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For our second story, we sat down with Jordan Casteel, a painter and a 2015-16 Artist in Residence at This story also features a selection of black-and-white portraits of Jordan and other New York City residents by Brooklyn-based photographer Where are you from? King Texas. When were you first exposed to the arts? The Studio Museum in Harlem, to chat about grad school, representations of black masculinity, and finding community in Harlem. So is that when you decided to become an artist?
I was born in 1989 in Denver, Colorado. Most of my family is still in Denver - my twin brother, my mother, father, and nephew are there. I also have an older brother based in Arizona with his wife and two sons.

I never realized how much I would miss it until I left. It was really special growing up in a city with such close access to nature. One of my favorite things to do was to lay on a blanket in the front yard and watch the clouds go by. I have always been a dreamer, and Denver was a city that really gave me the space and natural wonder to do that.

Jordan Casteel. "Ashamole Brothers." 2015. Oil on canvas, 54 x 72". Courtesy of the artist

Art has always been a huge part of my life. I grew up in a home that had Romare Bearden, Hale Woodruff, Faith Ringgold, Charles White, and Jacob Lawrence on the walls. My grandmother was on the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lincoln Center, and Dance Theatre of Harlem here in New York.

I also took a few classes at the local Art Students League. I was always making something and/or trying to realistically draw photos I'd find. Art was just there. It was hard for me to not notice or be inspired by the images and people that were around me. And my parents valued the things I would create; both of them have my artwork that spans my lifetime on their walls.

No. For a long time, I had decided that art was not going to make a living for me. That I needed something more practical. I originally wanted to go to an HBCU [historically black college or university] like Spelman, but I ended up attending Agnes Scott, a small, diverse women's liberal arts college also in Georgia.
Because you still hadn't let yourself think you could be an artist?
I went abroad my junior year to Cortona, Italy, and that changed everything for me. I took my first oil painting class, and I fell in love. I literally remember thinking, "I could do this forever. This is the happiest I've ever been in my life." My senior year, I changed my major to studio art, but the school had no support system for oil painting, so I spent the year trying to teach myself how to paint in the school basement.

After I graduated, I did Teach For America in Denver. Education and social justice have always been passions of mine. Even though I knew I needed to continue painting, I wasn't able to rationalize making it a career.

So I would come home from work, write my lesson plans, and then paint, but my spirit was really unhappy. I was in a therapy session complaining, and my therapist leaned forward and said, "Jordan, you need to get out." I was crying. I felt horrible. I felt like I was abandoning my students, and I had never quit anything in my life. But I was like, "You are right. I need to get out."

I ultimately decided to apply to graduate school for painting, but again, I told myself it was so I could become a teacher.

Nope. Absolutely not.

It was all my mother. I was looking at schools, and she said, "What's the best, honey?" I didn't know at that point. I knew nothing about the art world. Nothing. We Googled "best art MFA." The three that popped up first were the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia, and Yale. So I applied to those three, but I thought I definitely wouldn't get in. I was just a girl from Colorado with no art school training who taught special education and painted in her bedroom.

The day I was supposed to get notification from Yale, I bought myself a cupcake and carried it around all day to either cry over it or celebrate with it. By 7:00 that night I hadn't heard anything so I was like, "Fuck it," and ate the cupcake anyway.

Later that night, I finally got the e-mail. I got in. I fell to my knees screaming and crying and called my parents. I thought about Kehinde Wiley and Mickalene Thomas - two artists I admired who had gone through the same program. I think I knew this had the potential to change my life forever, that this could be my shot at becoming an artist.

What was Yale like?
The amount of learning I had to do in my first year was immense, everything from paint to mediums to stretching a canvas to art history to the language. The language - being able to relate to conversations around art - I felt completely on the outside because I just couldn't figure out how to have the conversation they were having.

At the end of my first year, I had any epiphany like, "There is a way to contribute to this conversation and use my own language that is just as meaningful." So my second year was everything because I was able to grow into that.
So what brought you to New York? What were your expectations of the city?
I was offered a solo show here after graduation in summer 2014. In my first few months, I moved into a tiny apartment with three roommates that I found on Craigslist, and I found a studio in Bushwick at 56 Bogart. I literally did not think I was going to survive here. I felt so stuck under a cloud of the exhaustion of this city, the energy. I have lupus, and so physically I wasn't ready for the challenges of maneuvering the city.

I also felt so much fear and pressure about the show. People like my friend Awol [Erizku] were fantastic during that time with talking me through things. Then I came to Harlem when I got residency at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Being here has really changed the game for me. For the first time, it feels like the New York experience that people love.

King Texas. "Harlem." 2015. Courtesy of the artist

How has your practice evolved since college?
It's always been figuration for me. It's always been people who are around me.

Frankly, during my first year at Yale, I didn't know how to paint well enough. It just wasn't working. I got a grant to go to Gloucester during the summer before my second year and was doing en plein air painting, landscapes, just going crazy. It was a great way to learn how to paint, but I wasn't happy. The social aspect that I care so much about was missing. The acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin happened while I was there.

That morning, I was at the local breakfast spot, and this man was like, "You must be devastated this morning." I was one of a few black people in the whole town. And I was like, "Shouldn't everybody be devastated? Why am I the only one devastated?"

I ended up not saying anything. It was one of those moments where you're confronted with somebody's ignorance, and you don't respond, but as soon as you walk away, you think of all the things you should have and would have done.
Was that a turning point for you?
I called my mother and then my twin brother, and we were really emotional. He talked about raising his son. He talked about being followed around in a store that morning. And we talked about Trayvon.

My dedication to black men in my painting started at that point. The first painting I did was of my twin's best friend, Cory, who was also my first crush. I had taken a photograph of him when I was in Denver that summer. He was wearing a "You Mad" Nike tee and a fitted Atlanta Falcons hat. I painted all of those things, but during studio visits, people were focusing too much on signifiers that they felt were explicitly black - the clothing, the Nike logo - and not on the humanity of the subject.

Jordan Casteel. "Miles and Jojo." 2015. Oil on canvas, 54 x 72". Courtesy of the artist

How do I create a painting of these men who have been in my life as their truest selves? You know, as the loving, intimate, caring fathers, sons, brothers, friends, men I've dated, kissed. The ones that I've had a very real history with.

Someone suggested I remove the clothing. I immediately said no. Black men in particular are hypersexualized and villainized, and I didn't want to feed into that conversation. Eventually I decided to try it, but I went into it knowing that I didn't want to paint their genitalia. I wanted to give a respect to their body that historically has not been given. A lot of people, including faculty, were frustrated with me for that. One critic said I was castrating the figure.

Their insistence that I paint their penises made me all the more confident. I was like, "If you want to talk about castration, let's talk about the history of castration and the black body because my guess is you don't want to actually have that conversation, yet you feel comfortable enough to tell me I am responsible for doing that."
How did all of this impact your work?
It ignited an urgency on top of the urgency I already had. It was another critic, Sarah Lewis, who had a studio visit with me, and I told her about all the feedback. She said to me, "Jordan, I have so much respect for you, because you do not and will not. I urge you to continue to fight that fight."

I also got criticism for being a woman painting the male body. I was interested in the conversation about why, throughout history, men painted the female body with no hesitation, but not the other way around.
Your paintings are so personal; these men are not flat archetypes of blackness or maleness, they are individual men.
The best thing I've heard was from Greg Tate during my Brothers exhibition. He said to me, "Sister, you are the queen at capturing the souls of brothers." It was one of the best compliments I've ever received. That to me is everything. Which is probably why I paint the eyes first.

Jordan Casteel. "Barbershop." 2015. Oil on canvas, 72 x 54". Courtesy of the artist
Do you feel very attached to a person once you've painted them?
I do find that I'm building a community. When I finish a show and that body of work leaves my studio, I feel like I'm starting anew, like I'm lonely or something. I love having all of my paintings in a small studio, where they are looking at each other and there is a conversation happening between them and myself.
Can you talk about the role of color in your work?
By playing with color, it's my way of addressing the question of how blackness relates to skin in my own personal life. Questioning how we identify blackness and color.
The color of the paint is abstracted; there isn't a literal correspondence between their skin color in real life and in the painting.
Right. This is why photography is an important part of my practice. I take upwards of 200 photos of my subjects in various places and postures, with their objects around. From a span of multiple photos, I begin drawing on the canvas to build the composition.

Jordan Casteel. Photo: King Texas. Courtesy of the artist

I do tend to cover the full canvas first with a color. I don't like the white very much. It stresses me out. Once I've colored it, I feel free to begin the painting. I also like the way the color can slip through sometimes where the paint doesn't meet.

Also, I'm always conscious about the amount of blue I use. I feel like I use it so often, unconsciously!
What next? Do you draw?
I sketch with turpentine and paint. I do the figure first; I always start with their head and eyes. I feel that anchors the whole painting. One person recently noticed the use of lettering in a lot of my paintings, the legibility of place, such as a barber shop or a street corner. Texture is also very important. There is a thickness or areas where things bulge out. I just love paint.

[Notices Black Male exhibition catalogue on the table] Wow, I lost my copy of Black Male. That show was huge for me. It got me through my second year at Yale and my exhibitions. It's one of those books I continue to go back to.
What was it about that show that was so special?
All of it. And that Thelma Golden, a black woman, curated it gave me the confidence to also tell my story. That I could have a voice as a woman - we who are daughters, mothers, sisters, all of those things. Thelma created a conversation we needed about contemporary art, and I had grown up admiring so many of the artists in the show. Literally, that book is my bible!
In the intro essay, Thelma talks about signposts of blackness at the time [in 1994] - such as blaxploitation films or Rodney King - and the power of imagery. What would you think about today?
Definitely the power of media imagery. I think about #BlackLivesMatter. I remember when Mike Brown had just been killed, and my mom and I were watching the news in her hotel room. For a long time, my work was dealing with issues from my own experiences, from experiences of black people. These experiences became part of a national conversation, and I've continued to think about how to contextualize humanity around blackness in my work.

Do you feel like you're part of a community now that you've been in New York for almost two years? How does The Studio Museum in Harlem fit into that?
I often find myself gazing out of the studio window in a trance of sorts. I love watching the energy of Harlem from a static position. The vibrancy of 125th Street is so beautiful and complicated. The other day I watched a man flying kites in the courtyard across the street for almost half an hour. I loved how he seemed to make time stop. He was clearly enjoying himself, completely without regard for everything else around him. Suddenly, I thought, I have to paint him, so I ran outside, introduced myself to Kevin the Kiteman, and photographed him for a painting. I can't imagine that happening any place other than my studio perch on 125th Street in Harlem. You cannot ignore the street and the people here.

It's crazy. For me, the end-all, be-all was to be an Artist in Residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem. The history, the energy of the Museum is truly profound. I feel really lucky to be able to experience the history of the building, all the nooks and crannies. I had a studio visit with Wardell Milan, who did the residency a few years ago, and he said, "Ah! This chair has been here forever!" Literally, how many artists have sat in that crusty orange chair that's in my studio?
Which studio are you in? The one where Eric

Jordan Casteel at work. Photo: King Texas. Courtesy of the artist

Wow, there's some good juju in that one. [Mack] was? Have you adjusted to the city yet?
Yes, Eric, and before that Abigail [DeVille]. Apparently Titus [Kaphar] had this one too.

King Texas. "Untitled." 2015. Courtesy of the artist
What are some of your favorite places?
Yes, the history, the lineage! As soon as we picked our studios, I lay on the floor and rolled around. It still doesn't feel real. Being at The Studio Museum in Harlem feels like the first solid community I've had since being in New York. I feel welcome and supported.

I haven't found myself loving it yet. During my first six months, I thought I was going to die every day. [laughs] Now things are more familiar, less scary. But at the same time, my headphones have gotten bigger. For awhile I was constantly looking down - one of those survival techniques that New Yorkers pick up, where we're around so much intensity all day that the only way to be on the train is to act like you don't see anybody to get where you need to go. Now I am looking up intentionally. The current series I am working on is based on the photographs I have taken of people in Harlem.

I was on the High Line the other night with a group of friends; it was just beautiful.

And I went to the Whitney recently with my dad, and he said, "Baby girl, you are here, you are doing it." Those are the most grounding moments when you're taken out of the hustle and bustle of New York, but you see New York, and you know you are here. That in and of itself is what's beautiful about the city. You learn how to survive. I'm surviving, I've become stronger, and I'm accomplishing things every day that I never felt were possible. All of a sudden they're possible in New York.

When you're not in the studio, what neighborhoods do you hang out in?
Home in Harlem. I'm a nerd! I'm not the cool artist type. I knit or bake to relax. [Editor's note: Jordan's pound cake is the best!]
We think you're pretty cool.
I don't go anywhere hip, and I don't wear cool clothes like other artists. I wear clothes that are covered in paint, that I've had since high school. I really feel like an oddity. [laughs]
Final question: What is your ultimate aspiration?
Being happy and painting somewhere forever. I genuinely just want to always be making meaningful work and surviving off of it in some way or another.
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For our second story, we sat down with Jordan Casteel, a painter and a 2015-16 Artist in Residence at This story also features a selection of black-and-white portraits of Jordan and other New York City residents by Brooklyn-based photographer Where are you from? King Texas . When were you first exposed to the arts?

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Hassan Hajjaj - Collaborations with Avant Arte

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Hassan Hajjaj's portraits marry Western pop culture with his Moroccan heritage. The brightly coloured, intensely patterned works pair motifs from fashion brands like Louis Vuitton and Nike with traditional North African textiles.

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Hassan Hajjaj showcases transformative power of photography at London’s Tate Modern

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Hassan Hajjaj is a contemporary Moroccan artist known for his photography, printed fabrics, and films. In perhaps his best known series, 'Kesh Angels, Hajjaj captures the unique street culture of young female bikers in Marrakesh. Meant to conflate Western perceptions of Arabic society, Hajjaj uses the language of fashion photography, to produce portraits of figures dressed in colorful North African garb. Set within frames of consumer products, including Coca-Cola and Louis Vuitton, the artist's images recontextualize both fine art photography and popular culture. "My work started because I wanted to show another side of Moroccan culture, something more than that, and the imagery that they'd understand in the same way," he has explained. Born in 1961 in Larache, Morocco, he moved to London to live with his father at 13 years old. As a young man, Hajjaj worked as a music promoter, often tasked with the job of decorating the interiors of club venues with designs, furniture, and flowers. Over the following decades, while working as a designer, the artist began producing photographs and films which conveyed the complications of his cultural identity. He currently lives and works between Marrakesh, Morocco and London, United Kingdom. Today, Hajjaj's works are held in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Lazaar Foundation in Tunisia, among others.

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Hassan Hajjaj is a contemporary Moroccan artist known for his photography, printed fabrics, and films. View Hassan Hajjaj's 108 artworks on artnet. Find an in-depth biography, exhibitions, original artworks for sale, the latest news, and sold auction prices. See available photographs, prints and multiples, and paintings for sale and learn about the artist.

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His photographs, enlivened by friends, subversive wit and a hip-hop swagger, are on show in a major retrospective in Paris.

Hassan Hajjaj in his shop and studio on Shoreditch, East London, on Sept. 20. A major retrospective of Mr. Hajjaj's work is showing at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. Credit... Ana Cuba for The New York Times

LONDON - Hassan Hajjaj was in his element.

On a recent afternoon, friends and strangers wandered into the Moroccan-born British photographer's shop in the Shoreditch district here, clustering amid the joyous mess. There were stacks of multicolored T-shirts, racks of sweatshirts and djellabas, and piles of slippers with mock sports-brand insignia.

Grocery-store cans and boxes marked in Arabic script served as decoration and furniture. Crowding the walls were vintage advertising posters - and of course Mr. Hajjaj's own photographs. In his instantly recognizable style of portraiture, he styles his subjects in a kind of faux-orientalist swag, using items like the ones in the shop as props.

In fact, he makes portraits right here, on the street, taping onto the brick wall his flamboyant backdrops, and shooting in full view of passers-by.

"There are two kinds of artist," Mr. Hajjaj said in the shop's back area, with its banquettes made of Moroccan Coca-Cola crates topped with flower-print cushions. "There's the artist that needs space, to be on their own to work, and there's somebody like myself." He scanned the scene. "There's always an ambience."

This fall, Mr. Hajjaj has brought the vibes to Paris, where a retrospective of his work is taking over the entire Maison Européenne de la Photographie, the photography museum. The city's mayor, Anne Hidalgo, attended the opening, which included Moroccan Gnawa musicians performing with Yasiin Bey, the rapper once known as Mos Def.

Mr. Hajjaj, who spent childhood in Larache, a fishing town, and now has a riad in Marrakesh as well as a home in London, has become Morocco's most visible artist. He shoots his friends, many of them working-class, such as the "henna girls" who adorn tourists in the Jemaa el Fna square in Marrakesh. He hires tailors and artisans to run up outfits for his subjects. And recently, he organized a salon there, where he showed works by less well known Moroccan photographers.

But he is even more a creature of London. Mr. Hajjaj arrived here in 1973 at age 12, with his mother and siblings, joining his father, a laborer who could not read or write. After dropping out of high school, he landed in the precarious economy of the early Thatcher years.

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"Time Out" from the series "Vogue: The Arab Issue" (2007). Credit... Hassan Hajjaj, via Maison Européenne de la Photographie

Selling flowers in Camden Market, then clothes, while also promoting underground club nights and working on film shoots and fashion shows, Mr. Hajjaj became a utility player in the emerging London bohemia of immigrants' children, fed on reggae and pirate radio, that produced bands like Young Disciples and Soul II Soul. His clothing label, R.A.P., sold streetwear before that was a fashion category. His Covent Garden shop was a central-city hangout and haven from the ambient racism and class hierarchies of the time.

"In the '80s you have to remember that London was just starting to blend," Mr. Hajjaj said, in the North London accent he acquired on arrival. "We all came from different backgrounds. We had to create something to find our space."

Simon Baker, the director of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie - and a former Londoner himself, previously curator of photography at Tate Modern - said that Mr. Hajjaj was a quintessential Black British artist, in the expansive usage of that time. The retrospective, Mr. Baker said, "tells the story of someone with London street knowledge, network, and background, but who is also very passionate about where he came from."

Yet it took many years for Mr. Hajjaj to think of himself as an artist.

"I didn't think I was worthy," he said. "I had all these friends who studied art, music, fashion, who prepared themselves, who were technically very good. I just took pictures. It was more to hang out with people, to listen to music and create a mood."

By the time he started showing his photography, in the mid-1990s, he had reconnected with Morocco, following a trip in 1993 to take his daughter to meet her relatives. Even among the London set, Morocco evoked tedious stereotypes - "caftans, hashish, camels," Mr. Hajjaj said - that irritated him. What he found was the place he remembered, at once ordinary, with its canned goods and fast fashions, and vibrant according to its own cultural mélange.

"I wanted to show my friends that we have something cool," he said. "And that I suppose is what started me entering the art world."

The Paris exhibition presents Mr. Hajjaj's work organized in six series of large-format prints, many in custom frames, inset with items like cans of tomato sauce or motor oil, or children's building blocks marked with Arabic letters. The galleries are decorated with wallpaper he has designed, and seating areas have been converted with his furnishings. Several video works are on view.

One photo series is his famous "Kesh Angels," in which women in gowns and face veils pose on motorbikes. They are glammed up, yet authentic. These are workers in Marrakesh tourist economy whom Mr. Hajjaj has known and photographed for years, and who use the bikes to get around town.

Mr. Hajjaj's stylings - mixing camouflage, polka-dot, or animal prints with traditional fabrics from the souk; adding cheap plastic sunglasses shaped like hearts; printing Louis Vuitton logos onto the motorbike body - bring a sense of play that melds Moroccan heritage with a patchwork hip-hop swagger.

Rather than launch a polemic against the tourist gaze that fetishizes veiled women on motorbikes, Mr. Hajjaj drowns it out with maximalist compositions that mash up references, disorganize expectations, and seize control.

"It's about taking this orientalism vibe and saying, 'O.K., let's take ownership of it,'" Mr. Hajjaj said. "Me being Moroccan, you being a Moroccan subject, let's take that kind of thing, and do it in our way."

"Alia Ali" from "Vogue: the Arab Issue" (2014). Credit... Hassan Hajjaj, via Maison Européenne de la Photographie

The same method applies to other series by Mr. Hajjaj: "Gnawi Riders," a male counterpart to "Kesh Angels," with Gnawa musicians; the "Dakka Marrakchia" headshots of women; and "Vogue: The Arab Issue," styled like fashion spreads. All use clothes and accessories sourced from the local market, to reclaim control: not just cultural, but also economic, and ultimately, psychological.

Mr. Hajjaj's work gets linked to Pop Art, with comparisons to Andy Warhol that he subverts in his clothing line "Andy Wahloo," which translates to "I have nothing" in Arabic. But he is equally inspired by photography studios of smalltown 1960s Morocco, where families went for special occasions. The classic studio work of Seydou Keïta, Sory Sanlé and Malick Sidibé - one of his idols - is another clear reference.

"I always think that Hassan's work looks as if someone electrocuted with color an African studio," Mr. Baker said, alluding to that tradition. "Which of course would have been full of color, but the pictures we have from them are black-and-white." One room in the show presents, for the first time, Mr. Hajjaj's own black-and-whites. "That's to show the journey, and my love of photography," Mr. Hajjaj said.

But Mr. Hajjaj's biggest love is for his subjects. It shines in the ease that pervades his portraits, even when the staging is ornate. He mostly photographs people he has formed a connection with - friends, friends of friends, colleagues - and the affinity shows.

"He loves the people around him, and that is a very endearing thing about Hassan," said Touria El Glaoui, founder of the 1-54 African Contemporary Art fair, who organized Mr. Hajjaj's last major solo show, at Somerset House in London, in 2017. "He has built this community and kept it over the years. And what's amazing is that he hasn't changed a bit."

The ongoing series "My Rock Stars" is Mr. Hajjaj's homage to his cosmopolitan crowd. (A sampler: the American artist Hank Willis Thomas; the Moroccan filmmaker Meryem Benm'Barek; the French-Algerian musician Rachid Taha, who died last year.) Some are famous, but styled by Mr. Hajjaj, seen through his lens, they would be special regardless.

In the Shoreditch shop, the grime M.C. Afrikan Boy, the Gnawa drummer Simo Lagnawi and the soul singer Bumi drifted in to rehearse. Mr. Hajjaj was developing a multimedia stage show, " My Rock Stars Experimental," with video projections and live performance by musicians styled in his outfits. (It premieres on Oct. 11 in Los Angeles.)

He put on a fresh pot of coffee and said to stick around.

"I've got my friends hanging with me on the wall," he said. "They're traveling with me. So there's this protection, there's a comfort for me."

Hassan Hajjaj
Through Nov. 17 at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris; mep-fr.org.

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Hassan Hajjaj Turns Moroccan Clichés Into London Cool

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His photographs, enlivened by friends, subversive wit and a hip-hop swagger, are on show in a major retrospective in Paris. LONDON - Hassan Hajjaj was in his element. On a recent afternoon, friends and strangers wandered into the Moroccan-born British photographer's shop in the Shoreditch district here, clustering amid the joyous mess.

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Asma Ghanem - Biography, Shows, Articles & More | Artsy

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Explore Asma Ghanem’s biography, achievements, artworks, auction results, and shows on Artsy.

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Zawyeh Gallery promotes emerging & established artists from Palestine and the region through art fairs, exhibitions, and bespoke art projects

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Asma Ghanem ( Arabic: أسمى غانم; born 1991) or Asma Ghanem Miller, is a Syrian-born Palestinian visual artist, photographer, and experimental musician. She is best known for her short documentary film, Wall Piano (2020).

Asma Ghanem was born in 1991 in Damascus, Syria, and raised in a refugee camp with her family. Ghanem graduated from the International Academy of Art Palestine - IAAP ( Ramallah, Palestine) and she received the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from the ISDAT or École des beaux-arts de Toulouse ( France).

Ghanem started her career working on an experimental music project called Shams Asma (شمس أسمى). About this, she says:

I began working on an experimental music project called Shams Asma, meaning both 'Asma's Sun', and 'Highest Sun' in Arabic. I began recording different sounds - the sounds of machines, daily movements, silence, musical instruments, electronic sounds, etc, with an aim to criticize the transformation of lifestyles and the phenomenon of construction in Palestinian cities, focusing on the questions that arise around the audio-visual transformation of ugly, yet beautiful, independent yet occupied cities, as well as other contradictions.

In 2014, she produced her first experimental album titled Fi Alard (في الأرض).

In 2015, her Photography received special mention in the Palest'In & Out festival, a festival to promote talented young Palestinian artists that it held in Paris ( France) and organized by Institut Culturel Franco-Palestinien.

In 2016, her experimental music project called HOMELAND IS... won the 3rd Prize in the Young Artist Award (YAYA) of the Hassan Hourani Award.

In 2021, her documentary film Wall Piano was selected at the Tampere Film Festival ( Tampereen elokuvajuhlat), a short film festival held at Finland. In this festival, it received the special mention and the Audience Award.

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Asma Ghanem ( Arabic: أسمى غانم; born 1991) or Asma Ghanem Miller, is a Syrian-born Palestinian visual artist, photographer, and experimental musician. She is best known for her short documentary film, Wall Piano (2020). Asma Ghanem was born in 1991 in Damascus, Syria, and raised in a refugee camp with her family.

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Carolyn Mazloomi of West Chester, Ohio, is an artist, author, organizer, and curator acknowledged as being among the most influential quilt historians in the United States. Widely exhibited in the United States and internationally, her quilts can be found in numerous important museums and corporate collections. She is founder of Women of Color Quilters Network, which has been a major force in fostering the fiber art works of African American people.

She has curated 27 quilt exhibitions and written 14 books on quilt making. Through Mazloomi's effort WCQN members have had their quilts presented in venues such as prominent museums and galleries and internationally traveled exhibitions.

"In her career as a quilter, curator, educator and author, Dr. Mazloomi has tirelessly honored the history of African-American quilt making," said ACC Awards Committee Member Pat Hickman. "Many of her own narrative quilts chronicle the past of racial violence in America; she speaks eloquently and powerfully of the greater need, on the part of all of us, to work toward diversity in our lives."

Carolyn Mazloomi of West Chester, Ohio, is an artist, author, organizer, and curator acknowledged as being among the most influential quilt historians in the United States. Widely exhibited in the United States and internationally, her quilts can be found in numerous important museums and corporate collections. She is founder of Women of Color Quilters Network, which has been a major force in fostering the fiber art works of African American people.

She has curated 27 quilt exhibitions and written 14 books on quilt making. Through Mazloomi's effort WCQN members have had their quilts presented in venues such as prominent museums and galleries and internationally traveled exhibitions.

"In her career as a quilter, curator, educator and author, Dr. Mazloomi has tirelessly honored the history of African-American quilt making," said ACC Awards Committee Member Pat Hickman. "Many of her own narrative quilts chronicle the past of racial violence in America; she speaks eloquently and powerfully of the greater need, on the part of all of us, to work toward diversity in our lives."

Carolyn Mazloomi of West Chester, Ohio, is an artist, author, organizer, and curator acknowledged as being among the most influential quilt historians in the United States. Widely exhibited in the United States and internationally, her quilts can be found in numerous important museums and corporate collections. She is founder of Women of Color Quilters Network, which has been a major force in fostering the fiber art works of African American people.

She has curated 27 quilt exhibitions and written 14 books on quilt making. Through Mazloomi's effort WCQN members have had their quilts presented in venues such as prominent museums and galleries and internationally traveled exhibitions.

"In her career as a quilter, curator, educator and author, Dr. Mazloomi has tirelessly honored the history of African-American quilt making," said ACC Awards Committee Member Pat Hickman. "Many of her own narrative quilts chronicle the past of racial violence in America; she speaks eloquently and powerfully of the greater need, on the part of all of us, to work toward diversity in our lives."

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Carolyn Mazloomi | American Craft Council

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Carolyn Mazloomi of West Chester, Ohio, is an artist, author, organizer, and curator acknowledged as being among the most influential quilt histori

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" Well. I look at the quilt makers as culture bearers because there's a long history of quilt making in this country and I want to see it carried forth to the next generation. And because most of the stories within the African-American quilt community are narratives and tell the story of our culture, what would be more important than people seeing these quilts and noting history; it's important because we as a people have our footprint noted on this canvass called american history, so people have to know the role that we played and that we were here and that we contributed positively to history in this country, so it's important for that aspect."

Dr. Carolyn Mazloomi is a master quilter of international renown. She is the founder of the African-American Quilt Guild (1981) and the Women of Color Quilters Network (1985). The Women of Color Quilters Network grew from its initial 10-person membership to over 1,800 nationwide and 4,350 internationally. Through these organizations, Mazloomi has created quilter networks that highlight the unique contributions of African-American quilters on the global stage. Mazloomi's quilts have been exhibited at establishments including the Mint Museum, National Civil rights Museum, Museum of Art and Design, American Folk Art Museum, and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Many of her quilts depict narratives about family history, African-American history, and women's rights. She has also published twelve books about African-American quilters such as Visioning Human Rights in the New Millenium: Quilting the World's Conscience, And Still We Rise: Race, Culture, and Visual Conversations, and Quilting African American Women's History. In 2003, Mazloomi was the first recipient of the Ohio Heritage Fellowship program which recognizes Ohio folk and traditional artists who are the finest and most influential masters of their particular art forms and traditions and whose work in the folk and traditional arts have had a significant impact on the people and communities of the state. In 2014, Mazloomi was named a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts. She was also inducted into the Quilters Hall of Fame Museum in 2016.

Carolyn Mazloomi's Traditions episode.

Her personal website can be found here.

NEA National Heritage Fellowship awarded to Mazloomi in 2014.

Women of Color Quilters Network website.

Contents of the Collection

Short video clips of Mazloomi quilting

Images of Mazloomi posing with various quilts

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"Well. I look at the quilt makers as culture bearers because there's a long history of quilt making in this country and I want to see it carried forth to the next generation.

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Layered & Stitched: 50 Years of Innovative Art | Carolyn Mazloomi

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Dr. Carolyn Mazloomi, Founding Member of Textile Center's National Artist Advisory Council

"My life is always in the fast lane, and this pandemic has given me a lot of time for reflection," says Dr. Carolyn Mazloomi, a nationally acclaimed quilt artist and lecturer who lives near Columbus, Ohio. She has been working on dual tracks: working on her creative pursuits at her home studio, as well as dedicating more time to empower African American quilters to preserve their legacies.

In normal times, Carolyn is crisscrossing the country, in demand as a curator and lecturer. With travel suspended, "this pandemic has forced me to slow down," Carolyn says, "and I realize how much I miss creating new work in my studio."

In addition to quilting, writing, and editing, printmaking is among Carolyn's many artistic endeavors - a medium that allows her to share more widely her stunning quilted subjects on paper. She is also an avid art collector. "I have acquired a lot of paintings, and they need framing," she says, "so I took a course in framing, set up a woodshop, and now I am using this time to frame nearly 40 of my collected works."

"My studio is my haven, and when I am in my studio, it's like I am in another world," Carolyn says. "Other than being with my family, I am happiest in this environment. My husband calls it my museum. I love to live around all this art. It's very special to me. It is my sacred space."

A founding member of Textile Center's National Artist Advisory Council, Carolyn was the juror for the quilt exhibit "Commemorating His Purple Reign: A Textural Tribute to Prince" in Textile Center's Joan Mondale Gallery in 2017, and then at the Wisconsin Museum of Quilts and Fiber Arts in 2018. This exhibit featured a number of quilts created by members of the Women of Color Quilters Network (WCQN), which she founded in 1985.

"Because I handle everything for the WCQN - chief administrator, financial officer, curator ... basically, I do it all - I am seeing the impact this pandemic is causing," Carolyn says. "One of our best sources of revenue are the exhibitions we rent to museums across the nation. We have temporarily lost some of exhibits due to museums having to be closed and to adjust their schedules. This affects the women in our network. They are losing the opportunity to sell their work."

The pandemic, which has claimed two lives of her WCQN members, has also brought greater urgency for Carolyn to "put the final touches on the latest project for WCQN ... which is my legacy project. I am working to empower African American quilters to preserve their own legacies. The average age of the quilters in our network is somewhere between 74 and 103, and their quilts are being taken by people outside of their families. As a result, we may never see those quilts again."

"It's a disservice to the quilt maker and to African American quilt history," Carolyn says. "This happens because the quilter doesn't have knowledge about how to preserve legacy. They don't know how to document their quilts and how to create wills that document what should happen to their quilts when they die. This is a project I am personally underwriting. I am speaking to quilt makers every day, working with them to preserve and honor their legacies ... and to do so for their families and for scholars who will keep these legacies alive."

Dr. Carolyn Mazloomi has been the recipient of many state and national honors, among them the 2003 Ohio Heritage Fellowship Award, the first such award for any Ohio citizen. In 2014 she was named a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts, the highest award given in the United States for traditional arts. In 2014 she was awarded the Distinguished Scholar & Celebrated Artist Lifetime Achievement Award by Faith Ringgold's Anyone Can Fly Foundation. Dr. Mazloomi is the 2016 inductee to the Quilters Hall of Fame Museum. All of her books are available in the Textile Center Library. carolynlmazloomi.com

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"My life is always in the fast lane, and this pandemic has given me a lot of time for reflection," says Dr. Carolyn Mazloomi, a nationally acclaimed quilt artist and lecturer who lives near Columbus, Ohio.

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Henry Taylor Biography, Artworks & Exhibitions

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Henry Taylor biography, exhibitions and artworks. Follow artist. Enquire about Henry Taylor artworks for sale.

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Henry TAYLOR Limited Editions – THE SKATEROOM

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Working with Hauser & Wirth and MOCA, THE SKATEROOM collaborated with Henry Taylor to release three limited editions of 100. Discover the full collection.

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Zadie Smith on Henry Taylor / The New Yorker

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Zadie Smith on Henry Taylor / The New Yorker

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Not quite two months after the Presidential Inauguration, a Henry Taylor painting appeared on the cover of Art in America: "Cicely and Miles Visit the Obamas" (2017). In this portrait, the Obamas are invisible, represented only by the house they'd just left, while the actress Cicely Tyson and her lover Miles Davis have been transported from a long-ago black-and-white society photograph onto the green impasto glory of the White House front lawn. Transported? Transmogrified. The original paparazzi snap is from the 1968 première of "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter," a film in which Tyson had a supporting role-in 1968, a black actress could rarely expect more-and she is playing a supporting role here, too. The nature of this support is interesting. Her hand is on Davis's sleeve, a gesture somewhere between solidarity and protection. Her gaze is steely: as proud and firm as it is guarded. (Meanwhile, his shades are on and his arms are crossed, as if the camera were some sort of weapon.) The support she offers is not meek or retiring ("Behind every great man . . ."), nor is it hidden or oblique ("The power behind the throne"). Instead, it speaks of a double consciousness. On the one hand, her lover is that unimpeachable thing: an American genius. Why should Miles Davis need anyone's help or protection? On the other hand, he is a black man in America. The same black man who, nine years earlier, found himself beaten up by a New York cop for the twin crimes of escorting a white girl to a cab and not "moving on." (He had been standing outside Birdland, where he was playing a concert for the U.S. armed forces.) Davis's name was up in lights, but Davis himself was laid out on the pavement: blood "running down the khaki suit I had on," as he later recalled. If you can be assaulted outside your own show, you might come to experience many apparently benign situations as rife with the potential for humiliation or violence. It's 1968: best be on your guard. But to be on your guard-unsmiling, self-possessed, not in need of anyone's approval, and dressed like you know your own worth-is also to be cool. Cool as a motherfucker. And surely one obvious way to read this translation of Miles and Cicely to the Obamas' front lawn is as a form of transhistorical wish fulfillment. What if these cool cats met those cool cats?

Yet to speak of this painting as I have-conceptually-is to pass over the difference between thinking with language and thinking in images, and no narrative explanation of the relation between these two pictures is as compelling as the horizontal line that marks the credenza in the photograph and the edge of the White House gardens in the painting, or the verticality of the white man in the photo's top-right corner-with his squared-off shoulders-and his painterly analogue: a blue flagpole, with its crossbar and absence of flag. Taylor thinks primarily in colors, shapes, and lines-he has a spatial, tonal genius. Form responds to form: the negative space around Cicely and Miles in the photograph suggests the exact proportions of the White House, yet in the transition the abstract sometimes becomes figured, and vice versa, as if the border between these things didn't matter. A burst of reflected light in the photo decides the height and placement of the windows in the painting, while two round signs at the movie première-one for Coca-Cola, the other for "Orange"-which can have no figurative echo in the painting, turn up anyhow on the White House façade as abstraction: a red sphere and an orange sphere, tracking the walls of what, in reality, now belonged to Trump. Like two suns setting at the same time.

What kind of a painter is Henry Taylor? He is described by others with labels he mostly rejects-outsider, portraitist, protest painter, folk artist. "I think I just hunt and gather," he has said. "I feel sort of voracious." It's his practice to seek people out-in the street, at an art fair, at his mama's house-and figure them in paint, but each person is configured differently, sometimes hewing closely to verisimilitude, sometimes ignoring it; sometimes attending to the proportion of limbs, other times leaving them out entirely. This variousness of approach finds its mirror in his life, which has also been a story of many different elements combined. Born in 1958, the youngest of eight children (he often refers to himself as Henry the Eighth), Taylor was raised in Oxnard, California, where the pictures in the fancy houses his mother got paid to clean provided some of his earliest exposure to art. Paint itself he might be said to have come to know through his father, a commercial painter employed, for a time, by the U.S. government at a naval air station in Ventura. (He also painted local houses and bars.)

Taylor spent many years in community-college courses-in subjects as disparate as journalism, anthropology, and set design-before taking a job as a psychiatric technician at Camarillo State Mental Hospital. At Camarillo, where he worked for a decade, he began, in his free hours, painting portraits of patients and studying for a B.F.A., at the California Institute of the Arts. He has been painting ever since, at a prolific rate, and on many surfaces besides canvas, including cereal boxes, suitcases, packs of cigarettes, bottles, furniture, and crates. The materials and the style may vary, but the inspiration stays constant: people. ("First of all, I love other people," he told Hamza Walker, the executive director of LAXART, in a recent conversation in Cultured magazine. "I love to meet them, and the fact I can just paint them.") His subjects are drawn from wildly divergent walks of life-the famous and the down-and-out, the sane and the mad, the rich and the poor-and the work they inspire has been similarly unpredictable: poignant faces and blank masks; social realism and fantasy; the handmade, the readymade, and the mixed-media sculpture; the multimedia "happening" (featuring real-life Rastas smoking real-life weed); as well as eclectic borrowings from Alice Neel, Basquiat, Degas, Rauschenberg, Matisse, Goya, Whistler, Alex Katz, Cubism, Constructivism, Congolese sculpture, and more.

If it has been the tendency of African-American artists to stray heedlessly across academic borders and genre demarcations (rap is popular poetry; jazz produces improvised symphonies; gospel is the sexual sacred), then Taylor is firmly grounded in the African-American aesthetic tradition. His greatest subject is human personality, although, in his portraits, personality is not a matter of literal representation but rather a vibe, a texture, a series of vertical block colors laid out on a horizontal plane. This re-states the obvious fact that seeing is never objective, but the intense level of empathy we meet with in Taylor's portraits, especially between the artist and his African-American subjects, determines everything we see, from brushstroke to framing to gaze. Take "Elan Supreme" (2016). Elan is that admirable friend: a sista who has her shit together-despite all obstacles placed in her path-who is permanently glued to her iPhone, working at the top of her game, with no time at all for anybody's nonsense. There are echoes of Cicely here (the word "support" seems to be etched along the horizontal. Or is it "suppress"? Or is it "supp"?), but the energy is different; Taylor's brushstrokes tend frantically rightward, as if his subject were about to walk out of the frame at any moment to take a conference call. "A young master" (2017), meanwhile, is your wiliest little cousin, the one who plays 4-D chess in his mind and may yet grow up to possess the kind of Machiavellian mastery of the streets that will mean, in turn, that the streets can't defeat him. "My Brother Randy" (2008)-one of multiple portraits of Taylor's sibling-looks like one of those naturally buoyant brothers, filled with wild philosophy, whom you can only pray that no oppressive counterforce will ever step on or stop.

Which is all to say that there is a profound sense of recognition and familiarity in Taylor's work, not only between painter and subject but between painter and community, there being so little anthropological distance between the two. (Taylor, who used to live in a loft studio in downtown L.A. and now lives in West Adams, regularly invites neighborhood types to hang out in his space, to drink and talk or be painted-often all three.) There is, additionally, an interesting division between Taylor's paintings of local subjects, frequently homeless or otherwise down on their luck-and usually black-and the art-world denizens, mostly white, he sometimes paints. In the first group, he captures the unstudied openness of those who have no sense of formally presenting themselves. (One painting, from 2014, is called " 'You Really Gone Pay me to Sit?' . . . said the panhandler." ) In the second, we can observe what it means to present oneself as a subject for a portrait by Henry Taylor. Here arms or legs get crossed, eyes turn a little wary or defensive. There is a difference, perhaps, between self-presentation and being present. "To be known and seen" is swiftly turning into a twenty-first-century cliché, but, as far as it regards black life in America, it remains an urgent necessity. "why look, when you can see?" is a recent Taylor title but might also serve as a ruling principle of his work. He paints children at play with their toy guns, undercut with explanatory titles ("I'm not dangerous" and "Girl with Toy Rifle," both from 2015) intended, perhaps, for those who can't see a black child for what she is-i.e., a child. And Taylor knows that it's all too easy to look but never truly see the "Haitan working (washing my window) not begging" (2015), whom he paints in rough but affecting profile, capturing so much: pride, intensity, stoicism, and simple beauty.

This is painting that goes way beyond the brute fact of a body. Other people look; Taylor sees. He puts himself in the way of people. His door is open to all kinds of folks at all kinds of hours. In a different place, this simple fact wouldn't feel so surprising, but in twenty-first-century L.A.-as throughout America-cross-class and cross-economic encounters are regulated and separated by gates, districts, ghettos, railway tracks, walls, and income brackets. Skid-row strangers rarely cross these lines except to be utilized in some form of transaction, often exploitative (prostitution, drug dealing). Taylor, by contrast, asks nothing of them but their presence, and in a heavily defended culture, rendered potentially lethal by the Second Amendment, this rare openness ("I love other people") feels pointedly radical. The poor, the marginalized, the addicted, the mentally ill, the desperate and forgotten-everyone is of interest to Taylor, and whatever is risked by this faith in strangers ("So far so good," Taylor told Modern Painters. "One girl stole my CD player.") is laughably minimal when placed next to the gains, both artistic and personal, from the encounters themselves.

And, of course, they're not always strangers. As Taylor has explained, "Every successful black person has eighteen members of his family living in the projects, and we all know someone who's in the system." This unique aspect of African-American life means that getting to the "top" never entirely shields you from the "bottom" (or doesn't allow you, in good conscience, to forget all the people you've left behind). It is a painful fact that functions structurally, in his work, to create interesting time signatures, where the past, the present, and the future meet in traumatic collisions. "Go Next Door and Ask Michelle's Momma Mrs Robinson if I Can Borrow 20 Dollars Til Next Week?" (2017) is a reference to Michelle Obama's mother and features a figure in a Colin Kaepernick jersey looking keenly through bars at two buildings: the White House and Marcy Projects, the Brooklyn public-housing complex in which Jay-Z was raised. Elsewhere in the painting, a gaggle of men are about to enter the county sheriff's department's white van, followed by an ominous-looking black horse. (Horses, in Taylor's work, appear sometimes as a symbol of freedom and power and sometimes as an expression of the opposite: power restrained, power trapped and fenced in.) It is a painting that exists in many moments in time-in a moment of success and in one of struggle, in the everyday present/past of black oppression and imprisonment and in the aspirational present/future of black success and freedom. Horizontal strips of tree and fence and pavement mark these divisions, but not cleanly. If Marcy were on the prisoner side of the fence, for example, it might be possible to separate the painting out chronologically, into the dark past and the bright future. But Taylor depicts black history the way many black people actually experience it: as simultaneous change and stasis, revolution and stagnation, one step forward, two steps back. In Taylor's work, the dream is not to finally and speciously separate these two worlds of struggle and success, as O. J. Simpson notoriously attempted to do, but to insist on their relation. The individual black success story-including Taylor's own-is not sufficient.

An awareness of the proximity and the ever-present threat of poverty and abjection connects Taylor's work to the hip-hop that he loves and references, mining Kendrick Lamar's lyrics for titles or using Tupac's face for an installation, and painting several lively portraits of rappers themselves. A 2017 portrait of Jay-Z, neither sat for nor gleaned from a photograph, was instead constructed from memory, and so we can rightly describe it as an imagined portrait of an Old Master: besuited, unruffled, arrived. And, considering the way that Taylor plays with time, it's pleasant to think of this portrait as existing in a fantasy chronology with "A young master," as if that determined young boy might be another kid from Marcy Projects with big plans, one of the future black success stories Jay-Z himself anticipates in the song "Murder Excellence": "That ain't enough-we gonna need a million more." But even Jay-Z, in Taylor's version, has not escaped the strictures of racialized America. The confidence of the portrait is deliberately undercut by its title, "I Am a Man," which, with its mixture of pride and a still necessary defensiveness, has melancholy roots you can trace all the way back to the abolitionists: "Am I not a man and a brother?" Celebrating black success is one thing, but Taylor never seems to forget the many other possible futures awaiting a boy like this young master, possibilities that are, statistically speaking, far more likely than a superstar rapper's miraculous trajectory. Take Taylor's neighborhood friend Emory, painted multiple times over the years but never more movingly than in the canvas titled "Emory: shoulda been a phd but society made him homeless" (2017). Was he once a young master? In this portrait, we find him an old man, in utter isolation, gray-haired, raggedly dressed, barefoot in a motorized wheelchair. But he has been seen by Taylor. Known and seen.

There is a Picasso-like restlessness to Taylor, a determined promiscuity of intention and execution. You can well imagine a gallerist pleading with him to slow down. The artist who once, back at Camarillo State Mental Hospital, painted a suffering patient synecdochically, with a screaming mouth for a head, could have easily become a commercial artist, using the part to represent the whole, pitching and selling on either side of the horizontal line that bisects so many of his canvases. He could have been a maker of icons and iconography, like Warhol, who made a Campbell's soup can a metaphor for capitalism and made repetition itself a metaphor for fame. Instead, Taylor has chosen the road of chaos-that is, the road of paint.

Freewheeling through references in his voracious desire to render his subjects truly visible, he retools Degas's existential mixture of boredom and desire in "La Coiffure" (circa 1896) so that a bored homey can get his braids freshened ("Gettin it Done," 2016), and borrows some of Barkley L. Hendricks's graphic flair and advertorial slickness for his portrait of the ice-cool drummer/rapper-and his fellow Oxnard native-Anderson .Paak ("PAAK," 2017). In "Two brothers (Afrikans) Relaxing in a Paris Park" (2014), you sense that you will surely find Manet's luncheon just out of frame, in the next clearing, while elsewhere, in "Before Gerhard Richter there was Cassi" (2017), Richter's famous "Betty" becomes Cassi, with an Afro. The influence of the masterly Kerry James Marshall-Taylor's contemporary and fellow L.A. painter-is many times explicitly quoted, with something of the same guilelessness and love with which Taylor opens his doors to his neighbors. In paintings like "Fatty" (2006) and "The Darker the Berry, The Sweeter the Juice" (2015), Taylor's subjects are so dark that they appear, as they often do in a Marshall canvas, almost as silhouettes. But the most affecting works see the world in a manner that is wholly Taylor's own.

No one else could have painted "See Alice jump" (2011) or "The Long Jump by Carl Lewis" (2010), in which African-American sports stars leap through the artist's beloved horizontal, and thus through time, through neighborhoods, through black history itself, offering a vision of the heroic that lives alongside the prisons and the projects, and that exists despite those things, yet does not, could not, erase or justify them. Taylor sees in the round. And he sees most acutely the things from which we may wish to turn. Things like Philando Castile bleeding out in the driver's seat of a car (" THE TIMES THAY AINT A CHANGING, FAST ENOUGH!"). The first time I came across that painting, at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, I thought for a moment that it was a presentation of a single eyeball-which, like all Taylor's eyeballs, reminded me of the eyeballs found in Congolese nkondi statues-existing independently of a face, set instead within a frame of collagelike colors and shapes. Then I saw the face, then the car, then the blue twist of the seat belt, and only after I'd read the title did the little black rectangle atop the pink ball of paint resolve itself into a gun in a white cop's hand. But I don't think my first instinct was entirely wrong. As viewers, we are being asked to do more than merely look at an infamous shooting. The challenge is to see how it feels to be shot-the world-destroying pain that arrives with the bullets, as reality streams away from you-and the way that people and things begin to dissolve, becoming colors and shapes, then outlines, then nothing. For Taylor, this outrage from the newspapers becomes a pietà, driven by an intimacy based not on actual acquaintance but rather on personal identification. And this identification must be intense: his own grandfather, Ardmore Taylor, a horse trainer from East Texas, was ambushed, shot, and killed, back in 1933, when Taylor's father was only nine years old. But many African-Americans will recognize the catechism: Could have been my cousin. Could have been my brother. Could have been me. ♦
This piece is from the monograph "Henry Taylor."

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Zadie Smith on Henry Taylor's Promiscuous Painting

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Not quite two months after the Presidential Inauguration, a Henry Taylor painting appeared on the cover of Art in America: "Cicely and Miles Visit the Obamas" (2017). In this portrait, the Obamas are invisible, represented only by the house they'd just left, while the actress Cicely Tyson and her lover Miles Davis have been transported from a long-ago black-and-white society photograph onto the green impasto glory of the White House front lawn.

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Artists

Henry Taylor creates assemblage sculptures that transcend the boundaries of painting and sculpture, and combine elements of figurative, landscape, and history painting.

Biography

Henry Taylor wanted to pursue a career as a writer before electing to become an artist. As a child, he observed art in the houses his mother cleaned for a living and through his father, a commercial painter working for the United States government at Naval Air Station Point Mugu in Ventura County, California.

He went on to study at Oxnard College, where he took courses in anthropology, journalism, and set design. He was encouraged to pursue art by James Jarvaise, an abstract painter who served as the head of the department of fine and performing arts at the college. As a student at the California Institute of the Arts, he studied under Charles Gaines, and familiarized himself with the work of artists like Henri Matisse, Bob Thompson, and Alice Neel.

While in school in the 1990s, Taylor also worked as a psychiatric technician at Camarillo State Mental Hospital. This experience gave his work a sense of humanity, as many of his first sitters were patients from the hospital. Since then, he has depicted relatives, athletes, politicians, entertainers, and strangers, conveying each with a sense of empathy. He paints across a multitude of materials beyond canvases, including cereal boxes, suitcases, and furniture, meeting traditional art history mediums with everyday objects. For these works, he creates assemblage sculptures that transcend the boundaries of painting and sculpture, and combine elements of figurative, landscape, and history painting.

Taylor earned his BFA from the California Institute of the Arts. He is the recipient of the Robert De Niro Sr. Prize (2018), and has had his work presented at the Whitney Biennial (2017) and Venice Biennale (2019). The Studio Museum has presented his work in exhibitions such as Henry Taylor: Sis and Bra (2007); Regarding the Figure (2017); and Their Own Harlems (2017).

Artists

Henry Taylor creates assemblage sculptures that transcend the boundaries of painting and sculpture, and combine elements of figurative, landscape, and history painting.

Nothing's Missing Paint on plastic bottle, wood 87 × 12 × 16 in. (221 × 30.5 × 40.6 cm) The Studio Museum in Harlem; gift of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg 2016.47

Biography

Henry Taylor wanted to pursue a career as a writer before electing to become an artist. As a child, he observed art in the houses his mother cleaned for a living and through his father, a commercial painter working for the United States government at Naval Air Station Point Mugu in Ventura County, California.

He went on to study at Oxnard College, where he took courses in anthropology, journalism, and set design. He was encouraged to pursue art by James Jarvaise, an abstract painter who served as the head of the department of fine and performing arts at the college. As a student at the California Institute of the Arts, he studied under Charles Gaines, and familiarized himself with the work of artists like Henri Matisse, Bob Thompson, and Alice Neel.

While in school in the 1990s, Taylor also worked as a psychiatric technician at Camarillo State Mental Hospital. This experience gave his work a sense of humanity, as many of his first sitters were patients from the hospital. Since then, he has depicted relatives, athletes, politicians, entertainers, and strangers, conveying each with a sense of empathy. He paints across a multitude of materials beyond canvases, including cereal boxes, suitcases, and furniture, meeting traditional art history mediums with everyday objects. For these works, he creates assemblage sculptures that transcend the boundaries of painting and sculpture, and combine elements of figurative, landscape, and history painting.

Taylor earned his BFA from the California Institute of the Arts. He is the recipient of the Robert De Niro Sr. Prize (2018), and has had his work presented at the Whitney Biennial (2017) and Venice Biennale (2019). The Studio Museum has presented his work in exhibitions such as Henry Taylor: Sis and Bra (2007); Regarding the Figure (2017); and Their Own Harlems (2017).

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Henry Taylor creates assemblage sculptures that transcend the boundaries of painting and sculpture, and combine elements of figurative, landscape, and history painting.

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Expert Voices: Henry Taylor’s From Congo to the Capitol and Black Again

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For more than thirty years, the Los Angeles-based artist Henry Taylor (b. 1958) has portrayed people from widely different backgrounds-family members, friends, neighbors, celebrities, politicians, and strangers-with a mixture of raw immediacy and tenderness. His improvisational approach to artmaking is hinted at in this exhibition's title, Henry Taylor: B Side, which refers to the side of a record album that often contains lesser-known, more experimental songs.

Taylor's paintings, executed quickly and instinctually from memory, newspaper clippings, snapshots, and in-person sittings, are variously light-hearted, intimate, and somber. In them, he combines flat planes of bold, sensuous color with areas of rich, intimate detail and loose brushstrokes to create paintings that feel alive. Guided by a deep-seated empathy for people and their lived experiences, Taylor captures the humanity, social milieu, and mood of his subjects, whose visceral presence is heightened by their closely cropped, often life-size images. In working from personal experience and shared history, Taylor offers a view of everyday life in the United States that is grounded in the experiences of his own community, including the incarceration, poverty, and often deadly interactions with police that disproportionately affect Black Americans. Deeply steeped in art history, his work forms a continuum with the expressive figurative painting and politically engaged work of European and American artists from Max Beckmann to Bob Thompson, Philip Guston, and Alice Neel.

Born in the Los Angeles suburb of Ventura, California, Taylor grew up nearby in Oxnard. While studying art at Oxnard Community College and later the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), he worked at the Camarillo State Mental Hospital as a psychiatric technician on the night shift. After graduating from CalArts in 1995 and moving to downtown Los Angeles, Taylor became a mainstay of the burgeoning art community there and a leading influence on the rise of figurative painting.

Organized thematically, Henry Taylor: B Side presents the artist's paintings along with a selection of his assemblage sculptures, rarely exhibited early drawings, a large grouping of painted objects on recycled cigarette packs and other everyday supports, and two new installations, one made specifically for this exhibition.

This exhibition is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), in Los Angeles, and curated by Bennett Simpson, Senior Curator, with Anastasia Kahn, Curatorial Assistant, at MOCA. The presentation at the Whitney Museum of American Art is organized by Barbara Haskell, Curator at the Whitney, with Colton Klein, Curatorial Assistant, and Caroline Webb, Curatorial Assistant.

Please read about the exhibition's accessibility information before visiting Henry Taylor: B Side.

Henry Taylor: B Side is organized by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

This exhibition is sponsored by

Generous support is provided by Judy Hart Angelo; the Barbara Haskell American Fellows Legacy Fund; Oliver Haarmann; Kevin and Rosemary McNeely, Manitou Fund; and the Whitney's National Committee.

Major support is provided by The Keith Haring Foundation Exhibition Fund, Hauser & Wirth, Sueyun and Gene Locks, and George Wells and Manfred Rantner.

Significant support is provided by the Kapadia Equity Fund.

Additional support is provided by The Cowles Charitable Trust.

New York magazine is the exclusive media sponsor.

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For more than thirty years, the Los Angeles-based artist Henry Taylor (b. 1958) has portrayed people from widely different backgrounds-family members, friends, neighbors, celebrities, politicians, and strangers-with a mixture of raw immediacy and tenderness. His improvisational approach to artmaking is hinted at in this exhibition's title, Henry Taylor: B Side, which refers to the side of a record album that often contains lesser-known, more experimental songs.

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Close Alert

Karon Davis

On the High Line at 23rd Street

Karon Davis brings to life historical and allegorical figures in her signature white, wrapped plaster sculptures. Immersed in her parents' worlds of theater and ballet as a child, Davis' installations merge memory and scenes from the stage with historical events, mythology, and ongoing socio-political concerns. Taking up topics ranging from environmental disasters to the Civil Rights Movement, Davis shows us how politics, history, and myth are all performances that live in our collective imaginations.

For the High Line, Davis creates a larger-than-life bronze portrait of a ballerina taking her final bow after a performance. Using a combination of 3D scanning technology and traditional sculpting techniques, the bronze figure was derived from Davis' life-size plaster cast sculpture of ballerina Jasmine Perry. The work is an homage to Davis' parents and sister, all of whom were professional dancers. Curtain Call draws on the artist's experience growing up on stage and behind the scenes of the dance and theater world, seeing firsthand the incredible mental and physical toll taken to create a flawless performance. The work is part of a new series, Beauty Must Suffer, which examines the life and labor of Black dancers in the historically European tradition of ballet. Davis' sculptures trace the ballerina's pursuit of perfect form, from their first encounter with the barre to their final bow-theatrically presenting their bodies as a vessel for performative storytelling. As Curtain Call's ballerina kneels forward, she reveals a bouquet of roses, a traditional gift of appreciation given by admiring fans after a ballet. Staged on the Lawn at 23rd Street, Curtain Call is forever frozen in reverence to her audience, transforming the architecture of the High Line itself into a stage.

Artist bio

Karon Davis (b. 1977, Reno, Nevada) lives and works in Los Angeles, California and New York, New York. Recent solo exhibitions have been featured at institutions and galleries including the Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles, California (2023); Salon 94, New York, New York (2023); Jeffrey Deitch, New York, New York (2021); Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles, California (2018); and The Underground Museum, Los Angeles, California (2012). Notable group exhibitions include Black American Portraits presented in conjunction with The Obama Portraits Tour, LACMA, Los Angeles, California (2021); Feedback, Jack Shainman Gallery, The School Kinderhook, Kinderhook, New York (2021); Yesterday we said tomorrow, Prospect New Orleans, New Orleans, Louisiana (2021); Art and Hope At The End of the Tunnel, USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California (2021); The Slipstream: Reflection, Resilience, and Resistance in the Art of Our Time, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York (2021); Eleven Figures In Two Parts, Atkinson Gallery at SBCC, Santa Barbara, California (2020); Reclamation! Pan-African Works from the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, Virginia (2018); and Young Blood, The Frye Museum, Seattle, Washington (2016). Her work is featured of the public collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California; the Pérez Art Museum, Miami, Florida; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; California; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California; the Rubell Museum, Miami, Florida; and the Brooklyn Museum, New York, New York, among others. In 2017 Davis was the recipient of The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Grant.

Support

Lead support for High Line Art comes from Amanda and Don Mullen. Major support is provided by Shelley Fox Aarons and Philip E. Aarons, The Brown Foundation, Inc., and Charina Endowment Fund.

High Line Art is supported, in part, with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the New York City Council, under the leadership of Speaker Adrienne Adams.

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For the High Line, Karon Davis presents Curtain Call, a larger-than-life bronze portrait of a ballerina taking her final bow after a performance.

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After Reflected Fame, the Artist Karon Davis Steps Into Her Own Light (Published 2021)

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Her exhibitions in two New York-area galleries take an unflinching look at the Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale and safety in schools.

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Salon 94 was an art gallery in NYC featuring renowned artists and selected works of fine art. Visit one of their four art galleries and exhibits in New York City today.

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Salon 94 was an art gallery in NYC featuring renowned artists and selected works of fine art. Visit one of their four art galleries and exhibits in New York City today.

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YOUTH PORTRAITURE BY GHANIAN VISUAL ARTIST SARFO EMMANUEL ANNOR

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YOUTH PORTRAITURE BY GHANIAN VISUAL ARTIST SARFO EMMANUEL ANNOR

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Youth Portraiture by Ghanian Visual Artist Sarfo Emmanuel Annor | African Digital Art

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At just 19 years old Sarfo Emmanuel Annor captures these dynamic portraits of the youth, the young people in his community. Shot and edited with his iPhone Sarfo hopes to represent the culture and …

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Ghana's Sarfo Emmanuel Annor Is Celebrating African Beauty

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Ghana's Sarfo Emmanuel Annor Is Celebrating African Beauty

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Ghana's Sarfo Emmanuel Annor Is Celebrating African Beauty

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OkayAfrica's mission is connecting a global audience to Africa. We are a youth-driven news site featuring comprehensive coverage of the latest news, culture, art, music and lifestyle from across Africa and the wider diaspora.

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Sarfo Emmanuel Annor: “I Want to Showcase the Beauty of Black Skin”

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Sarfo Emmanuel Annor: “I Want to Showcase the Beauty of Black Skin”

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Sarfo Emmanuel Annor 's portraits hum with a meditative frequency. Strong, primary-coloured backgrounds lay the foundation, in front of which his radiantly dressed subjects appear to levitate on a separate plane. Colours are exclusively bold but Annor keeps them in careful balance, creating perfectly tuned compositions with an almost holy aura.

The 22-year-old artist has made this deft interplay of light, colour and emotion the raison d'etre of his growing practice, creating jewel-like portraits of people from his hometown of Koforidua, southern Ghana. Last year, Annor received his debut solo show at the Bridge Gallery in Paris, and most recently, featured at the fifth edition of 1-54's Contemporary African Art Fair, held recently in Marrakech.

Founded in 2013 by Touria El Glaoui, 1-54 remains the first and only international fair dedicated to contemporary African art. Featuring galleries from across the continent alongside international counterparts that reflect the wider diaspora, 1-54 has supported young artists like Annor from the outset.

As is true of many emerging African photographers, from Ismail Zaidy to Derrick Ofosu Boateng and fellow Ghanaian Prince Gyasi, Annor started out taking photographs on his smartphone. Combining his day job as a designer's apprentice with a background in painting, photography offered a way of uniting both. "I started with taking photographs of family and friends," says Annor. "Especially my niece - I used to do only portraits of her in the beginning."

More recently, Annor's list of collaborators has expanded but two things remain unchanged: all are children and all share dark skin tones. "Kids have this special aura around them," explains Annor. "They represent the future and that makes the work really special for me."

The choice of shooting dark skin tones, on the other hand, offers a technical advantage, providing a high contrast with the textured white walls Annor uses as his backdrops so that their colour can be easily changed later. But the decision is also an integral part of Annor's ambition to channel the radiant energy and vitality of his home. "I want to showcase the beauty of Black skin to the world," says Annor, whose sitters all hail from Koforidua's population of just under 100,000. "One of the main symbols in my photography is embracing dark skin and challenging African stereotypes around it."

In spite of their relative locality (all his photographs were shot against found white walls in Koforidua), this Pan-African sentiment runs through Annor's work, down to the ceremonial cloths worn by his sitters, which he has collected from different countries across the continent.

These exquisite fabrics are just one of several colour inputs that Annor uses to play with the emotional resonance of each portrait. "I really believe these colours can lighten your mood," he says. "If you're having a bad day, these colours can directly influence your emotions." Each portrait reflects a different mood and each mood a colour, but Annor also brings narrative to his portraits with playful symbolism. In one photograph, a model stands with her back to the camera, an open book resting on top of her head ( , 2021). "Here in Ghana, most kids face a lot of pressure around school from their parents. The concept is about how learning can become a burden and that they also need to play to be kids."

Though he cites René Magritte and Vincent van Gogh as influences, closer similarities to Annor's style can arguably be found in the work of pioneering US painter Barkley L Hendricks. Paintings like Misc Tyrone (Tyrone Smith) (1976) and Blood (Donald Formey) (1975), in particular share clear parallels with Annor's intuitive sense for colour and sharp tailoring, as well as his elevation of Black skin.

Perhaps it's little surprise, therefore, that Annor has his sights set on taking his work into museum spaces and sharing the same walls as his idols. "My dream is that one day I will show my work somewhere like Tate," says Annor. "I want to continue developing works like this, works that promote a uniquely African beauty and tell stories of African youth."
Sarfo Emmanuel Annor's debut will go on show at the Bridge Gallery in Paris from 21 - 26 February 2023.

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Sarfo Emmanuel Annor: "I Want to Showcase the Beauty of Black Skin"

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Ahead of his debut solo exhibition in Paris, AnOther meets the Ghanian artist painting jewel-like portraits of people from his hometown

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God's Child | Sarfo Emmanuel Annor | Gallery Viewer

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God's Child, 2022. See all artworks of Sarfo Emmanuel Annor, represented by The Bridge Gallery.

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Sarfo Emmanuel Annor is a 21-year old visual artist who uses color to share the stories and dreams of young people from Koforidua, Ghana. He uses his smartphone to revive the art of portraiture by capturing colorful images of the local youth, translating the dynamic story of contemporary Africa.

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Storytelling Through Art with Bisa Butler and Gholdy Muhammad - webinar

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Storytelling Through Art with Bisa Butler and Gholdy Muhammad - webinar

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP39aiPMQk8&feature=youtu.be

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Storytelling Through Art with Bisa Butler & Dr. Gholdy Muhammad

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Bisa Butler on Process - Sewing Stories, via Scholastic

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Bisa Butler on Process - Sewing Stories, via Scholastic

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https://art.scholastic.com/issues/2021-22/120121/sewing-stories.html/eml=CM/smd/20212008//txtl/LiveEvent/edall?/#Grades%207-12

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Skip to main content

How do Bisa Butler's materials and process help her share ideas?

How does Bisa Butler use photos and fabric to share her ideas?

Ella drops her chin and looks up from beneath her colorful hat with big, expressive eyes. Light plays across her gold glasses and she reveals just the hint of a smile. Who is the girl in the portrait on the cover? What is her story?

The artist, Bisa Butler, knows that she can create a narrative in quilted portraits like this one by placing clues throughout the work. The materials an artist uses-from paint and clay to found objects and even food-inherently have meaning. Butler carefully selects colors and fabrics that hold symbolic meaning for each of her portraits, revealing details about her subjects-and herself.

A girl looks up from beneath a colorful hat. She wears gold glasses and a hint of a smile. Who is the girl in the portrait on the cover? What is her story?

Bisa Butler quilted the fabric portrait. She places clues about the subject throughout the work. She chooses fabrics in different colors and patterns. The fabrics are symbolic. Butler creates a narrative, or story, using materials that have meaning. They represent something about the subjects and about Butler.

Courtesy of Bisa Butler, Library of Congress.

Butler was born in 1973 and grew up in New Jersey. When she was a graduate student, her professors gave her an assignment to make a portrait. At the time, she was taking a fiber arts class, where she was experimenting with textiles and exploring processes like weaving, felting, and quilting. The artist decided to make a quilted portrait of her grandparents, above, based on a photo of them when they were young, right.

Butler selected fabrics from her grandmother's fabric collection and quickly realized she could tell a story about her subjects through the patterns and colors she used. For example, Butler included black fabric with purple flowers on it to symbolize her grandmother's name: Violette.

The process of quilting itself is also significant. There is a long history of quilting among Black women in America. By using this art form, Butler acknowledges that tradition.

The artist started out making portraits of important people in her life, including her daughters, friends, and family. "My original goal for creating portraits was out of love," Butler explains. Soon she realized she could make a bigger statement with her work.

Butler was born in 1973. She grew up in New Jersey. When she was in graduate school, her teacher gave her an assignment to make a portrait. Butler was taking a fiber arts class at the time. She learned about weaving, felting, and quilting. Butler made a quilted portrait of her grandparents, shown far right. She based it on a photo of them when they were young, shown above right.

Butler chose fabrics from her grandmother's fabric collection. She tells a story about her grandparents with patterns and colors. Butler included black fabric with purple flowers on it. It symbolizes her grandmother's name: Violette. Butler also honors the long history of Black women quilting in America.

How does this reference photograph from the National Archives relate to Butler's quilt?

Butler began experimenting with historical photographs from the National Archives, an administration in Washington, DC, that records documents for legal or historical reasons. These photos are meant to be historical records rather than formal, artistic portraits. In many cases, the image titles are simply descriptive, explaining where and when they were taken and what the subject is doing.

For Butler, the images offer far more than a record of history. "I think about them like family members," Butler explains. "If this was my little nephew, I'm trying to portray him as a person-not just a symbol of a child, but an individual child."

Like in the portrait of her grandparents, Butler continues to use fabrics and colors with meaning in each quilt she makes. Her 2019 To God and Truth, below, depicts the 1899 baseball team at Morris Brown College, the first Black higher educational institution in Georgia. One of the fabrics she incorporates is a pattern called the beehive. "I thought about a team and this hive having to work together," the artist explains. "I'm using pattern to tell the story."

Butler began creating quilts based on photos from the National Archives, which is a library of historical documents in Washington, D.C. People usually don't consider these photos artistic. The images often have simple titles describing what is happening in each scene.

Butler thought there was more to these images. "I think about them like family members," she explains. "If this was my little nephew, I'm trying to portray him as a person. Not just a symbol of a child, but an individual child."

Butler uses meaningful fabrics to share her ideas about her subjects in these quilted works. In 2019, Butler made To God and Truth, below. It shows the 1899 baseball team at Morris Brown College, the first Black college in Georgia. One of the fabrics she uses has a pattern called the beehive. "I thought about a team and this hive having to work together," the artist explains. "I'm using pattern to tell the story."

Education has always been important in Butler's family. Her father was a college president, and her mother was a French teacher. Butler herself was an art teacher for years. "Being a teacher allows you to see things from other people's perspective," the artist says.

This idea is deeply integrated with her portraits and process. As she works on each one, she spends countless hours observing the reference photograph, wondering who the subject was and how she can tell his or her story. "I hope that when people look at my work, that they see that interest in humanity and in the individual."

Education is important in Butler's family. Her father was a college president, and her mother taught French. Butler herself was an art teacher for years. "Being a teacher allows you to see things from other people's perspective," she says.

Butler uses this idea in her process. She spends many hours studying the reference photos that inspire her portraits. She wonders who the subjects were. She thinks about how she can capture their stories in her art. "I hope that when people look at my work, that they see that interest in humanity and in the individual," Butler says.

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Sewing Stories Features Article for Students | Scholastic Art Magazine

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Explore how Bisa Butler uses materials and her process to share ideas.

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Teaching Resources for Bisa Butler art by Gholdy Muhammad

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Teaching Resources for Bisa Butler art by Gholdy Muhammad

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https://classroommagazines.scholastic.com/teaching-blogs/2021-22/storytelling-through-art-teaching-resources.html

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Read Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy and learn more about Gholdy's four-layered equity framework and practical tips for instruction.

Check out this exclusive curriculum, Art as Anchor Text, adapated by Dr. Gholdy which examines Bisa's artwork for grades 6-12.

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Storytelling through Art Teaching Resources

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Read Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy and learn more about Gholdy's four-layered equity framework and practical tips for instruction. Check out this exclusive curriculum, Art as Anchor Text, adapated by Dr. Gholdy which examines Bisa's artwork for grades 6-12.

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https://figuringhistory.site.seattleartmuseum.org/kerry-james-marshall/school-beauty-school-culture/

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A famous example of art-historical painting, Hans Holbein the Younger's double portrait, The Ambassadors, shows two friends amid an array of detailed artifacts from art and science. Within this celebration of human accomplishment, hiding in plain sight, is a distorted skull-a mememto mori, a reminder of the inevitability of death.

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"I am overwhelmed by white figure representations every time I go to a museum. It is almost universally understood that these images are the foundation of art in the western world."

- Kerry James Marshall

Marshall replaces the skull from Hans Holbein the Younger's painting, The Ambassadors, made in 1533, with a Disney-esque image of a young blonde woman. As a parallel for the skull in The Ambassadors, which reminds us that death lurks in the midst of human vitality, this distorted head is a reminder of dominant notions of beauty within the buzzing activity of the Black beauty parlor.

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This 17th-century painting is a triple portrait whose main subjects-the Spanish King and Queen-appear dimly reflected in a mirror. More clearly represented is the artist at work, half-hidden behind a canvas. Next to him, the young princess becomes the central figure. This painting's unusual point of view questions the role of the viewer and who is looking at whom. In School of Beauty, School of Culture, Kerry James Marshall inserts the flash of his camera in the mirror behind the woman posing for the picture, to similar effect.

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This is a poster for a Chris Ofili exhibition at the Tate Britain in 2010. Winner of the Turner Prize, Ofili is an acclaimed Black contemporary artist whose paintings combine the sacred with the profane, the historical with pop culture. Marshall is creating a Black iconography by including his contemporary.

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"If you look around the museum you notice there's an absence of Black figures. I don't expect those people to have made pictures of me because I wasn't part of that culture and I wasn't part of that history. . . . I have to be able to project my self image in such a way as I can guarantee myself a place on these walls."

- Kerry James Marshall

An autographed poster of singer Lauryn Hill.

✕

The Black Is Beautiful movement began in the 1960s. It rejected the social and historical idealization of white beauty, and turned the negative perceptions of Blackness into a celebratory one.

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According to the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, "the three Pan-African colors on the flag represent: red: the blood that unites all people of Black African ancestry, and shed for liberation; black: black people whose existence as a nation, though not a nation-state, is affirmed by the existence of the flag; and green: the abundant natural wealth of Africa."

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View All Artworks

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School of Beauty, School of Culture - Figuring History

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A famous example of art-historical painting, Hans Holbein the Younger's double portrait, The Ambassadors, shows two friends amid an array of detailed artifacts from art and science. Within this celebration of human accomplishment, hiding in plain sight, is a distorted skull-a mememto mori, a reminder of the inevitability of death.

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Pair music and art for arts integration

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Highlights

Related Exhibition

Related Article

Related Exhibition

Related Article

Artist Bisa Butler and her husband, a longtime DJ, chose this selection of songs to pair with each of her quilts as well as other works from the museum's collection, all of which are on view in Bisa Butler: Portraits.

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Bisa Butler: The Playlist | The Art Institute of Chicago

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Artist Bisa Butler and her husband, a longtime DJ, chose this selection of songs to pair with each of her quilts as well as other works from the museum's collection, all of which are on view in Bisa Butler: Portraits.

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ArtlogicWebsite0907 artists: BK Adams, Matt Bahen, Lauren Fensterstock, Adebunmi Gbadebo, LaNia Roberts, Simone Elizabeth Saunders, Jeffrey Henson Scales, Judith Schaechter, Matthew Sleeth, Stan Squirewell, Aaron T Stephan, Gio Swaby, Barbara Earl Thomas

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Artist Bisa Butler draws from an array of vibrant patterned fabrics to create portraits of everyday people. She eschews representational colors, favoring layered jewel-toned hues to form the skin of her Black subjects, and often groups figures together into strong silhouettes.

"I have always been drawn to portraits," Butler explains in a statement on her gallery's website. "I was the little girl who would sit next to my grandmother and ask her to go through her old family photo albums. I was the one who wanted to hear the story behind every picture. This inquisitiveness has stayed with me to this day. I often start my pieces with a black and white photo and allow myself to tell the story."

Butler studied fine art at Howard University. In a video interview by BRIC TV, the artist explains that she began using fabric in her paintings in college, and then converted to quilting as a way to continue her dedicated art practice while protecting her young daughter from toxic materials and fumes.

The artist was born in Orange, New Jersey, and now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is represented by Claire Oliver Gallery. You can see more from Butler on Instagram. (via #WOMENSART)

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. You'll connect with a community of like-minded readers who are passionate about contemporary art, read articles and newsletters ad-free, sustain our interview series, get discounts and early access to our limited-edition print releases, and much more. Join now!

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Colorful Quilts by Bisa Butler use African Fabrics to Form Nuanced Portraits - Colossal

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Artist Bisa Butler draws from an array of vibrant patterned fabrics to create portraits of everyday people. She eschews representational colors, favoring layered jewel-toned hues to form the skin of her Black subjects, and often groups figures together into strong silhouettes. "I have always been drawn to portraits," Butler explains in a statement on her gallery's website.

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ArtlogicWebsite0907 artists: BK Adams, Matt Bahen, Lauren Fensterstock, Adebunmi Gbadebo, LaNia Roberts, Simone Elizabeth Saunders, Jeffrey Henson Scales, Judith Schaechter, Matthew Sleeth, Stan Squirewell, Aaron T Stephan, Gio Swaby, Barbara Earl Thomas

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ArtlogicWebsite0907 artists: BK Adams, Matt Bahen, Lauren Fensterstock, Adebunmi Gbadebo, LaNia Roberts, Simone Elizabeth Saunders, Jeffrey Henson Scales, Judith Schaechter, Matthew Sleeth, Stan Squirewell, Aaron T Stephan, Gio Swaby, Barbara Earl Thomas

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Bisa Butler Conversation - American Federation of Arts

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Bisa Butler Conversation - American Federation of Arts

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Inside the Exhibition

Bisa Butler creates portraits that are singular and striking. Her works, intricately layered and vibrantly colored quilts, resurface and reimagine historical narratives of Black life.

By <a href="https://www.artic.edu/authors/12/erica-warren" rel="author">Erica Warren</a>

As Butler notes in the video above, she found the subjects of her early portraits in family members and friends. In fact, her very first quilt, Francis and Violette, portrays her maternal grandparents. However, as her practice developed, Butler began to explore other potential subjects and eventually turned to vintage photographs as a means of finding new images of people who might look like family members, remind her of someone she knows, or depict larger-than-life figures.

Butler's The Storm, the Whirlwind, and the Earthquake provides an electric image of the revered American abolitionist Frederick Douglass. The most photographed man of the 19th century, Douglass appears in her work as an august, serious, and elegantly attired man. Butler meticulously depicted the details of his ensemble, including his beautifully styled cravat; high, starched collar; patterned waistcoat; and notched lapel coat.

While her portrait of Douglass envisions a well-known figure, many of her works consider and reinvent the lives of everyday people. For I Am Not Your Negro, Butler transformed a Depression-era photograph of an unidentified man in Greenville, Mississippi, into an homage to the writer James Baldwin.

In the photo, the man's patched pants and the frayed edges of his jacket suggest the hardships of his life. Butler sets aside this part of his story, intent instead on the message that his posture and facial expression convey.

With one bent elbow resting on his knee and the other draped across his thigh, he appears casually confident and elegant as he looks upon the viewer with a furrowed brow. Butler offers a vision of a man unafraid to question the status quo and to critique a nation that fails to live up to its founding ideals. To suggest that he, like Baldwin, is an expatriate, Butler employed an African-print fabric that features airplanes and international clocks for his trousers. The expatriate connection is furthered by the juxtaposition of pink and white background fabrics, which evokes a well-appointed European interior.

Indeed, fabrics play a critical role for Butler in both defining the narratives of her portraits and highlighting the contemporary resonance of her subjects. For her work I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, named to honor the poet Maya Angelou,she drew inspiration from an archival photo of four women, college students, sitting on the steps of a building on the campus of Atlanta University in 1899 or 1900. The women's confidence captured the artist's attention, and as with her portrait of Douglass and her homage to Baldwin, she precisely attended to the details of their ensembles.

The hat of the woman seated at the far left features a fabric known as "Speed Bird," signaling that she is going places. The caged bird flying free on the sleeve of the woman's blouse seated at center right highlights the fact that all of these women are using education to set themselves free. The woman on the far right wears a skirt made from a fabric named "Michelle's Shoes," after First Lady Michelle Obama, a symbol of strength and power. After all, these four women paved the way for Obama, and with their piercing gazes, they continue to demand that present and future generations follow in their trailblazing footsteps, seizing opportunities and defying expectations.

These are just a few of the examples of Butler's work and source materials. Her quilted portraits include a wide range of subjects-from a group of boys in their Sunday best to a family embarking on the Great Migration. But while her inspiration comes from vintage photographs, Butler's choice of color and fabrics paired with her use of scale and beautifully stitched detailing infuse her subjects with a vibrantly contemporary feel and encourage multiple readings.

We look forward to sharing more than 20 of her works with you when Bisa Butler: Portraits, the first museum exhibition dedicated to her work, opens to members on November 14.

-Erica Warren, associate curator of textiles

Sponsors

Corporate Sponsor

Major funding for Bisa Butler: Portraits is contributed by the Cavigga Family Trust.

Additional support is provided by The Joyce Foundation and Darrel and Nickol Hackett.

Topics

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The People of Bisa Butler's Portraits | The Art Institute of Chicago

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Bisa Butler creates portraits that are singular and striking. Her works, intricately layered and vibrantly colored quilts, resurface and reimagine historical narratives of Black life.

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The Art Newspaper - International art news and events

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Awash in jewel-like hues and splashes of light, Jennifer Packer's portraits of Black subjects have an auric quality. Like those photographs people have taken of themselves where the camera captures hazes of colours, supposedly energetic balances unseen by the naked eye, her paintings grasp at something just beyond the limits of accepted perception. Opening at London's Serpentine Galleries this month, The eye is not satisfied with seeing is the Bronx-based artist's first institutional solo show in Europe, featuring 35 works, from those made soon after she graduated in 2012 to canvases finished just a few weeks ago. It comes at a time when the world has been forced to bear witness to state violence, systemic racism and the weight of Black death in the US. But do the eyes really see? It is a question Packer comes back to again and again in her practice as she meditates on the power of grief and beauty and grapples with the limitations of paint.
The Art Newspaper: Your portraits, as much as they are of people you know-friends, family-are also abstractions. Similarly, as Christina Sharpe writes in her essay for your show at the Serpentine, you use "colour and light [to] transport us to a place beyond ordinary seeing". This closely relates to the title of the show. Can you tell us what this phrase means to you and how it relates to your role as a painter of people?
Jennifer Packer: I've been thinking a lot about the nature of belief and how it impacts the ways that artists and artisans make objects, like the sort of thoroughness and fixation of devotion to the process and the practice. "The eyes are not satisfied with seeing" comes from a Biblical scripture. The whole quote is: "All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing." For me, the takeaway from that is that our senses are limited-there is always something beyond what we perceive and therefore you're never really able to represent it fully. This relates to painting for me because when you're painting someone, the subject gets wrapped up by the medium and its history but they also, of course, exist outside of that. So [painting] leaves space for... I want to say faith, but without it sounding too hokey. But what I mean by that is that there is an understanding that there are things that we don't have access to, that exist around the things we make and things we do.
So you're never really telling-and the viewer is never getting-the full story?
Yeah, a painting is like a quotation out of context. And it's very clear sometimes when you go to a museum how poorly some things are quoted. I am inspired by the works of Michelangelo, El Greco or even painters like Philip Guston, Beauford Delaney, Palmer Hayden, Kerry James Marshall-I mean, God bless Kerry James Marshall, truly-but I think people are attaching too much importance to this idea of "rewriting the canon" [of Western art history]. It sounds good, but it's still reactionary. I don't fixate on that so much. I'm excited to know that what I've made has physically never been made before. That's enough for me.

Packer's Eric (2012-13), the subject sitting "in a room of things almost like satellites, floating around him" Photo: Jason Wyche; courtesy of the artist, Corvi-Mora, London and Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York

There's a work in this show, The Body Has Memory (2018) that depicts a man in a hooded sweatshirt, and the sweatshirt itself becomes almost the dominant figure in the composition. Rizvana Bradley writes in her catalogue essay, the sweatshirt is a kind of metaphor that "can be regarded as a sartorial signifier of Blackness, in and as a singular vulnerability to racial violence, it also fashions a provisional shelter from a world that would otherwise consume and expel Black life at every turn". In several paintings, clothing-I'm thinking of the excellent floral socks in Tia (2017)-or other items of note in the sitter's periphery, really come to the fore. What about clothes or other external trappings becomes relevant for you as you paint these people?
I'm interested in signifiers and how they function historically, and the ways in which every little detail in a Renaissance painting had a place and had a meaning. Some signs contradict each other; they don't always add up to a perfectly cohesive narrative. The trappings, as you called them, are not just beautiful decoration or distractions; I wanted them to have an equal presence, a power. That's something I was thinking through in a lot of my earlier works and that I'm returning to now. There's the painting Eric, from 2012-13, and he is sitting foregrounded in this room of things that are almost like satellites, floating around him. I thought about that work in making a lot of my new ones. There's really no one way to read these items, though-I'm still figuring them out myself.
There is a lot of flora in your portraits, but you also paint bouquets on their own too, which become elegiac portraits in and of themselves. One of these is Say Her Name (2017), which is a reference to Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old Black woman who was found hanged in her jail cell after being assaulted and arrested by police. I remember speaking with you about it during a studio visit in 2017, and you noted how it is difficult to express grief over the loss of someone you didn't know personally but with whom you still feel an intimacy. To what extent can grief, pain and suffering can be represented?
Sandra Bland's death enrages me to this day. It's easy to feel burdened by this desire for people to override the language of the painting or the subjectivity of the painter for something that ties it into culture and politics quickly, especially when it pertains to Black life. Look at how quickly museums like the Whitney [Museum of American Art in New York]have tried to collect protest art-so quick to historicise something, to put it in the past. That stops real change from happening in the now.
Now, three years later, the phrase "say her name" has a whole other meaning to it. Not a new meaning, as the issue remains the same-Black death at the hands of the state continues at an alarming rate and goes unchecked by the US's current legislative powers-but awareness of the issue has reached a critical mass, as protests continue in the wake of George Floyd's murder by police and the suspension of justice in the police shooting of Breonna Taylor. How has your relationship to these paintings or to your practice changed, if at all, as more people open their eyes to the systemic racial issues in the US and the list of names to say grows ever longer?
I feel really, really cynical about others opening their eyes. It's like walking down the same street and seeing all the differently coloured doors but if someone asked you to name the colours you wouldn't be able to even if you've seen them 1,000 times. Because you sort of refuse to know it or it's not central to your everyday experience.
To oversimplify your metaphor, do you mean that white people are talking a lot about the need to preserve those doors but can't recall the colours? I guess that goes back to this idea behind the show that the eye is not satisfied with seeing.
And back to the limitations of painting, too. I've been thinking about making a painting for Tamir Rice [the 12-year-old Black boy shot by police in Ohio when carrying a toy gun] for a long time, but the complexities of grief are too great. The flower paintings... they just feel too fraught after a while, I've had to stop making them. I don't pretend that my paintings are doing some work in the world that isn't already being done-and being done more effectively by other means.

Say Her Name (2017) references Sandra Bland, the Black woman who was found hanged in jail after being assaulted and arrested by police Photo: Matt Grubb ; courtesy of The Artist, Corvi-Mora, London and Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York

Biography

Born: 1984, Philadelphia

Lives: New York

Education: 2007, Tyler University School of Art at Temple University, Philadelphia; 2012, Yale University

Key shows: 2019 Whitney Biennial, New York; 2017 The Renaissance Society, Chicago. 2012 The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York

Represented by: Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York; Corvi-Mora, London

* Jennifer Packer: The eye is not satisfied with seeing, Serpentine Galleries, London, from 18 November; Jennifer Packer: Every Shut Eye Ain't Sleep will open at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in early 2021 (dates to be confirmed)

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'I'm excited to know that what I've made has physically never been made before': Jennifer Packer's extrasensory paintings come to London

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Ahead of shows at the Serpentine Galleries in London and, next year, at MoCA in Los Angeles, the US painter reflects on the power-and constraints-of her medium

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Jennifer Packer - Biography, Shows, Articles & More | Artsy

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Discover and purchase Jennifer Packer's artworks, available for sale. Browse our selection of paintings, prints, and sculptures by the artist, and find art you love.

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"My inclination to paint, especially from life, is a completely political one. We belong here. We deserve to be seen and acknowledged in real time. We deserve to be heard and to be imaged with shameless generosity and accuracy." - Jennifer Packer

This exhibition, the artist's first outside of the US, includes paintings and drawings from the past decade alongside recent work.

Combining observation, improvisation and memory, Packer's intimate portraits of friends and family members and flower still paintings insist on the emotional and physical essence of the contemporary Black lives she depicts. While the casual repose of her portraits is the result of her care for the sitters, Packer acknowledges her choice to paint figures as political, stating: 'Representation and particularly, observation from life, are ways of bearing witness and sharing testimony'.

Jennifer Packer's paintings recalibrate art historical approaches to these enduring genres, casting them in a political and contemporary light, while rooted in a deeply personal context. On occasion, Packer describes her flower compositions as funerary bouquets and vessels of personal grief; these paintings about loss are often made in response to tragedies of state and institutional violence against Black Americans.

Featuring 34 works dated from 2011 to 2020, the exhibition presents portraits of artists from Packer's New York circle, monochromatic paintings, intimate interiors and flower still lifes including Say Her Name (2017), painted in response to the suspicious death of Sandra Bland, a Black American woman who is largely believed to have been murdered while in police custody in 2015. The exhibition also includes drawings which for Packer are rarely just a study but hold a weight of their own that differs from paintings.

Visit our online shop here to purchase a copy of the exhibition catalogue, Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing.

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For further information on facilities and access please visit here

Listen to Jennifer Packer in Conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist

https://serpentine-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/03/Jennifer-Packer-x-HUO_mixdown.mp3

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Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing

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New York-based painter Jennifer Packer's first institutional solo exhibition outside of the US.

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The Eye is Not Satisfied with Seeing video

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The Eye is Not Satisfied with Seeing video

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Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing

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Much of Packer's work is in dialogue with art history, recalibrating and interrogating an enduring white, colonial narrative. By centring contemporary Black lives and painting them with love and care, Packer reframes the traditions of portraiture and still lifes.

"I'm thinking about Black representation in portraiture... I'm thinking about walking through the Met and looking at the Rubens, or any other large paintings of that nature, which are about a decadence that was funded through procuring riches from other parts of the world in questionable ways." - Jennifer Packer

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Jennifer Packer's Political Still Lifes & Intimate Portraits Centre Black lives

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Get acquainted with the work of New York-based painter Jennifer Packer and some of the works in her exhibition, The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing.

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New York Public Radio pieces on Kehinde Wiley

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New York Public Radio pieces on Kehinde Wiley

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Kehinde Wiley on his artistic practice. Forrest Wickman on "The New American Songbook." Beowulf Sheehan on his portraits.

Riffing on paintings by Old Masters, replacing the European aristocrats depicted in those paintings with contemporary black subjects.

The artist Kehinde Wiley wondered why he never saw people who looked like him in museums. His ground-breaking paintings, which borrow from art history, are changing that.

Up-and-coming painter Kehinde Wiley is a bit of a throwback -- to the Baroque era. Wiley's oil paintings are big, colorful, beautifully painted portraits. Kurt visits in his studio to find out how he has scouted models from the streets of Harlem to West Africa.

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People - Kehinde Wiley | WNYC | New York Public Radio, Podcasts, Live Streaming Radio, News

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WNYC is America's most listened-to public radio station and the producer of award-winning programs and podcasts like Radiolab, On the Media, and The Brian Lehrer Show.

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National Public Radio piece (8 minute listen)

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National Public Radio piece (8 minute listen)

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Katherine Wetzel/Virginia Museum of Fine Arts/Copyright Kehinde Wiley

Sarah DiSantis/Brooklyn Museum/Copyright Kehinde Wiley

Jason Wyche/Courtesy of Sean Kelly/Copyright Kehinde Wiley

Courtesy of Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris/Copyright Kehinde Wiley

Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum/Copyright Kehinde Wiley

This week, the Brooklyn Museum is wrapping up its mid-career retrospective of artist Kehinde Wiley - which means 14 years of work and something like 60 paintings.

It's been drawing a diverse and large crowd, partly because Wiley's work has been featured on the TV show Empire, and partly because he is a well-known and, in some ways, controversial figure in the art world. Wiley takes contemporary figures - oftentimes young black men and women - and places them in old European art traditions: Oil paintings, portraits, stained glass and even bronze sculpture.

Wiley tells NPR's Audie Cornish that the first time he stepped into a museum as a child, it was incredibly intimidating. "Great big paintings, history, gilded frames, a sense of power, a sense of majesty," he says. "It was alienating but it was fabulous at the same time, because I was trying to learn how to paint. And here you had images where people had spent hundreds of years trying to figure out how to coax reality into form, and here it was."

Interview Highlights
On the painting "Willem Van Heythuysen"
Well, the original painting is an old Dutch painting that depicts a man, he has his hand on his hip, his hand is turned outward, and he has a sword in the other hand. And it's a very regal look, it's very self-possessed. And in this particular painting that I chose to create, all of that pose is recreated, with the exception that there is a young man that I met in the streets of Brooklyn back in 2006, who chose that painting as his pose, and here he's wearing a velour Sean John suit, pair of Timberlands - but that same sense of regal hauteur is there.

On why he leaves in brand names and clothing labels
Why take it out, would be the real question? The brands that people wear are a serious business. I remember growing up as a kid in South Central Los Angeles, back in the 1980s, when people were being killed for Jordan sneakers. Branding says a lot about luxury, and about exclusion, and about the choices that manufacturers make, but I think that what society does with it after it's produced is something else. And the African-American community has always been expert at taking things and repurposing them toward their own ends. This code-switching that exists between luxury and urban is something that was invented in the streets of America, not Sixth Avenue.
On the painting "Mugshot Study"
Wiley: Well, what this painting is is a portrait of a young black man, possibly between the ages of 18 and 26, I can't really say. He has these beaded necklaces around his neck; nothing more than a wife-beater. It's a painting that's cropped, and in fact, the way that I found this image was, I was walking down the street in Harlem, and I found this crumpled piece of paper. And on it as a mug shot. Presumably it fell out of a police car, and it got me thinking about portraiture, about the choices that one has to make in order to be in a portrait of this type.

"It's a rebuke of the mug shot, it's an ability to say 'I will be seen the way I choose to be seen.'"

Cornish: It's also the antithesis of the work people may recognize ... if anything, your work, for a lot of people, has been a rebuke of the mug shot when it comes to black men.

Wiley: It's a rebuke of the mug shot, it's an ability to say "I will be seen the way I choose to be seen." All of the models are going through our history books and deciding, out of all the great portraits of the past, which ones do they feel most comfortable, which ones resonate with them. And so I go through the studios with individuals who go through art history books and choose how they want to perform themselves.
On why he chooses to work in traditional forms rather than create something new
My love affair with painting is bittersweet. I love the history of art - you asked me about that moment that I first looked at the stuff and when I first fell in love with it. It was only later that I understood that a lot of destruction and domination had to occur in order for all of this grand reality to exist. So what happens next? What happens is the artist grows up and tries to fashion a world that's imperfect. Tries to say yes to the parts that he loves, and to say yes to the parts that he wants to see in the world, such as black and brown bodies - like my own - in the same vocabulary as that tradition that I had learned so many years before.

It's an uncomfortable fit, but I don't think that it's something that I'm shying away from at all. In fact, I think what we're arriving at is the meat of my project, which is that discomfort is where the work shines best. These inconvenient bedfellows that you're seeing all over this museum are my life's work.
On the gut feeling of vulnerability that informs his work
What I wanted to do was to look at the powerlessness that I felt as - and continue to feel at times - as a black man in the American streets. I know what it feels like to walk through the streets, knowing what it is to be in this body, and how certain people respond to that body. This dissonance between the world that you know, and then what you mean as a symbol in public, that strange, uncanny feeling of having to adjust for ... this double consciousness.

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The Exquisite Dissonance Of Kehinde Wiley

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The Brooklyn Museum's mid-career Wiley retrospective wraps up this week; his large, elaborate works depict black men and women in traditional forms like oil, bronze sculture and even stained glass.

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Kehinde Wiley, (born February 28, 1977, Los Angeles, California, U.S.), American artist best known for portraits that feature African Americans in the traditional settings of Old Master paintings.

Wiley's childhood experiences in the South Central neighbourhood of Los Angeles were enriched by his mother's passion for education. At the age of 11, he took art classes at a conservatory at California State University, and at 12 years old he attended a six-week art program outside Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) sponsored by the Center for U.S./U.S.S.R. Initiatives. After Wiley graduated from the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree (1999) at the San Francisco Art Institute and a Master of Fine Arts (2001) at the School of Art at Yale University. While in residence in 2001 at the Studio Museum in Harlem, he found a discarded New York City Police Department mug shot of a black man, and its blunt presentation inspired his early series Conspicuous Fraud and the video Smile. He followed those with his breakthrough Passing/Posing series (2001-04), in which he replaced the heroes, prophets, and saints of Old Master paintings with young black men who were dressed in trademarked hip-hop attire.

In the series Rumors of War (2005), Wiley displaced heroic equestrians, painted by such court painters as Diego Velázquez and Peter Paul Rubens, with contemporary men in team jerseys and Timberland boots, but he kept the original portraits' titles. In Down (2008) grand-scale figures simulated the prone postures displayed in such works as Hans Holbein the Younger's The Dead Christ in the Tomb and Auguste Clésinger's Woman Bitten by a Serpent. Throughout, Wiley relied on random encounters-"street casting"-to find his models, who went to his studio to select a pose and be photographed. Wiley's assistants applied the elaborately patterned backgrounds, but Wiley always painted the figure, following the conventional hierarchy of a historic atelier. The World Stage paintings, launched in Beijing in 2006, took his practice to Nigeria and Senegal (2008), Brazil (2009), India and Sri Lanka (2010), Israel (2011), France (2012), Jamaica (2013), and Haiti (2014). Wiley added women to his repertoire in the 2012 series An Economy of Grace, commissioning costumes from Riccardo Tisci, creative director of the French fashion house Givenchy.

In 2015 Wiley collaborated with the Brooklyn Museum of Art to organize the exhibition "Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic," which charted the course of his 14-year career. In works that questioned the cultural narrative of the Western art canon, Wiley replaced conventional images of white men of historical status with contemporary men of colour who simulated the poses of the original masterworks. Wiley reconceptualized specific paintings by such Old Masters as Titian, Sir Anthony van Dyck, and Édouard Manet with likenesses of black men who figured prominently amid his decorative backgrounds. His impeccably refined technique and ironic yet intellectual interpretation skewed high-art traditions while giving them new significance. He has cited Barkley L. Hendricks as a central influence in such re-imaginings.

In 2015 Wiley was the recipient of the 2014 National Medal of Arts. Two years later former president Barack Obama selected Wiley to paint his official portrait for the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. The painting revealed a mixture of convention and invention when it was unveiled in 2018. Obama, wearing a traditional black suit, sits forward on a mahogany chair with a determined expression on his face and his elbows on his knees. The figure is set against an exuberant pattern of leafy greens and flowers symbolizing Kenya, Hawaii, and Chicago. The portrait was the first representation of an African American and first painting by an African American in the presidential portrait collection.

Following the success of the Obama portrait, Wiley launched (2019) Black Rock Senegal, a residency program for multidisciplinary artists in the country's capital of Dakar. He also maintained a home and studio at the residency's luxury compound.

Also in 2019 Wiley's Rumors of War, a bronze sculpture commissioned by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, was unveiled in Times Square, New York City, and was later brought to its permanent location in front of the museum. The work recalls the traditional equestrian form used for several of the Confederate statues that line Richmond's Monument Avenue, but, in the place of a mounted soldier, the sculpture features an African American man sporting dreadlocks and wearing jeans and Nike high-tops. The commission came amid ongoing debates in the United States and other parts of the world about the removal of public sculptures commemorating figures, such as Christopher Columbus and Robert E. Lee, whose supposed heroism was increasingly questioned in the 21st century. Wiley's next public work, Go (2021), was one of several permanent installations chosen for Penn Station's concourse expansion in New York City. The stained-glass triptych features Black break-dancers floating across white fluffy clouds.

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Kehinde Wiley | Biography, Art, Portraits, Paintings, Sculptures, & Facts

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Kehinde Wiley, American artist best known for portraits that feature African Americans in the traditional settings of Old Master paintings. His fame exploded after his portrait of former president Barack Obama was unveiled in 2018. Learn more about Wiley's life and career in this article.

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"Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic" video series

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Paradigm Shift in the Art World video clip

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Paradigm Shift in the Art World video clip

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Kehinde Wiley creates paradigm shift in the art world

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Kehinde Wiley (b. 1977, Los Angeles) is an American artist best known for his portraits that render people of color in the traditional settings of Old Master paintings. Wiley's work brings art history face-to-face with contemporary culture, using the visual rhetoric of the heroic, the powerful, the majestic and the sublime to celebrate Black and brown people the artist has met throughout the world.

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Vanity Fair piece / after Breonna Taylor

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Vanity Fair piece / after Breonna Taylor

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Amy Sherald on Making Breonna Taylor’s Portrait

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The artist, who painted Michelle Obama, took care to draw on details from Taylor’s life.

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Amy Sherald’s Shining Second Act (Published 2019)

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After her famous portrait of Michelle Obama, the artist is bringing her new works to New York. “Every painting is a kind of communion,” our critic says.

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The subjects of Amy Sherald's eight strong oil portraits at Hauser & Wirth impress with their looks, in both senses: striking elegance, riveting gazes. In six of the pictures, the subjects stand singly against bright monochrome grounds. (The other two works are more complicated.) They are young or youngish, attractive, stylishly dressed, and likely well-to-do-presentable people, presented. All are African-American. Should this matter? It does in light of the artist's drive to, in her words, seek "versions of myself in art history and in the world." Sherald, who is forty-six and lives in New Jersey, revitalizes a long-languishing genre in painting by giving portraits worldly work to do and distinctive pleasures to impart. Her style is a simplified realism, worked from photographs that she stages and takes of individuals who interest her, an approach much like that of the late, belatedly celebrated painter Barkley Hendricks. Peculiar to Sherald is a consistent nuance, in her subjects' expressions, which can take time to fully register-it's so subtle. There is no palpable challenge. But there's drama, starting with that of the show's existence.

Three years ago, Sherald was plucked from low-profile but substantial status as an artist when Michelle Obama chose her to paint her official portrait. The result was unveiled, last year, along with the official portrait of Barack Obama, by Kehinde Wiley: the ex-President seated and leaning forward, as if in intimate conversation. Barack's characteristic pose (I beg indulgence to use the couple's first names, for convenience) rather undercut Wiley's signature manner of investing contemporary subjects with neo-early-nineteenth-century, Napoleonic grandeur. (Wiley compensated by surrounding Barack with glorious flowers.) In Sherald's painting, Michelle sits sideways and turns outward, with her arms bare and her chin resting lightly on the back of one hand. She wears an immense cotton gown-by the designer Michelle Smith-patterned with fragments of eccentric abstract shapes adrift on white, which fills most of the canvas that isn't taken up by a light-blue ground. Like some other commenters, I was bemused, when I saw the work in reproduction, by what seemed an overwhelming of the wearer by the worn. Then I visited the painting at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, in Washington, D.C.

You must-and I mean absolutely have to-see Sherald's work in person, if at all possible. Taking in the painting's scale (it is six feet high by five feet wide) and the sensitive suavity of its brushwork (a tissue of touches, each a particular decision), I decided that artist and sitter had achieved a mind meld, to buoyant effect. The dress amounts to a symbol of Michelle's public role-a tall order for anyone-and the éclat with which she performs it. But the gown becomes subsidiary when you meet Michelle's gaze, which we've glimpsed often since 2008, one of disarming but seriously knowing irony, true to her roots even as she rises to her station. Sherald riffs on the extravagance of the spectacle while deferring-as just another beholder, another citizen-to the integrity of the mien. The work is a tour de force within the constraint imposed by a political commission. Even so, it didn't prepare me for the more intense eloquence of Sherald's present show: portraits commissioned by herself, all but one painted this year. She activates the double function of portraiture as the recognition of a worldly identity and, in the best instances, the surprise of an evident inner life. Race applies as a condition and a cause for resetting the mainstream of Western art.

The subjects make eye contact with us. They can seem mildly interested in how they are beheld-they wouldn't have bothered dressing well if they weren't-but with dispassionate self-possession, attitude-free. Their affects vary from the radiant assurance of "Sometimes the king is a woman," a young woman in a dress of slashing black-and-white patterns against a pink ground, to the slightly gawky presence of "A single man in possession of a good fortune." (The whiff of Jane Austen bodes some consequential comedy.) This young man sports a spectacular sweater that displays gridded architectural motifs in blazing colors; the ground is a modulated gold. He impresses as somebody's son, somebody's brother, who is embarking on adulthood with resilient confidence but a good deal yet to learn. He made me smile, with wonder. The tacit narratives of both pictures are compelling in a way that recalls the long-lapsed convention of painted portraiture as courtly ceremony, exalting kings and courtiers-this was the forte of Velázquez, whose duties to Philip IV happened to occasion some of the greatest paintings ever made. (The Spaniard's royal tots, for instance, had everything to learn, but their existence was important to everyone.)

Race anchors Sherald's project in history. She represents it strategically, by modifying a policy of today's leading painter of subjects from black society and culture, Kerry James Marshall. Marshall renders the skin of all of his people coal black. Sherald opts for grisaille. Both thereby apostrophize America's original sin and permanent crisis: the otherizing of the not white, regardless of gradations. The standardized hues put race both to the fore and to the side of what's really going on-an address to Western pictorial precedence, freezing a debate in the present to thaw a conversation with the past and future. To explain the startling authority of Sherald's art, you must think back to periods when portraiture was a vital function of painting and then, returning forward, incorporate as mainstream the apposite contributions of honored but too often patronized black American artists such as Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and Charles White. When art changes in the present, it changes in the past, too. I had a dizzy sensation at the Sherald show-which was so much better than I had expected-of ground shifting under my feet.

As is natural in a time of transition, Sherald, too, is still learning. Marking a hugely ambitious departure for her, "Precious jewels by the sea"-a beach scene, ten feet high by nine feet wide, in which two young men carry two young women on their shoulders, all in chic swimwear, next to a tipped reddish-orange-and-white beach umbrella-should be a masterpiece, and it almost is. The frankly observing, untroubled intelligence of the four subjects stuns with what I want to call the Sherald Effect: an experience of looking that entails being looked at, to ambiguous but inescapably gripping ends. However, there's a lurch in her switch from flat to spatial backgrounds. Aqua waters flipping to dark blue at the horizon fail to convince, and I could very well do without a tiny sailboat in the supposed distance. The perfunctory depth doesn't detract from the terrific aplomb of the figures, but it sabotages the unitary power to which the picture aspires.

I love "The girl next door," a less insistent departure for Sherald. The young woman portrayed is personable and anything but svelte. She fills out a baggy dress that is patterned with red, yellow, blue, green, and purple polka dots, cinched by a thin belt. Her look is rather guileless-far from the cool savoir of the beach people-but equal, you somehow know, to whatever daily life she is leading. She is praised by Sherald's brush for the insouciance of her garb: the bouncy dots a tonic exception to the refinement of the abstract designs that the other subjects' clothes provide for this painter's aesthetic use. What's the neighbor's name? I'd like to know. I almost feel that I do-on the tip of my tongue, about to come to me. Now let's define great portraiture. It makes companionable for you a person who is identified or unknown, perhaps remote from you in geography or time (even dead, no matter), different from you in ways big or small, a lot or only the littlest bit like you in other ways, and, all in all, another exceedingly specific inhabitant of a certain planet, amid everything that cannot help but be. ♦

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In the painter's realism, race applies as a condition and a cause for resetting the mainstream of Western art, Peter Schjeldahl writes.

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NPR Radio Piece - Black Presence in Art World 

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NPR Radio Piece - Black Presence in Art World 

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Kerry James Marshall: A Black Presence In The Art World Is ‘Not Negotiable’

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For decades, the 61-year-old artist has depicted black lives on canvas. He says inclusion in museums must not be contingent on “whether somebody likes you ... or somebody’s being generous to you.”

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New York Times piece on changing history

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New York Times piece on changing history

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Kerry James Marshall Is Shifting the Color of Art History (Published 2016)

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For more than 40 years, the Chicago-based artist has made it his mission to paint black figures into the canon.

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1. About the Exhibition

2. Installation Images

3. Gallery Text Downloads

4. Funding

About the Exhibition

Kerry James Marshall, Portrait of a Curator (In Memory of Beryl Wright) 2009

The MCA is honored to present a major museum survey of Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955), one of America's greatest living artists. The exhibition focuses primarily on Marshall's paintings made over the last 35 years, from his seminal inaugural statement Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980) to his most recent explorations of African American history.

Born before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, in Birmingham, Alabama, and witness to the Watts riots in 1965, Marshall has long been an inspired and imaginative chronicler of the African American experience. Best known for his large-scale paintings featuring black figures, defiant assertions of blackness in a medium in which African Americans have long been "invisible men," Marshall's interrogation of art history covers a broad temporal swath stretching from the Renaissance to 20th-century American abstraction. He critically examines the Western canon through its most canonical forms: the historical tableau, landscape, and portraiture. His work also touches upon vernacular forms such as the muralist tradition and the comic book, as seen in his comics-inspired Rythm Mastr drawings (2000-present), in order to address and correct the "vacuum in the image bank"-in other words, to make the invisible visible.

Marshall studied in Los Angeles with acclaimed social realist painter Charles White and participated in the residency program at the Studio Museum in Harlem. He has received solo exhibitions throughout Europe and North America and his work has been included in such prestigious international exhibitions as the 1997 Whitney Biennial, the 2003 Venice Biennial, the 2009 Gwangju Biennial, two Documentas (1997 and 2007)}, and the 1999 Carnegie International. His paintings are in private collections and foundations as well as major public collections including the MCA's.

Kerry James Marshall: Mastry is co-organized with The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and cocurated by former Manilow Senior Curator Dieter Roelstraete; Helen Molesworth, Chief Curator at LAMOCA; and Ian Alteveer, Associate Curator at The Met; with the assistance of Karsten Lund, former Curatorial Assistant, and Abigail Winograd, former Research Associate at the MCA. It travels to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 25, 2016-January 29, 2017, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, March 12-July 2, 2017.

A comprehensive monograph accompanies the exhibition, featuring essays by each of the curators; Lanka Tattersall, assistant curator at LAMOCA; as well as a new essay by Kerry James Marshall in addition to previously published essays by the artist.

Installation Images

Kerry James Marshall, Revolution Day, 2016. Installation view, Kerry James Marshall: Mastry, MCA Chicago, Apr 23-Sep 25, 2016
Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago

Gallery Text Downloads

Funding

Lead support for Kerry James Marshall: Mastry is provided by the Harris Family Foundation in memory of Bette and Neison Harris: Caryn and King Harris, Katherine Harris, Toni and Ron Paul, Pam and Joe Szokol, Linda and Bill Friend, and Stephanie and John Harris; R. H. Defares; Andrea and Jim Gordon; the George Lucas Family Foundation; Liz and Eric Lefkofsky; Helen and Sam Zell; and Nancy and Steve Crown.

Major support is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; The Bluhm Family Foundation; David Zwirner, New York; the Ford Foundation; the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation; the Joyce Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; and Phillips.

Additional generous support is provided by Dr. Anita Blanchard and Martin H. Nesbitt; Allison and Susan Davis; Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson; Jack and Sandra Guthman; David Herro and Jay Franke; Jack Shainman Gallery; Gretchen and Jay Jordan; Anne L. Kaplan; Nancy Lauter McDougal; Robert Rennie and Carey Fouks; Marilyn and Larry Fields; Sara Szold; Cari and Michael Sacks; Eleana Del Rio and Koplin Del Rio Gallery; Lois and Steve Eisen and the Eisen Family Foundation; the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation; Agnes Gund; Ashlee Jacob; the North Shore Affiliate of the MCA; the Robert Lehman Foundation; Ambassador Louis and Marjorie Susman; the Terra Foundation for American Art, on behalf of board member Nora Daley; Lynn and Allen Turner; Dick and Gloria Anderson; Dr. Daniel S. Berger; BMO Wealth Management; Dontrey Britt-Hart and Brett Hart; Mandy and Cliff Einstein; Denise and Gary Gardner; Helyn D. Goldenberg and Michael Alper; Paul and De Gray; Nickol and Darrel Hackett; Mary E. Ittelson; James W. Kenyon; Nancy Lerner Frej and David Frej; the Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg Foundation; Eric McKissack and Cheryl Mayberry McKissack; and Sylvia Neil and Daniel Fischel.

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Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Painter), 2009. Acrylic on PVC; 44 5/8 x 43 1/8 x 3 7/8 in. (113.4 x 109.5 x 9.8 cm). Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, gift of Katherine S. Schamberg by exchange, 2009.15. © 2009 Kerry James Marshall

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Kerry James Marshall « Artists « Jack Shainman Gallery

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Kerry James Marshall (b.1955 in Birmingham, AL; lives and works in Chicago, IL) is recognized as one of the leading contemporary artists of his time. Internationally renowned, Marshall’s work interrogates Western art history—from the Renaissance to 20th-century American Abstraction—challenging and r…

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Jordan Casteel at the New Museum - Virtual Tour

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Portraits That More Than Meet the Eye (Published 2020)

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Jordan Casteel’s vibrant colors capture the spirit and humanity of her subjects: black and brown people who have often been excluded from art institutions.

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Jordan Casteel Stays in the Moment | Art21 "New York Close Up"

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Ekua Holmes is a welcome anachronism in African-American art, a woman who illuminates contemporary painting by embracing an aesthetic from the past.

Ostensibly self-conscious in the genre of representational art, the Roxbury native deftly salutes African-American luminaries who preceded her with stunning vibrancy - extending a clear-eyed perspective and a verve that serve to open new imaginative and intellectual vistas. She also weds herself to the idea that art should carry with it crisp social commentary, editorials on the state of black America.

Not since the Harlem Renaissance during the 1920s and '30s has there been a high-profile movement defining black culture as that movement so forcefully did. The brilliant works of William H. Johnson, Archibald Motley and Jacob Lawrence are examples of the epic quality of painting produced during that era.

Holmes, whose work is now on display at Simmons College, is a recognizable descendant of that school of painting, someone who stoically offers tales on canvas about the human condition - ranging from the joyful lemon juice of existence to the bracing blues that attend the cadence of our days. Her pictorial gestures showcase coherent, linear storytelling and urbane accessibility.

Deeply introspective and at every moment alert about the disposition of her subject, Holmes, who still lives in Roxbury, has a knack for raising the vernacular of the streets and common social situations into a private and noble language of lofty contemplation, a way of transitioning mundane scenes into allegorical insight.

To outsiders, the 62-year-old Holmes is mostly modest, often speaking in soft, dulcet tones that refract the visual choices she consistently makes in her paintings. As Holmes, who teaches at the Mass. College of Art, discusses her work, her gestures are graceful, nuanced and reminiscent of bodily movement learned from the long hours of ballet practice she endured as a youth in Roxbury at the Elma Lewis School for the Performing Arts. And like Lewis, that implacable doyenne who reigned for decades over the black arts community in Boston, Holmes reaches for any imaginative ideal, any plausible entry to the categories of the sublime, and any possible lesson that can be gleaned from the past.

" The Art of Ekua Holmes " will be on exhibit at Simmons College's Center for the Study of Children's Literature as part of its Summer Institute's "(im)possible dreams" series. The display is open to the public through July 27, with the official opening on July 11.

The exhibit mostly displays Holmes' paintings for the children's books she has recently illustrated, including her works on Fannie Lou Hamer, titled " Voice of Freedom " and "Out of Wonder, Poems Celebrating Poets." The Hamer book, produced with writer Carole Boston Weatherford, garnered a children's book trifecta: The Caldecott Honor Book, The Robert F. Sibert Honor Book and the John Steptoe New Talent Coretta Scott King Award.

The artwork in each book illustrates what writer Toni Morrison has called "rememory," the African-American aggregation of past group experiences, and the capacity to recall individual and collective history by revisiting tragic and significant incidents.

"House on Mango Street" is a portrait of ebony beauty that highlights the mien of African-American womanhood. Characterized by its angular shapes and bombastic colors, it evokes reflection into the past, suggesting a primordial space that is home. A young black woman traverses time with books of knowledge in her hands, perhaps seeking a pathway to wisdom. The pull of the feminine mystique is palpable.

In "Bus Stop," Holmes captures the urban landscape with power and pathos. A father sits wordless with his young boy on a bench, the full blaze of the city environs depicted gloriously in the background. The composition conveys agency, ambiguity and thick symbolic representationalism.

So too, "Sufficient Grace" is a study of sepia serenity and itself an essay on the complexity that drapes the interior life. An octogenarian church lady models a floral-patterned headpiece, the brim adorning her regal and gaudy Sunday religious wardrobe. The espresso-hued woman seems to hold the past and present in careful abeyance, her hauteur ennobling and suggestive of what writer Ralph Ellison has called the "rich abundance of warmth and human sympathy."

Ellison's quote is so telling of Holmes' work generally, which shows, at every turn, great humanity, a nod to past artistic masters and an ability to speak elegant truthfulness.

This article was originally published on July 11, 2017.

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The Vibrant Art Of Roxbury's Ekua Holmes Recalls The Harlem Renaissance

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The Roxbury native's art recalls the representational genre of the '30s and '40.

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Black Creators Series - S1 - E2 - Ekua Holmes

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Ekua Holmes' work is collage based and her subjects, made from cut and torn papers, investigate family histories, relationship dynamics, childhood impressions, the power of hope, faith, and self-determination. Recalling a quote from American Artist, Romare Bearden, "I do not need to go looking for 'happenings,' the absurd or the surreal, because I have seen things that neither Dalí, Beckett, Ionesco nor any of the others could have thought possible; and to see these things I did not need to do more than look out of my studio window," Holmes has looked out of her window for the subjects of her collages too. Remembering a Roxbury childhood of wonder and delight she considers herself a part of a long line of Roxbury imagemakers. In this spirit, she supports those who have a calling in the arts as well as keeping her own studio practice ignited. She has created and led workshops, been a visiting artist and lecturer, and held artist residencies in public and private institutions throughout New England. In her first public art initiative, she received a Now + There Public Art Accelerator Fellowship and launched The Roxbury Sunflower Project (#RoxburySunflowerProject), in which she facilitated the planting of 10,000 sunflower seeds in her native Roxbury, MA.

For her work in illustrating children's literature, Holmes is the recipient of a Caldecott Honor, Coretta Scott King's John Steptoe New Talent Illustrator Award, Robert Siebert and Horn Book awards for her illustrations in "Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement" by Carole Boston Weatherford, her first illustration project. In 2018, she won the coveted Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration for the book, "Out of Wonder: Poems Celebrating Poets." In 2019 she won the 2019 Coretta Scott King Award again for her illustrations in "Stuff of Stars," written by Marion Dane Bauer.

Ms. Holmes currently serves as Commissioner and Vice-Chair of the Boston Art Commission, which oversees the placement and maintenance of public works of art on and in City of Boston properties. She is also currently Associate Director at the Center for Art and Community Partnerships at MassArt where she manages and coordinates sparc! the ArtMobile, an art-inspiring, art-transforming vehicle retrofitted to contribute to community-based, multidisciplinary arts programming currently focused in Mission Hill, Roxbury, and Dorchester, MA. Ekua Holmes received her BFA in Photography from MassArt in 1977.

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Ekua Holmes' work is collage based and her subjects, made from cut and torn papers, investigate family histories, relationship dynamics, childhood impressions, the power of hope, faith, and self-determination.

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Bryan Collier uses watercolor and collage to create his masterful illustrations. A graduate of Pratt Institute, Collier pursued a career in children's illustration after feeling like the current children's book market had no connection to him or his children. He decided to change that. While at Pratt, he was a volunteer at the Harlem Horizon Art Studio located within the Harlem Hospital Center. The center is open to the children of the hospital as well as the children of the community. He later became the Program Director, a position he held for twelve years. He continues to volunteer for the organization to this day. Collier has since received numerous awards for his writing and illustrations, including four Caldecott Honors, and nine Coretta Scott King Awards (three honors and six winners). His book, Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope, published before Obama won the Democratic nomination for President, was the first picture book about the future President. He was the 2014 U.S. nominee for the Hans Christian Andersen Award. Early in his career, Collier also received the Ezra Jack Keats New Illustrator Award.

Close up of Collier's collage technique:

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Bryan Collier uses watercolor and collage to create his masterful illustrations. A graduate of Pratt Institute, Collier pursued a career in children's illustration after feeling like the current children's book market had no connection to him or his children. He decided to change that.

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Bryan Collier grew up in Pocomoke, Maryland, on the lower Eastern Shore of the state, the youngest of six children. His interest in art started early. "At home and at school, I was encouraged to read. I remember the first books with pictures that I read by myself were The Snow Day by Ezra Jack Keats and Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson. I liked the stories, but I really liked the pictures." As a teenager he began to paint the world around him - the bay, ducks, water, and marshland.

His interest in art was always encouraged both at home and at school. He began to develop a unique style of painting that incorporated both watercolors and collage.

"Collage is more than just an art style. Collage is all about bringing different elements together. Once you form a sensibility about connection, how different elements relate to each other, you deepen your understanding of yourself and others."

In 1985 Bryan won first place in a Congressional Competition, and his art was displayed in the Capitol Building in Washington D.C. Later that year he was awarded a scholarship to Pratt Institute in New York City through their national talent competition. In 1989 Bryan graduated with honors from Pratt Institute with a bachelor of fine arts degree.

While attending school in New York, Bryan began to volunteer at the Harlem Horizon Studio and Harlem Hospital Center with a program that provides working space and materials for self-taught artists in the community. He went on to become the Program Director, a position he held for 12 years. Bryan still works with the program in Harlem as a volunteer, feeling a deep sense of responsibility to be a positive role model for kids.

"It gives the community, the schools, the kids, and the parents the opportunity to come together for a very positive uplifting cause - the building and re-building of self-esteem, teaching the appreciation of art, and keeping the kids connected and involved and away from negative influences."

Meanwhile, he made the decision to focus his time and attention on illustrating children's books full time. It wasn't easy getting his art published in books; Bryan tried for seven years before he got his break with the publication of his book, Uptown.

Today Bryan spends his time working on his book illustrations, creating his own studio pieces, and going into classrooms to talk with teachers, librarians, and students about books and art. "I get so much from those school visits. With the books I've been doing, I have this amazing opportunity to bring my art and the process of making artwork and books into the classroom. I ask the students to talk to me and talk to each other about how they feel and what their own experiences are. Basically I ask them to tell their own story. Then I ask them to tell their own story through art.

"The experience of making art is all about making decisions. Once the kids really get that, you see them making the connection. They go from saying, 'That's not about me' to 'Hey. Look at me. This is who I am.'"

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Bryan Collier grew up in Pocomoke, Maryland, on the lower Eastern Shore of the state, the youngest of six children. His interest in art started early. "At home and at school, I was encouraged to read.

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© 2011 Bryan Collier Website by LightCube Solutions

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Early in her career Walker was inspired by kitschy flee market wares, the stereotypes these cheap items were based on. Mining such tropes, Walker made powerful and worldly art - she said "I really love to make sweeping historical gestures that are like little illustrations of novels."

Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred b'tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart

This extensive wall installation, the artist's first foray into the New York art world, features what would become her signature style. The work's epic title refers to numerous sources, including Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936) set during the Civil War, and a passage in Thomas Dixon, Jr's The Clansman (a foundational Ku Klux Klan text) devoted to the manipulative power of the "tawny negress." The form of the tableau, with its silhouetted figures in 19 th-century costume leaning toward one another beneath the moon, alludes to storybook romance. The tableau fails to deliver on this promise when we notice the graphic depictions of sex and violence that appear on close inspection, including a diminutive figure strangling a web-footed bird, a young woman floating away on the water (perhaps the mistress of the gentleman engaged in flirtation at the left) and, at the highest midpoint of the composition, where we can't miss it, underage interracial fellatio.

Silhouetting was an art form considered "feminine" in the 19 th century, and it may well have been within reach of female African American artists. Walker uses it to revisit the idea of race, and to highlight the artificiality of that century's practices such as physiognomic theory and phrenology (pseudo-scientific practices of deciphering a person's intelligence level by examining the shape of the face and head) used to support racial inequality as somehow "natural." Walker's black cut-outs against white backgrounds derive their power from the silhouette, a stark form capable of conveying multiple visual and symbolic meanings. Fanciful details, such as the hoop-skirted woman at the far left under whom there are two sets of legs, and the lone figure being carried into the air by an enormous erection, introduce a dimension of the surreal to the image. When asked what she had been thinking about when she made this work, Walker responded, "The history of America is built on this inequality...The gross, brutal manhandling of one group of people, dominant with one kind of skin color and one kind of perception of themselves, versus another group of people with a different kind of skin color and a different social standing. And the assumption would be that, well, times changed and we've moved on. But this is the underlying mythology... And we buy into it. I mean, whiteness is just as artificial a construct as blackness is."

Wall Installation - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven

This and several other works by Walker are displayed in curved spaces. Taking its cue from the cyclorama, a 360-degree view popularized in the 19 th century, its form surrounds us, alluding to the inescapable horror of the past - and the cycle of racial inequality that continues to play itself out in history. With its life-sized figures and grand title, this scene evokes history painting (considered the highest art form in the 19 th century, and used to commemorate grand events). Loosely inspired by Uncle Tom's Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous abolitionist novel of 1852) it surrounds us with a series of horrifying vignettes reenacting the torture, murder and assault on the enslaved population of the American South. These include two women and a child nursing each other, three small children standing around a mistress wielding an axe, a peg-legged gentleman resting his weight on a saber, pinning one child to the ground while sodomizing another, and a man with his pants down linked by a cord (umbilical or fecal) to a fetus.

Walker's use of the silhouette, which depicts everything on the same plane and in one color, introduces an element of formal ambiguity that lends itself to multiple interpretations. For example, is the leg under the peg-legged figure part of the child's body or the man's? What is the substance connecting the two figures on the right? We would need more information to decide what we are looking at, a reductive property of the silhouette that aligns it with the stereotype we may want to question.

Wall installation - The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

Untitled (John Brown)

Walker's critical perceptions of the history of race relations are by no means limited to negative stereotypes. Many of her most powerful works of the 1990s target celebrated, indeed sanctified milestones in abolitionist history. Her apparent lack of reverence for these traditional heroes and willingness to revise history as she saw fit disturbed many viewers at the time. Untitled (John Brown), substantially revises a famous moment in the life of abolitionist hero John Brown, a figure sent to the gallows for his role in the raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859, but ultimately celebrated for his enlightened perspective on race. Astonished witnesses accounted that on his way to his own execution, Brown stopped to kiss a black child in the arms of its mother. In a famous lithograph by Currier and Ives, Brown stands heroically at the doorway to the jailhouse, unshackled (a significant historical omission), while the mother and child receive his kiss.

Walker's depiction offers us a different tale, one in which a submissive, half-naked John Brown turns away in apparent pain as an upright, impatient mother thrusts the baby toward him. The child pulls forcefully on his sagging nipple (unable to nourish in a manner comparable to that of the slave women expected to nurse white children). Brown's inability to provide sustenance is a strong metaphor for the insufficiency of opposition to slavery, which did not end. Additionally, the arrangement of Brown with slave mother and child weaves in the insinuation of interracial sexual relations, alluding to the expectation for women to comply with their masters' advances. By casting heroic figures like John Brown in a critical light, and creating imagery that contrasts sharply with the traditional mythology surrounding this encounter, the artist is asking us to reexamine whether we think they are worthy of heroic status.

Sepia gouache - Brooklyn Museum

No mere words can Adequately reflect the Remorse this Negress feels at having been Cast into such a lowly state by her former Masters and so it is with a Humble heart that she brings about their physical Ruin and earthly Demise

"I wanted to make a piece that was incredibly sad," Walker stated in an interview regarding this work. "I wanted to make a piece that was about something that couldn't be stated or couldn't be seen." Against a dark background, white swans emerge, glowing against the black backdrop. As our eyes adjust to the light, it becomes apparent that there are black silhouettes of human heads attached to the swans' necks. Flanking the swans are three blind figures, one of whom is removing her eyes, and on the right, a figure raising her arm in a gesture of triumph that recalls the figure of liberty in Delacroix's Lady Liberty Leading the People. The procession is enigmatic and, like other tableaus by Walker, leaves the interpretation up to the viewer. Like other works by Walker in the 1990s, this received mixed reviews. Some critics found it brave, while others found it offensive. While her work is by no means universally appreciated, in retrospect it is easier to see that her intention was to advance the conversation about race.

Wall installation - San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Darkytown Rebellion

Having made a name for herself with cut-out silhouettes, in the early 2000s Walker began to experiment with light-based work. In Darkytown Rebellion, in addition to the silhouetted figures (over a dozen) pasted onto 37 feet of a corner gallery wall, Walker projected colored light onto the ceiling, walls, and floor. The effect creates an additional experiential, even psychedelic dimension to the work. Shadows of visitor's bodies - also silhouettes - appear on the same surfaces, intermingling with Walker's cast. With their human scale, her installation implicates the viewer, and color, as opposed to black and white, links it to the present. Our shadows mingle with the silhouettes of fictitious stereotypes, inviting us to compare the two and challenging us to decide where our own lives fit in the progression of history.

Cut paper and projection on wall - Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg

A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant

This work, Walker's largest and most ambitious work to date, was commissioned by the public arts organization Creative Time, and displayed in what was once the largest sugar refinery in the world. The monumental form, coated in white sugar and on view at the defunct Domino Sugar plant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, evoked the racist stereotype of "mammy" (nurturer of white families), with protruding genitals that hyper-sexualize the sphinx-like figure. Attending her were sculptures of young black boys, made of molasses and resin that melted away in the summer heat over the course of the exhibition. Sugar in the raw is brown. White sugar, a later invention, was bleached by slaves until the 19 th century in greater and greater quantities to satisfy the Western appetite for rum and confections. Sugar cane was fed manually to the mills, a dangerous process that resulted in the loss of limbs and lives. This site-specific work, rich with historical significance, calls our attention to the geo-political circumstances that produced, and continue to perpetuate, social, economic, and racial inequity. A powerful gesture commemorating undocumented experiences of oppression, it also called attention to the changing demographics of a historically industrial and once working-class neighborhood, now being filled with upscale apartments. Sugar Sphinx shares an air of mystery with Walker's silhouettes.

Installation - Domino Sugar Plant, Williamsburg, Brooklyn

The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing of this page. These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet.

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Kara Walker shocks and inspires viewers by creating wall-sized paper silhouettes of nightmarish vignettes that illustrate the history of the American South.

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Kara Walker was born in Stockton, California, in 1969. She received a BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991, and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994. The artist is best known for exploring the raw intersection of race, gender, and sexuality through her iconic, silhouetted figures. Walker unleashes the traditionally proper Victorian medium of the silhouette directly onto the walls of the gallery, creating a theatrical space in which her unruly cut-paper characters fornicate and inflict violence on one another.

In works like Darkytown Rebellion (2000), the artist uses overhead projectors to throw colored light onto the ceiling, walls, and floor of the exhibition space; the lights cast a shadow of the viewer's body onto the walls, where it mingles with Walker's black-paper figures and landscapes. With one foot in the historical realism of slavery and the other in the fantastical space of the romance novel, Walker's nightmarish fictions simultaneously seduce and implicate the audience.

Walker's work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. A 1997 recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, Walker was the United States representative to the 2002 Bienal de São Paulo. Walker currently lives in New York, where she is on the faculty of the MFA program at Columbia University.

Kara Walker & Jason Moran

53:44

Conversation Starter

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Interview

Kara Walker discusses her 2002 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, Insurrection! (Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On).

Interview

Kara Walker talks about her interpretation of Gone with the Wind, and how it inspired her first silhouette piece, Gone, An Historical Romance of Civil War As it Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of Young Negress and Her Heart.

Artist at Work

24 Images

Artwork Survey: 2000s

4 Images

Artwork Survey: 1990s

7 Images

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Fons Americanus. Hyundai Commission at Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London.

October 2, 2019 - November 8, 2020+

The Katastwóf Karavan. (first performed in New Orleans in 2018)

Event outside the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, performance by Jason Moran. October 12, 2019.

From Black and White to Living Color: The Collected Motion Pictures and Accompanying Documents of Kara E. Walker, Artist. Sprüth Magers, London. October 4-December 21, 2019

The exhibition, curated by Hiilton Als, featured a retrospective of video works and incorporated archival material related to those videos.

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Event outside the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, performance by Jason Moran. October 12, 2019. The exhibition, curated by Hiilton Als, featured a retrospective of video works and incorporated archival material related to those videos.

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Hyundai Commission: Kara Walker's Fons Americanus | Tate