Through artistic production and practice, these Contemporary Black Artists critique the construction and representation of identity as social categories that intersect and encompass roles of race as a metalanguage.
ZANELE MUHOLI
Zanele Muholi is a South African artist and activist who focus their art on photography and activism. Muholi captures people and creates representations of marginalized LGBTQIA people of Africa. Muholi’s work in activism brings awareness for a change in the systems and structures of and an increase in diverse representation for society, the art community, and art institutions. Muholi’s self-portraits capture self-representation and experience in site-specific locations. Muholi creates self-portraiture through photography to define and establish visual representation that contests political hierarchical manifestations and attests to grounded and embodied empowerment. The contrasting compositional relations interwoven in the monochrome of each artwork activates a critical dichotomy and questions of social presence, responsibility, and respect.
KERRY JAMES MARSHALL
Kerry James Marshall is an African American painter who was born in Birmingham, Alabama. Marshall paints portraits and scenes of African Americans in daily life and configures them to align within the Art History Canon of Painting. By challenging, redefining, and inventing new practices and principles from previous masters, Marshall connects his paintings to the Art History Canon while adding a new image, the Black figure, that is autonomous, liberated, elevated, self-determined, and a consistent representation within art and American society. Marshall’s images challenge, contest, and reimagine the systems and structures within painting and societal practices.
GLENN LIGON
Glenn Ligon is a painter and interdisciplinary artist. Ligon, influenced by his love of books, uses text, literature, photography, sculpture, and light in conceptual ways to illustrate and question African American experience in America. Using references from African American life of the past; a photograph from the Million Man March, boxes designed after Henry ‘Box’ Brown, protest signs from sanitation strikes, and text from James Baldwin; Ligon recreates situations that exhibit the ways in which African Americans have traveled and worked to achieve meaning, definition, value, and purpose in a world that is objective, subjective, and abstract simultaneously. Through blurring and representing words created to connect and empower African Americans during times of struggle, Ligon’s text paintings become a metaphor, a window, and a mirror of the everyday practices and experience of African Americans. The text, the color, the material, the process is all a part of the metalanguage of race that Ligon creates to emphasize and inquire about Black American existence. This metalanguage becomes a catalyst for other projects to define the Black experience and Black Art. Ligon’s light works become metaphorical references: looking for black light and finding the absence of light allows for the black words to glow.
EMORY DOUGLAS
Emory Douglas is an African American artist and activist. Douglas was a member of the Black Panther Party and helped to create and define their “Revolutionary Art.” The Black Panther Party supported “Teaching by illustrating.”4 Douglas created graphic illustrations, cartoons, and prints for the Black Panther’s newspaper, Black Panther, that was distributed throughout African American communities to share knowledge, educate, and empower. Douglas’s work helped create a positive vision for African Americans as they moved toward self-determination, resistance, and liberation during a moment in American history when Black identity was reinventing and redefining itself within the African American community. Collaborating with international artists who created revolutionary imagery for freedom, Douglas used their “graphic language and semiotic devices” to illustrate Black revolution for liberation in America.5 “Douglas’s images changed the story from Black people as victims to Black people as freedom fighters, allying themselves with concurrent global revolutionary movements.”6 A contributor to the Black Arts Movement, Douglas worked with Amiri Baraka on sets for The Black Arts Repertory Theater/School.
BISA BUTLER
Bisa Butler is an African American artist and quilter who uses textiles to create large-scale quilted portraits of African Americans. Butler researches old found photographs of African Americans known and unknown throughout historical identification. Butler’s quilts recreate portraiture of the past into elevated portraits of African Americans in luxurious design for the present. In keeping with African American quilt-making tradition, Butler’s quilts incorporate different fabrics from various sources: family member vintage African fabric, previously owned dressmaker fabric, donated fabric, seasonal African fabrics, all combine to create a unique arrangement of collaged patterns, as if fabric were a painting. Her technique for line, pattern, and color combinations and layering makes Butler’s quilted portraits incredibly captivating. A student of Jeff Donaldson, Butler’s influence and studies come from AfriCOBRA and Black Arts Movement.
WANURI KAHIU
Wanuri Kahiu is a Kenyan based artist who directs, produces, and writes films. Kahiu’s film, Pumzi, is an Afrofuturist film about the earth post-world war over water. The film depicts a matriarch that wants to dilute grandeur beliefs about reality to dominate and preserve. Themes of nature, the mother, the seed, the unknown, the ancestor, and elements of science fiction make Kahiu’s film great art to compare African culture and tradition to Afrofuturistic ideas and perceptions. Kahiu discusses in her interview how elements of science fiction and Afrofuturism are indigenous to African cultures. Stories about visionaries who predict the future, animals that can talk, people that can transform have always been a part of African folktales. Kahiu brings a thought provoking and prophetic insight into philosophical questions about race, social constructs, systems, and structures in Afrofuturism.