The book at hand represents a selection, a small selection of a much larger collection
of paintings, sculpture, drawings, and videos in the Rubell Family Collection. Yet,
it is a very important selection, presented at this time to represent a body of work of
diverse minds that happen to share some cultural traits and thus have some things in common.
Their work speaks to each other’s artistic output as much as to larger issues in the
history of contemporary art.
Yet, to ponder the work in this show as a point of departure for an essay about the art of
thirty-one disparate and diverse artists is to consider a proverbial catch-22. On one hand,
I can fall in behind the fact that this exhibition’s title makes only a small defining note
in regard to the art assembled. There is the telling fact that these artists are all considered
to be Americans. But, there is no description of the art, no subheading that conveniently gives
one a little more to go on. Thus, the title for this essay remains under careful consideration.
And, thus, I could not have possibly begun to write with a quote from one of the three thinkers
that are so central to this discussion, as that would have been a dead giveaway. (As if it
weren’t already, by the book in your hand.) Yet, we have to consider, can such a show be useful?
Considering that Thelma Golden’s 2001 exhibition “Freestyle”—one of the inspirations for this exhibition—posited the fact that a show of black artists could in fact be post-black in
subject matter, this presentation also questions the term and wantonly throws it into flux.
The art at hand is wildly different in materials and themes, though it does offer hints to
an assembled collection of a cultural consciousness.
Yet it also begs the question, recently posed by the art historian Darby English, “What
becomes of black art when black artists stop making it? Without being much remarked as
yet, the category’s instability now defines it far more clearly than do its supposed contents,
as ‘black art’ has come to have less and less descriptive bearing (which is not to say
influence) on the work many black artists actually produce.”1 Thus, it is a fitting title.
Four years after “Freestyle,” the curator questioned her own motives, in the catalog essay
for the exhibition “Frequency,” where she said, “After the tremendous success of ‘Freestyle’
in 2001, I had both privately and publicly acknowledged that there might no longer be a need
for me to organize group shows featuring the works of emerging black artists.”
More recently, Hamza Walker, who wrote the signature essay in the “Freestyle” catalog, has
said, “Given that an exhibition of all African-American artists no longer passes for one
about race, the discourse of race, as it resides in the visual arts in the broadest sense,
is a very diffuse affair. Race is no less mercurial and complex as an organizing principle
for an exhibition than it is a tricky issue in general.”
Thus, why call attention to it, with a subordinate clause on the end of a title?
Yet, as is suggested in a recent essay by Kobena Mercer, the work in this exhibition also
treads upon some contentious ground (as should any collection presentation worth its salt)
while delineating between what he sees as a shift in the narrative of African-American art
from late modernism to post-modernism. Grouping together the artists Betye Saar, Robert
Colescott and David Hammons, he identifies what he considers to be a black avant-garde in
the late 1960s and 1970s, which included the three very different artists. Whereas black
artists were called upon and many engaged in a practice that was consciously about race
before Abstract Expressionism, abstraction freed many artists to pursue an art, at least
a little bit more, in the mode of art for art’s sake. Mercer’s position of a later shift
also takes into account a time when all artists were reconsidering the work of art as a
conceptual and often political tool. “Black artists opened up a wider range of questions
about ‘race’ and representation as a result of the crisis of modernism that came to a
head during this period.”3
This collection and this show are clearly on the other side of both shifts. Representation
is more the mode of thought than abstraction. And, there is no more a crisis between
modernism and post-modernism. Sources are multivalent and the vernacular is coded enough
to remain in the realm of contemporary art, as we know it. We are dealing with the here
and now, and no need to be restrained by the vagaries of modernism versus post-modernism
as constricting categories. Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden still don’t sell. And,
don’t even think about a woman.
Cluttered by theories, let us turn to thoughts of utility. Sometimes lists tell stories,
narratives even. Lists can contain just enough information. Lists of facts provide
background. Artists’ lists, when given as the primary information concerning an exhibition
of contemporary art, provide the most basic information. And, if you add a few more things,
other than a name, sometimes, the list is all you need to see the connections between the
artists and to understand the thematic of the show.
Because of the many fascinating exhibitions that have played a pivotal role in the
presentation of the artists’ work, it is tempting to line them up for yourself. I saw
such-and-such with so-and-so at this show, for instance. Or, so-and-so talked about
such-and-such being an important influence on her work…
Or, going down the list on a first pass and placing dates for birth is also interesting
in the parallel lines drawn or not. The earliest work is from 1970, but percentage-wise,
most of the work has been made in the last ten years. There are only two artists born in
the ’40s, none in the ’30s and a lone representative from the ’20s. Citing these three
artists by name, in order of date of birth, gives an important foundation to the other
twenty-eight. Robert Colescott, Purvis Young and David Hammons. One is a mixed-media-based
conceptualist (a pioneer of a peculiarly American brand of arte povera), one is a
representational painter with an expressionist surface tension and the other is a
pronounced self-taught painter who works on varied materials. Together they provide a
foundation of stylistic tendencies and genres of art making that encompass some of the
most prevalent trends in contemporary art since the late ’60s. But, they are all black.
To some that may be a surprise: that black artists employ all the strategies and styles
of contemporary art. Others invariably would take a glance at this list of artists and
let out yet another exasperated “WTF?”! Industry rule number 5,080: Don’t show in all
colored exhibitions, someone might say.
But, we have to go there, so let’s throw the issue out there, lay it on the table, if you
will, because it continues to bend my brain. Basically, I love to see lists like this. It
excites me to see the recognition of a gang of artists who can hold their own. And then to
have a little historical sense behind it all, to be intergenerational, makes it all the
more exciting.
And, it must be noted that these artists in the Rubell Family Collection have been shown
before in other focused ways: for example as artists from a specific city in “Red Eye: L.A.
Artists from the Rubell Family Collection.” The RFC has also focused in on ‘painters from
Leipzig’ and more broadly on artists from Europe. So the presence of thirty-one Americans
in one exhibition is right in line with those preceding shows.
Excuses, excuses…, one might say. So, just in case, I haven’t tip-tapped on a tightrope
enough, and kept my distance while obviously being up in it, we can recognize that this
work has not been brought together under the auspices of a non-profit but it was purchased
with strong beliefs.
But, if we are counting categories, English’s question prefaces this discussion: What
happens to black art if black artists stop making it? Or, the similar invocation of Walker’s
exhibition, “Black Is, Black Ain’t,” a show that featured a variety of artists of different
cultural backgrounds.
Needless to say, we aren’t in Kansas anymore.
“The African spirit … is at its best in abstract decorative forms.”
—Alain Locke, The Legacy of the Ancestral, in Alain Locke, ed. The New Negro, Athenaeum,
New York, 1969 (1925), p. 267.
The artists collected here, for the most part, eschew such antiquated sentiment. It is
most obviously seen in one of the cornerstones of the collection in the work of Robert
Colescott (b. 1925), playing elder statesman here. Colescott provides an example from the
earliest works in the show as the oldest artist in this collection. Born in the same year
that Dr. Locke issued his call to gather up the African spirit, Colescott came of a mature
age at a time when Abstract Expressionism had come into much question all around. He
studied in Paris with Fernand Léger—whose work embodies the early push and pull between
abstraction and representation—and turned to the figure much like Philip Guston, in an
attempt to reinvigorate representation via expressionism. In the late ’50s, like David
Park, Richard Diebenkorn, and Elmer Bischoff, Colescott was a second wave progenitor of
Bay Area figurative painting. Yet, the turmoil of the ’60s and its calls to political
action bear a stark mark on the work. With a sense for pushing America’s cultural buttons,
Colescott found his unique style in addressing age-old stereotypes with a raw and rare
disregard for correctness, as in the 1970s drawing shown here, where a bulbous-lipped
black man stands in a pool surrounded by scantily-clad white women.
Enough has not been made of this important painter who represented the U.S. at the
Venice Biennale in 1997. Though he shares that recent honor with the likes of Felix
González-Torres, Fred Wilson, Hans Haacke, and Robert Gober, Colescott has only recently
found new prominence via his exhibition two years ago at the Kravets/Wehby Gallery. With
a drawing from 1970, his 1976 video Dulacrow’s Masterwork: A Mockumentary Film, and
paintings from the late ’80s to the late ’90s, this collection of works by Colescott
is immensely important. Though he has been collected by major museums such as New York’s
Museum of Modern Art, and the Hirshhorn, a concentrated view of paintings by Colescott
such as this is a rare find. Several younger artists within the collection are evidence
of his influence.
Taking cues from Colescott, Nina Chanel Abney (b. 1982) reminds one also of the mask-like
faces of Vincent D. Smith’s paintings and the eccentric primitivism of William Henry
Johnson, though she also shares a penchant for the contemporary grotesque with the work
of her near contemporary Dana Schutz. The bodies in her paintings are often contorted
like a child’s plastic dolls, but menacing—attack of the body snatchers on crack. Henry
Taylor (b. 1958), John Bankston (b. 1963),and the exceptionally precocious Noah Davis
(b. 1983), all bear a stylistic affinity to the work of Colescott in surface tension and
subject matter, which often borders on the absurd and the surreal.
A central figure in the tendency for representational figuration in a realist mode is
Barkley L. Hendricks (b. 1945). Hendricks also acts as an elder statesman here; his work
often tests the heavily contested boundaries between representation and abstraction.
Favoring the former, Hendricks is known for his late Pop Art influences combined with a
more up-to-date flavor for the people. A third and chronologically later strain of painterly representation meets conceptualism in the work of Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955). Born
in Birmingham, Alabama, and raised in South Central Los Angeles, Marshall’s work has
always been steeped in a black aesthetic, whether he is referencing El Greco, Bouguereau
or his college professor, the artist Charles White. Like Colescott, Marshall has amplified
blackness in his figures with charcoal black characters against luscious super-saturated
primary colors. As is well represented in the collection, Marshall’s practice is
multi-dimensional and also includes sculpture, drawing and video. Using all of these
tools, Marshall’s charge remains to question the way we see black people in the history
of art.
Peerless in stature is the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988). Three paintings
from Basquiat’s early years—Bird On Money (1981), One Million Yen (1982), and an untitled
self-portrait—give a look at one of the most important artists of the last thirty years.
Bird On Money presents one of Basquiat’s most popular subjects in the form of an homage
to Charlie “Bird” Parker. Loaded with repeated symbols and arrows, the canvas includes
the words para morir (for death) in the lower right hand corner.
The influence of these four painters is also felt in the fact that they have been an
abundant source of reference for other artists in the exhibition including the young
painters Iona Rozeal Brown, Jeff Sonhouse, Mickalene Thomas, Wangechi Mutu and Kehinde
Wiley. It is worth noting that as much as these artists, who are all relatively close in
age, may agree with the idea of the aforementioned as being influential to their work,
there is no disputing the popular place of painting since the late 1990s in our contemporary
art. Familiar American artists like John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton, and Lisa Yuskavage
have had a profound effect in making a place for the figure in representational painting
as a more than viable option for young painters.
Iona Rozeal Brown’s (b. 1966) work takes equally and liberally from 19th-century Japanese
erotica (shunga), early 20th-century American vaudeville, and contemporary hip-hop culture,
exaggerating tropes of cultural identification. In an ongoing series of works, she has
concentrated on picturing Japanese women in blackface. Also intrigued by gender and
ethnicity, Wangechi Mutu’s work also has a profound focus on women. Utilizing collage as
in Non je ne regrette rien (2007), Mutu (b. 1972) uses her medium to evoke a ruptured
(and carefully put back together) monstrous exoticism. With more surface tension than the
work of Brown or Mutu, Mickalene Thomas’s (b. 1971) paintings are often encrusted with
rhinestones. Early after graduate school, Thomas completed a series of works of black
women in the classic odalisque position, evoking a mix of Manet and ’70s black “power
girl” pinups.
Jeff Sonhouse (b. 1968) and Kehinde Wiley (b. 1977) question the portrait tradition as it
relates to sartorial splendor, decoration and the power of the sitter. Concentrating on
black male figures, both artists borrow from an amalgamation of sources including art
history and the everyday urban environment. Sonhouse has used various forms of masking
in his paintings, via color, texture and sometimes surface ornament, suggesting a twoness:
that of the person depicted and that of the true person within, or behind the mask. If
Sonhouse’s characters—from Exhibit A: Cardinal Francis Arinze to the rapper Busta Rhymes—are
ambivalent about taking off the proverbial mask, Wiley’s subjects pose stridently with
confidence from the street into the Baroque poses they assume in his canvases.
While not necessarily conjuring the African spirit as Locke suggests is a possibility via
abstraction, a few artists do work in an abstract mode. Embracing the cool, measured pleasure
principle of painting embodied by an artist like Agnes Martin or Brice Marden, Mark Bradford
(b. 1961) opens up and extends the discourse around abstraction informed by conceptualism—think
arte povera via Alighiero e Boetti, who also shared an interest in mapping and for whom the
final product was an endnote to a much longer process of negotiation in making art inside and
outside the studio. Whore in the Church House (2006), is a prime example of Bradford’s all-over abstraction, informed as much by Jackson Pollock as by the abstractions of big city urban
cartography. The works of Rodney McMillian (b. 1969) and Shinique Smith (b. 1971) both touch
upon abstraction in painting strategies while also embracing the three-dimensional mode of
sculpture.
David Hammons’s (b. 1943) presence here is minimal though remarkably important. Hammons
came to prominence in the ’70s. His interest in conceptualist strategies including body art
has been an important influence on many of the artists within the collection. In Hammons’s
Esquire (or John Henry) (1990), as in certain works by Max Ernst, Joan Miró or Jimmie
Durham, the found rock has a special resonance. Esquire is one of the rare Hammons portraits
of a head defined by the lines and content of a hairdo on a common found object. The ease
with which Hammons’s piece suggests a portrait of a person is in line with his long and
ongoing interest in hair as a purveyor of character and identity. Using the found rock, he
would then bring it in to a barber shop for a shave or a lineup, its simple natural surface
and lines evocative of so much more.
Carrie Mae Weems (b. 1953), Renée Green (b. 1959), Glenn Ligon (b. 1960), Lorna Simpson
(b. 1960), Leonardo Drew (b. 1961), Gary Simmons (b. 1964), and Kara Walker (b. 1969) are
all represented by significant works. Simmons’s work in particular bears mentioning for
its in-depth view of early work in this artist’s career. An important early sculpture,
Duck, Duck, Noose (1992), is joined by several of Simmons’s trademark erasure drawings
from the same year. Duck, Duck, Noose is a great example of Simmons’s early sculptures
that often took on stereotypes and symbols of racial connotation. In this case, the work
comprises nine Ku Klux Klan hoods sitting atop stools (the kind that might be used in a
graduate art class). In the middle is a hanging rope tied in a noose ready for the lynching.
Equating the childish behavior of a group known for its racial hatred with the setting of
learning, Simmons questions the nature of racism: is it learned or is it innate? Ligon is
also well-represented with three of his iconic neon text pieces and two of his classic
joke paintings.
Three of the most in-depth presentations are reserved for very young artists, evidence
of the risk and unabated desire with which this collection has been put together. Kalup
Linzy (b. 1977) uses fiction in a narrative sense through his hilarious video works
featuring himself. With the heat of a telenovela and the faux drama of soap operas,
Linzy’s film and video works are scripted and directed by him as he plays a starring role.
No artist is shown as comprehensively as Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976), with over 80 works
in the collection, all since 2003. Thomas’s focus, perhaps not surprisingly, has been on
found images from advertising. The images that pepper our magazines or are blown up for
use on billboards are his stock, his archive. Reimaging many crude or senselessly banal
adverts from the 1960s to the present, Thomas puts the attention on the mediated image
as a source of understanding, not just a source for selling something. With the designed
texts and symbols removed, we concentrate more on the image than the original creator
could have ever imagined.
Working in a variety of modes, though trained initially as a photographer, Rashid Johnson
(b. 1977) has six large works in the collection, all from his early 2008 exhibition in New
York. Featured as a photographer in “Freestyle” seven years ago, Johnson went to graduate
school in that time and has steadily explored diverse media ever since. The new work
resembles a mad scientist’s lair or the meeting grounds of the Mu’tafikah before another
raid on a museum (Center for Art Detention). Nick Cave’s afrofuturist soundsuits are heavily
costumed figures, which look as though they would be right at home.
But, can such a show be useful? Ultimately part of the importance of this collection of
work is that it was purchased. In this case, the RFC has recognized, more than any other
public institution—except the Studio Museum in Harlem—the importance of this work. That’s
useful.
October 2008
Franklin Sirmans
Franklin Sirmans is curator of modern and contemporary art at The Menil Collection in
Houston, where he organized NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith (The Menil Collection;
P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center; traveling to Miami Art Museum). A curatorial consultant
at P.S. 1, he was the 2007 recipient of the David C. Driskell Prize awarded by the High
Museum of Art, Atlanta, and has been the curator or co-curator of numerous important
exhibitions, including Contemporary Conversations: Robert Ryman, 1976 (The Menil Collection),
and Basquiat (Brooklyn Museum of Art; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; The Museum of
Fine Arts, Houston). A former editor of Flash Art and Art AsiaPacific magazines, Sirmans
has also written for several publications including The New York Times, Essence and Grand
Street.
1. Darby English, “Beyond Black Representational Space,” in How to See a Work of Art in Total
Darkness (Cambridge and London: The MIMIT Press, 2007), 27.
2. Hamza Walker, “Domino Effect,” from the exhibition catalog, Black Is, Black Ain’t
(Chicago: The Renaissance Society, 2008).
3. K Kobena Mercer, “Tropes of the Grotesque in the Black Avant-Garde,” in Pop Art and
Vernacular Cultures, ed. Mercer (Cambridge: The MIMIT Press; London: Iniva, 2007), 138.
