 2018, Pencil and Pastel on Paper, 40.4 in x 32.5 in (102.6 cm x 82.6 cm)

Boswell is nothing short of masterful at adapting her craft to respond to the pressing issues of our times. She toggles between different modes of artistic representation—from portraiture to landscape painting, abstraction to representation—to reveal just how fragile the constructs of identity and community actually are. And this is not an exercise she performs in service of her own sense of belonging—she asserts, “the most personal things are usually the most universal.” Taking her own life as a case study, Boswell expands her autobiographical exploration of trauma, grief, and healing into a broader survey of the body and its challenge to find a home outside itself. In this challenging exhibition, self-portraiture becomes a tool of self-care and a much needed reminder to look back at paths travelled, in shedding the weight of the past and stepping more fully into the evolving selves we all seek to inhabit more mindfully.

Notes

  1. http://www.saparcontemporary.com/

  2. https://www.phoebeboswell.com/about/

Ceaphas Stubbs: Phantom Limb | The Brooklyn Rail

Ceaphas Stubbs, …Stripped of Everything…Waiting to be Drained Again…, 2018. Latex inkjet print, 64 × 44 inches. Courtesy the artist.

Ceaphas Stubbs, …Stripped of Everything…Waiting to be
Drained Again…, 2018. Latex inkjet print, 64 × 44 inches. Courtesy the artist.

Phantom Limb is a solo exhibition of recent works by Ceaphas Stubbs, a New Jersey-based artist who collapses photography, sculpture, and collage into a singular process that yields hyper-layered 2D prints from 3D dioramic still lifes. The exhibition marks the culmination of his six-month residency at the Paul Robeson Galleries at Express Newark, a community collaboratory that encourages innovation, collaboration, and experimentation. These perception-defying photographs both conjure and resist the sex appeal of advanced imaging technology, marrying analog and digital processes to produce imagery that is simultaneously nostalgic and afro-futuristic. Stubbs’s eclectic and erotic ecosystems—which he fashions from repurposed detritus and ephemera such as fabric scraps, adult magazines, and found objects—unleash symptoms of yearning in their viewers that can be likened to those of phantom limb pain. In this otherworldly exhibition, Stubbs navigates the innate tension between desire and pain, and unpacks the phenomenology of loss by giving visual language to the persistent tingling, itching, burning, and aching that accompany want.

His creative process is an experiment in itself, a performance that tests the understood limits of photography, perception, and patience. First, Stubbs sets about scavenging materials, which often hold traces of intimacy yet embody only a fraction of a greater whole—colorful, patterned swatches that belong to a larger garment; scenes clipped from photographs rooted in someone else’s memories; and limbs dismembered from sex acts depicted in pornographic magazines. These are then refigured, suspended, anchored, or overlaid into parallel universes using string and wire affixed to a wooden armature. In a final gesture, Stubbs places this armature against a vibrant and textural backdrop, and photographs the tableau to generate a single image, where only shadows remain as remnants of his trace, and the multi-step process.

These flat yet loaded prints toy with viewers’ perception and orientation by eroding the distinction between background and foreground, gravity and anti-gravity. The longer one spends falling head over heels into these works, the more existential questions arise. How can we comprehend desire for something we never in fact held? Do the social and cultural constructs of trauma engender collective suffering? And if life is pain, and love is desire, then what is death? Are we all fated to live, love, and die as masochists? In this meditative space, the works themselves somehow come to embody an expression of deep loss, as dimensions evaporate in the translation from worldly context to artistic studio, kinetic sculpture to static photograph, and static photograph to the wandering eye. However—as with the scientifically inexplicable sensations associated with phantom limbs—even these voids generate unfathomable dimensions and rearticulated relationships in their wake.

Ceaphas Stubbs, …A Touch Here, A Tickle There…The Full Lengths of The Bodies Pressed…, 2018. Latex inkjet print 64 × 44 inches. Courtesy the artist.

Ceaphas Stubbs, …A Touch Here, A Tickle There…The Full Lengths of The Bodies Pressed…, 2018. Latex inkjet print
64 × 44 inches. Courtesy the artist.

Many of Stubbs’s works achieve a delicate alchemy of love and loss, and at times fuse these elements together to summon the heartbreak and rage of unrequited love. In . . .A Touch Here, A Tickle There. . .The Full Lengths of The Bodies Pressed. . . (2018), a hand reaches out, grasping at what appears to be a literal and a metaphorical straw, while nearby backs and necks—arched in ecstasy—never seem to quite connect. In his statement, Stubbs expounds, “First, losing the physical contact of a lover. Eventually most people accept the relationship ending and find ways to move on. That is until we have reason to hope again. The fragmented bodies become the catalyst for hope.”1 Perhaps it is this belief in something beyond the other side of sorrow—be it independence, reconciliation, or acceptance—that allows us to shed the pains that haunt and moor us, and ascend into a vast and limitless future love.

If French is the language of love—and love is central to how we perceive ourselves in the world—then let’s turn to the revolutionary French philosopher and writer Frantz Fanon to comprehend this cosmic romance between hope and reason, the mind and the body. He writes “I am black; I am in total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth, losing my id in the heart of the cosmos [. . .] I am black, not because of a curse, but because my skin has been able to capture all the cosmic effluvia.”2 Here, black magic and black excellence are embodied, and blackness becomes another form of gravity. In works like . . .Stripped of Everything. . .Waiting to be Drained Again. . . (2018), Stubbs suspends a torso amidst a galaxy of stellar debris like a resilient, black star unmoored from the fate of an event horizon and surrounded by a galactic luminescence of its own creation.

Stubbs weaves this push and pull between fantasy and reality through the titling of his works to drive home these underlying tensions: . . .Disappearing Act. . . (2018);. . .His Eyelids Fluttered Down. . .His Heart Floated Away. . . (2018); . . .Easy Come, Easy Go. . . (2018); and . . .To Heal the Troubled Mind. . .The Center Must be Found. . . (2018) to name a few. Stubbs’s poignant use of ellipses subverts the conventions of linear narrative, and instead imagines alternate and orbital endings that leave space for the viewer to transcend their own realities, slip through the trap doors of memory, and revel in the space of infinite possibility that seems only achievable in dreams. In the worlds Stubbs creates, these are wet dreams, where Black intimacy drips from every object and surface. What Stubbs achieves in these strikingly liberated and devastatingly distant worlds is a prototype for living with desire, dismantling the trope of hyper-sexualized black bodies, and inviting unabashed, orgiastic, and radical love to join us down here on earth.

Notes

  1. From a conversation with the artist, Friday, July 13, 2018.

  2. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Atlantic, 1994.