Reckoning with “Black Identity” over 4 Decades of Art

The Chrysler Museum is Next to Stir the Art-and-Race Discussion

Not for the first time, the black painter Robert Colescott will have an honorary room of his own.

            In three weeks, when the “30 Americans” traveling exhibit of black artists reaches the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Va., it will dedicate one of its largest spaces solely to the colorful work by Colescott, a dean of African-American artists, who died three years ago at age 83.

            The Chrysler already owns two “monumental” Colescott canvases, always colorful, satirical, and done in acrylics. These will be teamed up with three more canvases in the visiting exhibit, which just wrapped up a four-month show in Washington D.C.  As the Norfolk museum says, Colescott’s “work was an enormous influence on the generations that followed,” mainly through his treatment of delicate racial issues in diverse and humorous ways. His influence was evident back in 1977. In that year, Colescott was the first black artist to represent the United States at its pavilion at the Venice Biennale—a room of his own on the world stage.

            As the senior painter in the "30 Americans” exhibit (with actually 31 artists), Colescott anchors its central theme—how younger black artists deal with the topic of race today. Some of the artist “grew up amidst the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and ‘70s, others continue to live within its aftermath,” says the exhibit, which “explores how each artist reckons with the notion of black identity.”

            The selection in the show could not be a more diverse patchwork of responses to the race topic. They range from the outsized Renaissance-type paintings of heroic black males by Kehinde Wiley, to Kara Walker’s popular cut-paper silhouette murals (this one of Camptown Ladies, 1998). There is also the found object conceptual work by Rodney McMillian: a room-sized dirty white carpet hung on the wall.

            As art critics have noted, the grouping of 31 black artists would seem to promise a consistency in their collective show, at least if taken to be organized under a racial theme. The works—76 paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, and videos—could not be more different, however. None of the artist statements say the same thing.

            “My work has to do with the tension between masculinity and beauty,” writes Wiley. “It’s all about convincing the world about your position in society.” When artist Leonardo Drew stacked a wall of cotton bales as his artwork, he said, “The work becomes the emotion.” In Renée Green’s five sets of photo collages from old movies, the work “highlights the power of exclusion and the arbitrariness of seemingly objective systems.”

            The well-known Carrie Mae Weems, who does photos and text on slavery, notes that the works hark back to the “anthropological debate” on people from Africa. Rashid Johnson says of black art today: “It’s not a weapon for me. It’s an interest.”

            Generally, the works of the 1960s and 1970s had been about protest and racial pride, whereas today they seem far more ambivalent and ironic. They can cleverly use stereotypes to not only lampoon white attitudes, but to comment on black pop culture as well, with all of its foibles.

            For general visitors—which included President Obama’s family at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington on January 29—the cumulative impact of so many black artists has been exciting. A sampling of the leave-a-note wall at the Corcoran is typical: “It’s Incredible,” “Finally,” “Bold, brash, profound,” “Majestic,” “Amazing,” and “It’s a Lively Exhibit.” Behind the enthusiasm lies a deeper discussion on how African American artists—and a young generation of American blacks—want race to be discussed today. If the artists do it in images, their peers are looking at the terminology itself: black, African-American, or simply American.

            An Internet movement has arisen to call for an end to the late-1980s term African American, for example. It favors simply black or American. “We respect our African heritage, but that term is not really us,” Gibré George told the Associated Press after he started a popular Facebook site, “Don't Call Me African-American.” In a story on the trend, the AP also quotes Shawn Smith of Houston, who prefers black: “How I really feel is, I'm American,” said Smith, who comes from North Carolina. According to many other comments, the reference to Africa wrongly eclipses the more recent roots of American blacks, either in the states, the Caribbean, or elsewhere.

            Ever since the Rev. Jessie Jackson made the campaign for the African-American term his chief legacy, the change of generations was bound to raise a debate on who decides the proper labels for individuals or groups. Obviously, black artists will have a role in how this plays out. Not for nothing, this notable exhibit is titled 31 “Americans.” The University of Chicago art historian Darby English said that the 31 artists, despite their diverse approaches, present a profound question for the future: “What becomes of black art when black artists stop making it?”

“30 Americans” Black Art Exhibit a Tale of D.C., Miami, and the Rubells

Two Enterprising Collectors Make a Bid to Mix Art and Urban Renewal

WASHINGTON D.C.—Behind every great art exhibition is a larger story, and for a drama that involves celebrity collectors, the Miami art scene, top black artists, and Washington D.C.’s top art school, the “30 Americans” exhibition is tale worth telling.

            This week the Corcoran Gallery of Art, just a block from the White House, began packing up the 76 paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, and videos that made up a rare and stunning show. It was titled simply “30 Americans” to say something new about African American artists, who usually organize under a “black" American art banner.

            The traveling exhibition, which began at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh last year, has just finished its four month run in D.C. Now it heads for the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Va., opening March 16.

            Significantly, the show was designed by the collector couple Donald and Mera Rubell of Miami. They drew upon their own private collection to gather the works by, actually, 31 black artists. Since the Rubells settled in Miami 20 years ago, their family fortune—derived from New York clubs and Florida real estate—has allowed them to become hotel developers and avid collectors of contemporary art.

            Now they are buying real estate in Washington D.C., hoping to shape its art scene, and this is why, in the view of some, the Corcoran show was more that a splendid art event. It was part of the Rubell family’s bid to become players in the local arts of the nation’s capitol.

            “We decided to call [the exhibition] ‘30 Americans,’” the Rubells said of their traveling exhibit, launched in March 2011. “‘Americans,’ rather than ‘African Americans’ or ‘Black Americans’ because nationality is a statement of fact, while racial identity is a question each artist answers in his or her own way, or not at all.” The works by the 31 artists bear this out. Each artist has reflected differently on the American black experience from the 1970s onward (see next week’s column for this topic).

            In this sense, the Rubells are shaping the art discourse in America. Their generosity also has bolstered a good number of young artists, whose work they buy, store in their large warehouse galleries in Miami, or loan for exhibitions. As real estate developers, they are also thinking about urban art scenes. That is how they made their mark in Miami, and it seems to be their ambition in Washington D.C. as well.

            In Miami, besides owning a few luxury beach hotels, they bought large warehouses in the downtrodden east Miami art district, the Wynwood neighborhood. By dint of their local collection, they have become, over the years, unofficial hosts of the annual Art Basel Miami Beach festivities, boosting their global celebrity. The Rubells’ first venture in Washington D.C. was to buy a dilapidated Best Western hotel, now called the “Capitol Skyline Hotel,” in the city’s declining southwest, a section currently being gentrified by developers. Thanks to the Rubells, the three-star Capitol Skyline has become a modest art scene, a place of artist gatherings and displays of contemporary artworks.

            Eventually in D.C., the venerable Corcoran Gallery of Art and its Corcoran College of Art + Design crossed paths with the Rubells, now doing business in the capital city. The Corcoran complex is a classic museum-art school arrangement. While the school is financially stable, the museum—housed in a massive but old beaux arts building—struggles to keep up repairs and raise millions for operation costs each year.

            Everything at the historic Corcoran art complex was looking pretty good in the first decade of the 2000s. The college enrollment, ranging between 500 and 1,000, was doing well enough. The Corcoran had land next door to lease and it ran a satellite campus in prestigious Georgetown. In 2006, it also bought from the D.C. government, for $6.2 million, the defunct Randall Junior High School in southwest D.C. as an ideal setting in which to create a new and larger Corcoran College of Art campus.

            Then came the stock market crash in 2008.

            Today, the Corcoran has an annual deficit of a few million, is trying to sell its Georgetown campus, and was lucky to find at least one source of financial relief—the Rubell family. The Corcoran could no longer finance the Randall school campus. So last year, the savvy Rebells bought the boarded-up property for about the same price.

            The Rubells are in partnership with a local developer, Telesis, to turn the school and its playing fields into a cultural hub, much as they had done in Miami’s warehouse district. According to the plan, which may be completed in 2014, the vintage school building will become a Rubell Art Museum and a restaurant. Mixed-price apartments and perhaps a hotel will be built on the school yards.

            The Rubell story adds credence to the recent Wall Street Journal headline that private collectors are now eclipsing galleries and museums, using their independent wealth and considerable art holdings to set up new art scenes at will. Logically, the Rubells see it as urban renewal, an idea that city planners everywhere can agree with.

            “We want to create a lot of life here,” Mera Rubell told the Washington Post last year. “We want to make an important place. This city does a crappy job of selling itself. It’s amazing that people come here because the promotion is so awful. They just show men in suits in front of marble buildings. This could be the social hearth of the country. It’s enticing to come to a desert and do something big.”

            Such big moves always raise eyebrows and question motives. Some have said the Corcoran Gallery hosted the Rubells’ “30 Americans” show because it came to the financial rescue, a quid pro quo that the Corcoran denied. Some locals also believe the Rubells muscled in on the school as if at a fire sale, getting the real estate at a price four times lower than its true worth, since it is in a gentrifying area.

            Either way, the collectors and the galleries make their moves and the art world charts its future. Meanwhile, the splendid “30 Americans” exhibit heads to Virginia, a topic worth looking at in the next column.

            Next week: the “30 Americans” exhibit.

Telling Tales of Rags to Riches in the Art World

1 Percent of Artists Have Luck but 99 Percent Must be Determined

The late 19th-century American author Horatio Alger never devoted one of his “rags to riches” books to the story of a young artist. But these days, not a few entrepreneurs in the arts would want to hear that story.

            How does an artist succeed financially against the odds?

            The odds look daunting in the current economic climate. While the mathematics of the “1 percent wealthy versus the 99 percent of the rest of us” may be exaggerated and skewed, life at the top of the economic pyramid does seem like a different planet.

            Take Facebook. When it filed as a publicly traded company on Feb. 1, it reported $1 billion in pure annual profits even before it starts selling shares. Next, look at Art Basel Miami, the annual art fair. Last December, the moneyed class showed up as usual, plunking down $1.5 million for a blue-and-white Ellsworth Kelly art object no bigger than a bread box. “Despite the flatlined economy, the art market has been roaring,” reported the Daily Beast’s Blake Gopnik. “In the first half of this year, total worldwide art sales hit a record of . . . $5.8 billion.”

            The ordinary artist is not entirely cut out of these developments. Facebook reports that users swap 250 million photos per day, which could be called a type of art marketing or art appreciation. One graffiti artist, David Choe, 36, accepted private employee shares from cash-poor Facebook in 2005 in lieu of a fee when he painted murals in the company’s office in Palo Alto, California. Now, Choe’s stock is estimated to be worth $200 million. What is more, the Zynga computer game company, whose founders included art students, has also shot up on the stock market, since it provides most of the games Facebook users play.

            Such rags-to-riches sagas in the art world are mostly a recent phenomenon. It began with the Pop art of the “Warhol economy” and now is driven by the high-end market of contemporary art. Along the way, stock market and Internet bubbles sometimes do not burst, and in those time, some visual artists are carried rapidly upward on the rising tide of wealth.

            On his blog, Choe presented the life of artists as both a lottery and a kind of divine providence. “Have you had the dream where you ARE this guy?!?” Choe wrote. “And then some kind of happy accident happens, and as you’re in the middle of this glorious car crash, you stop to realize, that there is actually no such thing as an accident, and no chance encounters, and that everything has a direct purpose?”

            Which brings us back to those “Horatio Alger stories.”

            None of the Horatio Alger characters won the lottery, but there is a connection. In the stories, characters such as Mark the Matchboy or Ragged Dick typically meet a wealthy patron. The patron is impressed by their efforts at self-improvement. Then the patron gives them seed money. After that, the characters make the money work by way of persistence, inventiveness, frugality, and virtue.

            The stories are considered hokey today. But two of their principles still are alive and well: seed money and virtue. To get the seed money, artists need to go out and put a best foot forward. They may find a wealthy patron, or simply land a day job that can accrue savings. Then, once some money is coming in, the artist must make the most of it by being productive and frugal. Virtue, plus creativity, may drive successful art.

            Forbes magazine’s personal finance writer Kym McNicholas jumped on the David Choe story as a parable for freelancers and entrepreneurs, of which artists are typical. While most artists need cash, not stock, Choe had the luxury of obtaining some stock and holding on to it. Even in this, Choe was lucky. At first he said Facebook was a “ridiculous and pointless” company, but didn’t know any better. Facebook, too, was lucky. Many Internet and finance companies have paid employees in stock. Then everything went into bankruptcy.

            “The Facebook story is making us collectively giddy and euphoric,” McNicholas wrote. “That could make us more susceptible than usual to scams and get-rich-quick plans.” The key to Choe’s success, Forbes suggested, was that he was doing what he loved. Meanwhile, he stumbled upon the stocks as barter for spray painting graffiti art across interior walls. How he uses his new-found fortune is the next question.

            Today there are ample how-to books on artists developing a plan, a brand, a portfolio, and pursuing prizes, grants, exhibits, and galleries. As most artists will concede, however, success does seem to be a matter of luck—or of having the right connections. In the end, therefore, the one thing that remains in the artist’s control is what’s found in those un-cool, old-fashioned Alger books: determination, self-regulation, and enthusiasm.

            Even in physics, the “rich get richer”—the particles and energies that have a leg up over other particles tend to increase in size without effort, creating giant galaxies and stars. In the art world, too, the rich get richer. The one resort for the other 99 percent of artists is to rely on skill, character, and enterprise. It seems very un-bohemian. But just ask Mark the Matchboy, who in fiction rose up by the boot-straps to financial security. That’s often how it works in non-fiction life as well.

Two Images in Japanese Art Reveal the Flow of Visual Culture

Large Cartoon Eyes and a Big Wave in Prints Started Powerful Art Trends

Before the Big Eyes, there was the Great Wave.

            When people in the West turn their attention to Japanese art, these are the two archetypes that come to mind. In recent decades, the big-eyed cartoon character of Japanese comic books, animation, and contemporary art, has influenced even Western culture. A century before that, Japanese art prints had invented the giant wave, and that too has endured as an icon of Japanese art well known around the world.

            Most recently, the cartoon-like characters with the large, glinting child’s eyes have even become part of cutting-edge Pop art, showing up in the works of contemporary artist Takashi Murakami. He’s put the big eyes on smiling flowers, mushrooms, and a large sculpture, Oval Buddha. A far older work, the Great Wave woodblock print, while having some modern imitation, continues to appear as a benchmark in art history. It was prominently featured in two recent BBC programs, the latest being “A History of the World in 100 Objects.”

            The big eyes and the great wave also have lessons about the interchange of Asian and Western culture in the development of art, or what the expert’s today call the development of “visual culture.”

            The more ancient of the two stories (about the wave) begins in the early 1800s, when the more traditional treatment of waves in Japanese design suddenly gave rise to a single giant wave, thanks to the artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849).

            Known as Kokusai (first name), he departed from flat Chinese style painting and a design tradition of “rough sea screens” by adopting Western-style perspective. Western art was reaching Japan by way of Dutch and French books and drawings. As he mulled these changes, he formed a new portrayal of the cresting surf at Enoshima beach in Kanagawa, near ancient Edo (now Tokyo). The beach still today is the best for surfing in Japan. He designed one large, stand-out lacy wave, put a boat in the torrent, and placed Mount Fuji in the far distance, smaller and dimmer, as a matter of visual perspective.

            As a woodblock printer, and sometime illustrator-cartoonist, Kokusai was commercially minded, and that led to his new approach in the now-famous “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.” Of these, The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1831) turned out to be the favorite, especially outside of Japan. The single wave—a giant breaker—stood out like a main character, a role typically played in Japanese block prints by a prince, warrior, or courtesan.

            After this, the single wave became a symbol for many concerns in Japanese culture. The wave came to stand for foreign invasion, whether Mongol or Western, and also natural disaster and the warrior gods. “The wave’s authority depends not simply on its scale but also its singularity,” art historian Christine Guth writes in the current Art Bulletin. “It is, in the eyes of Euro-Americans, Japan’s most representative artwork.”

            In Hokusai’s day, thousands of inexpensive woodblock prints of his various scenes and stories were sold, but the single wave motif was a favorite, leading Hokusai “to use it again and again in various combinations,” Guth says. “Commercial opportunism led other print artists to draw on the cultural capital encoded in the market-tested Hokusai ‘brand’ and in so doing opened the waves to interpretations that kept them fresh.”

            In short, the Great Wave became a permanent visual image for Japan, much as the Mona Lisa or Van Gogh’s Starry Night come to mind when the world thinks of European art and culture.

            After World War II, however, a new image rivaled the Great Wave. With the rise of modern Japanese comics (called Manga) that rival was the Big Eyes, now a dominant image in cartooning and Pop art.

            That story begins with Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989), a serious medical student who turned out to be the founder of modern Japanese comics. For Japanese culture, he invented the big-eyed, cute characters (though he proudly said he borrowed the big-eye concept from the American cartoon, “Betty Boop”). His most famous early character was a bionic boy, “Astro Boy,” who rocketed around by nuclear power. Other big-eyed characters were “Kimba the Lion” and “Black Jack,” among a growing number of other child-like heroes and creatures.

            As a result, the feature of large child-like eyes came to dominate many artists in the Japanese cartoon industry. They soon exported such branded characters as “Sailor Moon” and “Pokeman,” and Western artists picked up its variations. Eventually, even sophisticated Pop artists such as Murakami adopted the big eyes because of their strong cultural reference—that is, their dominant place in visual culture.

            So today, the Great Wave and the Big Eyes may be the most salient aspects of Japanese visual culture, at least to the West. Both of them came by way of cultural exchanges, adaptation, and successful commercialization. Nevertheless, both were developed by profoundly great artists—Kokusai and Tezuka—both of whom did a vast number of works in a great variety. They just happened, meanwhile, to hit upon two icons that stood the test of time: the Great Wave and the Big Eyes.