Photography (Photography)

LaToya Ruby Frazier is an artist and a militant; her photos combine intimate views of her relation with her parents and grandparents with the history of the Afro-American community of Braddock, Pennsylvania, where she grew up and where her family still live. She reports upon the decline of this steel-producing town, which was once prosperous and where the local population today is devastated by poverty, unemployment and health problems linked to pollution. The town has currently closed the hospital which increases unemployment and makes access to treatment complicated for the residents of one of the most polluted towns in the USA.

Painting (Painting)

Like many of his other sculptural works, the source of I am the Greatest is actually a historical photograph of an identical button pin from the 1960s. I am the Greatest presents the famous quote by Mohammad Ali to think about his important presence in the African American community. In dialogue with the painting I am a Man, also in the Kadist collection, this assertion that begins the same way takes the line from the protest poster several steps further.

Painting (Painting)

The image is borrowed from protests during Civil Rights where African Americans in the south would carry signs with the same message to assert their rights against segregation and racism. Historically, in countries such as the US and South Africa, the term “boy” was used as a pejorative and racist insult towards men of color, slaves in particular, signifying their alleged subservient status as being less than men. In response, Am I Not A Man And A Brother?

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Intentionally Left Blanc alludes to the technical process of its own (non)production; a procedure known as retro-reflective screen printing in which the image is only fully brought to life through its exposure to flash lighting. Using a found photograph depicting a passionate crowd of African Americans—their attitude suggesting the fervor of a civil-rights era audience— Intentionally Left Blanc reverts in its exposed, “positive” format to an image in which select faces are whitened out and erased, the exact inverse of the same view in its “negative” condition. This dialectic of light and dark re-emerges when we view the same faces again, only this time black and featureless, a scattering of disembodied heads amidst a sea of white.

Installation (Installation)

South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

A Place to Call Home

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title. As with many of his works, the artist has taken a found image and manipulated it to draw out and dramatize the formal contrast between the black hands holding white cotton. Cotton, of course is one of the most familiar fabric sources to us, and becomes incredibly soft once processed.

Painting (Painting)

Bread and Roses takes its name from a phrase famously used on picket signs and immortalized by the poet James Oppenheim in 1911. “Bread for all, and Roses, too’—a slogan of the women in the West,” is Oppenheim’s opening line, alluding to the workers’ goal for wages and conditions that would allow them to do more than simply survive. Thomas’ painting includes several black, white, brown, yellow, and red raised fists—clenched and high in the air in the internationally recognized symbol of solidarity, resistance, and unity.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Thomas’ lenticular text-based works require viewers to shift positions as they view them in order to fully absorb their content. Meaning, therefore, changes depending on one’s perspective—and in the case of Thomas’ installation, only emerges when one knows that there is always something hidden, always more to one of his works than immediately meets the eye. This lenticular print with text shifts as you walk in front of it from its title, “Black Imitates White” to the inverse, “White Imitates Black”(and some other possibilities in between) emphasizing that there are always at least two perspectives to the same scenario, and thereby encouraging us as viewers to consider them all together rather than trying to identify with any one subjectivity.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

American Artist is engaged in a multiyear research project that traces and teases various interconnections between the life and work of science fiction author Octavia E. Butler (b. 1947, Pasadena, CA); the evolution of rocketry and sci-fi in Los Angeles; and the post-war movement of African-diasporic families from the Southern to the Western United States, a phenomenon known as the Second Great Migration. Using a historical materialist frame of study, American Artist’s undertaking asks of the region and the frequency of Black people practicing art and science in Altadena, an enclave northeast of Los Angeles.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

American Artist is engaged in a multiyear research project that traces and teases various interconnections between the life and work of science fiction author Octavia E. Butler (b. 1947, Pasadena, CA); the evolution of rocketry and sci-fi in Los Angeles; and the post-war movement of African-diasporic families from the Southern to the Western United States, a phenomenon known as the Second Great Migration. Using a historical materialist frame of study, American Artist’s undertaking asks of the region and the frequency of Black people practicing art and science in Altadena, an enclave northeast of Los Angeles.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

American Artist is engaged in a multiyear research project that traces and teases various interconnections between the life and work of science fiction author Octavia E. Butler (b. 1947, Pasadena, CA); the evolution of rocketry and sci-fi in Los Angeles; and the post-war movement of African-diasporic families from the Southern to the Western United States, a phenomenon known as the Second Great Migration. Using a historical materialist frame of study, American Artist’s undertaking asks of the region and the frequency of Black people practicing art and science in Altadena, an enclave northeast of Los Angeles.

Photography (Photography)

David Goldblatt’s “Boksburg series” is a telling portrait of the small town that became a notorious symbol of racism in South Africa. The photographic essay negotiates the troublesome landscape of the apartheid through capturing the intimate in-between moments that are seemingly inconsequential and visually inoffensive. However, it is in this series that Goldblatt provides a candid insight into the white communities during the apartheid.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In her masterpiece 8 Possible Beginnings or The Creation of African-America , Walker unravels just that, the story of struggle, oppression, escape and the complexities of power dynamics in the history following slave trade in America. Her use of contour and silhouette accentuate emotion with rigor, she reduces the narrative to black and white as gruesome acts of sex and violence address trauma, fear and suffering through a majestic play of shadow and light.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

From suicides, to gang violence, to the epidemic abuse of force by police departments (predominantly against Black men), to school and mass shootings, there is perhaps no more urgent issue in the United States than gun control. The color blue is a proxy for both sadness, and a color that is emblematic of American law enforcement services. I Am Blue, 1 by American Artist is a sculpture that fuses a school desk with a ballistic shield.

Photography (Photography)

Collier Schorr’s prints upend conventions of portrait photography by challenging what it means to “document” a subject. American Flag (Scratch) (1999), for example, depicts an unidentified male subject clad in an American flag-print singlet. With his head and extremities out of frame, the camera focuses on his flush-red torso, his left nipple protruding from the singlet’s strap.

Photography (Photography)

The American War , which takes its title from the Vietnamese term for what Americans call the Vietnam War, has toured the United States extensively with the goal of presenting a Vietnamese perspective of that history. The project began in 2005 when Fletcher visited the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. He was shocked by images that depicted the lasting effects of the war and the atrocities committed by the United States.

Photography (Photography)

On 15 September 1963 members of the Ku Klux Klan blew up the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham Alabama up using dynamite. Four African American girls were killed, and 22 other people were injured. Two African American boys were killed in related violence that day.

Photography (Photography)

The title of this series – Two videos, three photographs, several related masterpieces and American art – is paradoxical, suggesting the work is conceived in relation to its medium and a situation in art history and the region of the world in which it was made. Paradoxical but in the end, often true of the way in which art history is written. The presence of black men and the term “American Art” brings us back to Robert Mapplethorpe’s Black Book .

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Historically, blondeness has been a signifier for desirability and beauty, speaking to “purity” — the purity of whiteness — like no other bodily attribute except, perhaps, blue eyes. In the twenty-first century, blondeness is the look desired by American presidents, pop stars, rappers, television announcers, Hollywood celebrities, the boy next door, and some Asian Americans, African Americans, white Americans, Arab Americans, and LatinX Americans. The desirability of blonde hair has no genre boundaries, no pronoun limitation, and no class limit.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

In Hole #1 a zebra scull stands in as a representation of Africa, while the plexiglass box and the hole made through it represent the inaccessibility of that culture to African-Americans.

Photography (Photography)

The Breaks reflects Capistran’s interests in sampling and fusing different cultural, social, and historical sources. Growing up in an African-American community in Los Angeles, Capistran has long been influenced by hip-hop culture. The photographs in this print document him surreptitiously breakdancing on Carl Andre’s iconic lead floor piece after the guards at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art have left the gallery.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

By Way of Revolution is a series of works by Helina Metaferia that addresses the inherited histories of protest that inform contemporary social movements. In the project, Metaferia works intrinsically with female descendants of prominent historical black activists to produce video art; with women of color organizations to produce socially engaged work; with “radicalism” archives and performance stills to produce works on paper and tapestries; and with museum, gallery, and public spaces to produce participatory performances. Tapestry (Gewel) (2023) is one of a series of tapestries that are all subtitled with names of traditional storytellers from across the African continent.

Photography (Photography)

Since the global capital expansion, billboards have been the medium of communication between the rulers and the residents of townships. In South Africa, a billboard is a relic from the times when Africans were subjects of power and when townships were restricted areas, subject to laws, municipality by-laws and ordinances regulated the movement of persons and governed who may or may not enter the township. Mofokeng references this medium for control through tracing the history of townships in South Africa.

Photography (Photography)

After seeing Martha Camarillo’s photographs of horsemen in Strawberry Mansion -an impoverished Philadelphia neighbourhood- Mohamed Bourouissa travelled to see the urban stables run by African American men. For eight months, he observed, drew and photographed this community. As the community and Bourouissa became closer throughout his stay, the artist suggested that they organize a competition, called “Horse Day”, in which artists from other neighborhoods would be invited to create costumes for the horses.

Painting (Painting)

Fred Wilson’s flag paintings document the 20th century history of African people, indexing the period of liberation from colonialism. As the majority of African flags were created during the 1950s and 60s, they were intended to reflect a so-called ‘modern’ aesthetic and ideology. Many African flags maintain the typical flag tropes such as stripes, stars, birds, and blocks of primary and secondary colors; green to represent the land; blue to symbolize the ocean or sky; and red to recall the violence that occured in the pursuit of liberty.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

By Way of Revolution is a series that addresses the inherited histories of protest that inform contemporary social movements. In the project Metaferia works intrinsically with female descendants of prominent historical black activists to produce video art; with women of color organizations to produce socially engaged work; with “radicalism” archives and performance stills to produce works on paper and tapestries; and with museum, gallery, and public spaces to produce participatory performances. Tapestry (Gewel) is one of a series of tapestries that are all subtitled with names of traditional storytellers from across the African continent.

Installation (Installation)

Dave is part of Mohamed Bourouissa’s project Horse Day , which stemmed from a residency the artist conducted in Philadelphia in 2014. There, he discovered the activities of the Fletcher Street Riding Club, a historical stable and training program built by and aimed at young African Americans. Weaving together two predominant symbols of American lifestyle and culture—the cowboy and the car—Bourouissa collaborated with local riders and artists to organize a contest celebrating the best adorned horse, in the manner of car tuning competitions.

Photography (Photography)

Xaviera Simmons often employs her own body and collected materials in the service of her photographs and performances. Not to be mistaken as mere portraiture, however, Simmons’ works are explorations of the Black body in relation to landscape and other dimensions of non-linear space and time. Concealing and flattening her subjects with costumes and collage-like, abstract pictorial devices, the artist arranges archival photographs, printed textiles, and anthropological artifacts in configurations that highlight the power of visual culture to shape contemporary understandings of the self.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Killed is a video projection in which William E. Jones appropriated and edited, in a rapid sequence, a selection from the more than 68,000 censored or discarded films produced by the Farm Security Administration’s photographers between 1935 and 1943. Roy Emerson Stryker, the then director of the program, was in charge of what he called “killing” negatives by punching holes in them to render them unusable. Killed continues Jones’s use of discarded film footage seen in his video created from vintage 1970s and 1980s gay porn that was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.