Above: Rashid Johnson. The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club (Thurgood), 2008. Lambda print, Ed. 2/5, 69 x 55 1/2 in. Courtesy of Rubell Family Collection. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Art school at Rutgers was just 45 minutes away from New York City by train, and it was the 1980s with a cast of artists showing at museums and galleries and populating art magazines that still consisted mostly of white men, with some white women artists, such as Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, and Jenny Holzer, and a scant few men of color—graffiti artists like Fred Braithwaite (Fab Five Freddy), Futura 2000, and Dondi (Donald White) up out of the hip-hop scene to excite the landscape.
Of living, working artists of color beyond hip-hop at that time, I saw few, especially in the mainstream. Sure, there was my own wonderful life-drawing professor, Lloyd McNeill, a renaissance artist: painter, poet, jazz musician, photographer—his works were and are inspirational. And there was Jean-Michel Basquiat, the “radiant child” of Rene Ricard’s ArtForum article of the same title. That was it. No Howardena Pindell. No Elizabeth Catlett. No Romare Bearden. No Jacob Lawrence. No Betye Saar, just to name a few.
Iona Rozeal Brown, “Sacrifice #2: it has to last” (after Yoshitoshi’s “Drowsy: the appearance of a harlot of the Meiji era”), 2007; enamel, acrylic, and paper on wooden panel, 52 by 38 inches. Rubell Family Collection, Miami.
No Lorna Simpson, or Robert Colescott, or recent MacArthur fellow Carrie Mae Weems, all of whom along with 27 other artists are represented in a show called “30 Americans” that was recently at the Frist Center in Nashville, Tennessee, and will be traveling to the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans.
The title of the exhibit is wry and sweet, and the curators of the show decided not to include “African-American” in the description. “Nationality is a statement of fact,” say Don and Merrel Rubell of the Miami-based Rubell Family Collection, who sponsor the show. “While racial identity is a question each artist answers in his or her own way, or not at all.” They chose the number 30 as an acknowledgement that the show does not include everyone that could be in it.
The depth and breadth of how each artist expresses him- or herself through the more than 70 pieces—paintings, photographs, sculpture, and multi-media installations—is a lesson in understanding that black Americans are not and never were a monolith walking in lockstep.
“‘30 Americans’ contains a near-comprehensive repertoire of the tropes of black postmodernism . . .” writes the artist Michele Wallace in the catalog, “in which the negativities of slavery, Jim Crow, blackface minstrelsy, racism, sexism, and sexual slavery are constantly invoked and interrogated for the rich, dark spaces and designs that their still-warm undersides may reveal.”
Kehinde Wiley, “Equestrian Portrait of the Count Duke Olivares,” 2005. Oil on canvas 108 x 108 in. (274.3 x 274.3 cm. Rubell Family Collection, Miami.
Tough, uneasy critiques (the museum warns on its website that “some content in this exhibition many not be appropriate for all audiences. Visitor discretion is advised) of the African-American’s place in history, and a past and deliberate (a)void(ance) of black artists by the mainstream art world are are supplied by artists both established and emerging who, through their chosen mediums, turn mainstream culture on its head: Robert Colescott plays out on canvas the drama of Pygmalion, in which an upper class linguist transforms a poor gutter snipe into a lady, with a white man and black woman. Kehinde Wiley, who has been compared to the great early European portraitists makes no bones about referencing Diego Velasquez’s “Portrait of the Count Duke Olivares.” The pose is a classical equestrian portrait from “back then,” the person in the red Negro Leagues hoodie is here and now. The canvas is outsized, monumental; it says “this black person is important.” Iona Rozeal Brown, working in the style of Taisho Yoshitoshi’s traditional Japanese woodblock prints, recasts the central figure of a courtesan with thoroughly twenty-first century black woman.
“30 Americans” will open at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans February 10 and will run until June 13, 2014. For more information and a full list of artists visit the museum’s website. A 224-page catalog is available through the Rubell Foundation.—Audrey Peterson
