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?”
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