Article

In 2019 Gates installed AESOP (An Extended Song of Our People) (2019), a DJ booth installed in a commuter hub on the Chicago Transit Authority’s (CTA) Red Line rapid transit route. … Situated at street level and just outside of one of the station’s turnstiles, AESOP’s glass doors and window façade offer commuters an unobstructed view of the DJ’s turntables, mixers/controllers, and vinyl/CD library. On prominent display in the darkened booth is Gates’s large neon work Afro (2018), synchronized to illuminate a silhouetted head’s halo-like Afro as if repeatedly growing outward. Gates, who was once employed by the CTA, said the 95^th Street Station’s commuters and Roseland’s Black inhabitants… “deserved to be surrounded by art and music, and shouldn’t have to travel far or leave the city to experience art and culture.” He continued, “It’s easily one of the most important artworks that I’ve made…”

Death knells for the “Chocolate City” have proliferated in the aftermath of D.C.’s announced population shift and, yet, like countless other historical African American requiems… blackness rarely disappears in toto.  Rather, it miraculously “hangs on,” seeps into the cultural mainstream, and perseveres; albeit, in a new, modified form or fashion.  And the concept itself is an acknowledgement… of a lifestyle and cultural locus akin to tasting “an unquantifiable richness.”  This particular metaphor… reminds us of the more sensuous elements in the District of Columbia’s art portfolio, but in almost every instance it is a fleeting, evanescent sweetness couched in the occasionally boring and often bitter flavors of everyday truths, delivering a euphoria and, then, an aftertaste that speaks to the particular historical circumscriptions which have long defined this place and its striving and continually self-searching black community.

The strength of pigment – whether experienced in an oil painting, or on one’s face – becomes commensurately forceful when, as in the case of Beverly McIver’s paintings, the instrument is the statement, underscoring how these works straddle the worlds of self-portraiture, action painting, and ritual masquerade. But it is especially in the last category – a cosmetic-fashioned protocol imposing an alternative personality or a larger-than-expected social role on the art subject – that McIver’s paintings complicate the conventional perceptions of the art medium.

The color brown’s critical role in Barkley L. Hendricks’s portraiture – again, not just as an indication of the African ancestry of his figures and its melanin trait, but as a subconscious jolt and tactical foil to black, white, and the conventional color palette’s grip on modern painters – comes under further scrutiny when the groundbreaking Miss T is viewed alongside another important study in opposition: John Singer Sargent’s Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau). For Sargent, Madame Gautreau’s perfunctory, raw umber background visually anchored, or rather, obliged her stark, white/black figure, whereas Robin Tyler’s brown face, neck, and collarbone, comprising a fraction of the overall composition, pulsated with life and variability and rendered the surrounding areas relatively inert.

Raymond Saunders… has always revered the sometimes beautiful/always honest aspects of street art, doodles, scrawls, and other fringe drawing reflexes. Cy Twombly, Raymond Saunders’s half-brother in creating painted homages to visual automatism, shares Saunders’s early appreciation for the gesture in art, and joins him in providing viewers with an American spin on European tachisme…The difference, of course, is that Saunders’s marks grow out of visions unique to him and him alone. Saunders’s scratches have evolved over years of “remembering to remember” discarded passports, sidewalk sketches, children’s blackboards, artist’s plans, etc… Saunders, somewhat like jazz great Miles Davis, takes these marginal notes, lines, and/or phrases from the world-at-large, and reconstitutes them into nothing short of major artistic statements.

Not entirely renegade, and yet not beholden to painting’s a priori status in art history, Nina Chanel Abney interjected into the medium a new pictorial program, governed by her cerebrations, ideological positions, and inclinations toward digitally informed encryptions. Her designs and painting strategies collectively gestured towards a personal protocol: a code that responded to the exigencies of the twenty-first century, and that saw visuality as adept at grappling with ethical conundrums, while not abandoning art’s allure and mythos.

“I remember going to a party at Jeff’s house where I met Jean Pace, whom I had seen in Chicago as a high school student. I also met Nina Simone at Jeff’s house. Just being in the room with these larger-than-life figures was extraordinary. Another person I remember meeting during this period was Toni Cade Bambara, who came to that 1976 Black Writers conference at Howard, and ended up being somebody with whom I was in regular communication through the late 1970s and early 1980s. Howard University and Washington, DC, were meccas for Black culture. Jeff was very instrumental in bringing all these interesting people together. Washington, DC, was the Black diaspora personified, even in a bigger way than Atlanta. I was meeting people from Africa, the Caribbean, and from all over the Black world.”