Painting (Painting)

Jarrett Key’s practice combines several modes of production into a single frame, incorporating sculpture, painting, and performance. Dancing Free I , painted in wet cement, like a fresco, is part of a current series of paintings titled Leaving the City , which depicts Black people they know in lush, pastoral landscapes. Raised in rural Alabama, Key’s series grew out of a few experiments conducted with visitors to their studio.

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.

Painting (Painting)

El mar y sus múltiples afluentes (The Sea and its Multiple Tributaries) builds on the concept of trafficking that Adriana Bustos has been exploring over the last decade. The piece represents an apocryphal river and illustrates the routes of the slave trade between the coasts of Africa, Europe, and South America, departing from the Congo River (once called Zaira), and arriving at Río de la Plata, the main river in Buenos Aires that divides Argentina from Uruguay. The work collapses time and space, placing the coasts of colonial empires across the colonies where slaves were taken.

Textile (Textile)

Out of simple materials, Alicia Henry creates enigmatic, somewhat troubled characters, which reveal her interest in the complexities and the contradictions surrounding familial relationships. The artist probes societal differences and how these variations affect individual and group responses to themes of beauty, the body, and broader issues of identity. Untitled explores these themes and addresses the processes through which women navigate such issues.

NFT (NFT)

In conjunction with his first NFT sale of White Male Dread Scott made and circulated a poster titled Whites For Sale . The indigo-colored poster advertises a “cargo” of newly arrived white slaves, from which one will be for sale. This work is adapted from a 1796 slave sale announcement poster that is now archived in the library at Columbia University, NYC.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Leila Weefur’s two-channel video installation Between Beauty & Horror focuses on the sensorial and somatic experiences that give Blackness a distinct and inherently racialized materiality. The narrative structure of Between Beauty & Horror operates on dream logic; interspersed among the dream sequences of the video are moments that fluidly shift between violence, playfulness, tenderness, and of course, beauty and horror. Weefur’s work poses many questions about the Black experience, but it offers no easy answers.

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.

Painting (Painting)

Figura Noturna II by Antônio Obá depicts a dark figure, surrounded by a halo of light set against an even darker background. He has one eye open, which stares intensely at the viewer. The image relates to a theme recurrent in the artist’s practice: the figure lying awake at night.

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. The Call is an ongoing video project of performances by descendants of prominent civil rights activists across the United States.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Jes Fan’s video work Xenophoria , as opposed to the term ‘xenophobia’, refers to a love of the foreign and is inspired by the name of a mysterious species of aquatic carrier shell. This creature, Xenophora pallidae, calcifies free-floating objects in the water to its spine, bringing foreign bodies into its own structure. Likewise, Xenophoria stages a delirious search for the melanin pigment – the molecule responsible for skin color – as it manifests in both human and non-human bodies.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Known But to God: The Dug Up, Dissected, and Disposed for the Sake of Medicine by Doreen Lynnette Garner is a small, suspended sculpture composed of glass, silicone, steel, epoxy putty, pearls, Swarovski crystals, and whiskey. At once attractive and repulsive, the sculpture combines objects of adornment with what appears to be viscera. The sculpture’s curious delicacy evokes a ritualistic catharsis, in response to persistent forms of medical racial violence and objectification for Black people in America and around the world.

Photography (Photography)

In the fictional narrative Plantation Boy (2012), Irhoa places himself inside imagery from Francis Ford Coppola’s seminal The Godfather (1972). Inflected with humor, the series examines race in society. According to the artist, the 40 images collectively question structures of power and the hegemony of Western culture.

Painting (Painting)

White Minority , is typical of Capistran’s sampling of high art genres and living subcultures in which the artist subsumes an object’s high art pedigree within a vernacular art form. Here, Capistran humorously remixes the form and style of Frank Stella’s Black Paintings with California punk rock band Black Flag’s song title and logo (created by artist Raymond Pettibon). White Minority , then, appropriates, recontextualizes, and riffs on language and visual signs to unmoor notions of identity, power, and revolution.

Photography (Photography)

The archival images used by Frida Orupabo in her collages trace stereotyped representations of race, gender, sexuality and violence. Her works are developed through a process of decontextualization of such imagery, layering and recomposing, playing with new narratives. In this work she focuses on memory and what might be triggered in the viewer.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Simpson Verdict is a three-minute animation by Kota Ezawa that portrays the reading of the verdict during the OJ Simpson trial, known as the “most publicized” criminal trial in history. In 1995, OJ Simpson—a well-known American football player—was accused of the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. Based on the courtroom footage, Ezawa uses his signature style to create an abstract and graphically simplified echo of what happened in the room.

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.

Photography (Photography)

In her work, Maids Room (2012) which is part of a series, Daniela Ortiz undertakes an architectural analysis of the houses belonging to the upper class of Lima. Her research highlights the position of ‘service architecture’, the vital space given to the domestics. The project offers an analysis of this room, its size and its position in relation to the rest of the house.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the video Negro sobre Negro (Black on Black) all we see is a completely black screen on a monitor that is recessed into a wall, also painted black. Gradually, the face of a man becomes visible as he steps out of the darkness and closer to the camera. As suggested by Castro, the color of this man’s skin allows him to pass unnoticed perhaps literally, but also metaphorically as he alludes with certain humor to the iconic work Black Square by Suprematist artist Kazimir Malevich, often referred to as the “zero point of painting” in Western art-historical discourses.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the video Blanco sobre Blanco (White on White) , we see a white man appearing in a white screen embedded into a white wall— alluding to Malevich’s White on White series. Analogously, in Castro’s related work Negro sobre Negro (Black on Black) all we see is a completely black screen on a monitor that is recessed into a wall, also painted black. Gradually, the face of a man becomes visible as he steps out of the darkness and closer to the camera.

Photography (Photography)

“Maqe II” is at first glance a romantic image of three diaphanous angels hovering in the luminous sky over a South African township. A closer inspection reveals that the apparition is the appropriated figure of Marie Antoinette from the artist’s Ciao Bella series (2001) with the addition of a butchered cake. The figure is Rose herself dressed in costumed made of trash bags holding a haunting paper mâché mask.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In True Red Ruin (Elmina Castle) , Danielle Dean uses archival documents to re-imagine colonial history from the 1400s, while also referencing her own personal history. Elmina Castle was built in Ghana in 1482 as a Portuguese trading post, and later became a key location in the Atlantic slave trade. Dean’s re-enactment is set in an affordable housing community in Houston, Texas, where her half-sister Ashstress Agwunobi lives, and who also performs the role of “the native.” Dean plays the role of “the prospector,” who plans to “colonize” her sister’s home by bringing a wobbly red cardboard castle into the grounds of the community and getting the locals to help build it and work there.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Set to the iconic and spiritual music of Alice Coltrane’s Turiyasangitananda (1937–2007), Cauleen Smith’s film Sojourner travels across the US to visit a series of sites important to an alternative and creative narrative of black history. While the approach may appear spiritual, it is more futuristic (Afrofuturism and Radical Jazz) than religious. Smith is interested in using the individual stories of “those who have formed their own solutions” as a reconstructive and healing lens for considering the past.

Installation (Installation)

The title of the performance video work Impression by Amol k Patil refers to an Indian tradition. During a Hindu or Muslim weddings, all the inhabitants of the chawl (very modest buildings) cover their chests, arms, and feet with henna. For this work the artist covered his chest with temporary henna tattoos before applying Fervicol, a synthetic resin adhesive.

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 .

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Poet and writer Fred Moten gesticulates joyously during Girl Talk by artist Wu Tsang. Moten is dressed in light drag—a studded cloak hanging loosely over his body, his eyes and mouth adorned with makeup. Filmed in a sunlit garden, Moten whirls in slow motion to the trickle of a lion-headed water fixture and the acapella rendition of jazz standard Girl Talk by singer Josiah Wise.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

As she traces the same shape again and again, Ojih Odutola’s lines become darker and deeper, sometimes pushed to the point where their blackness becomes luminous. Set against a blank white background, as in Untitled (2015), Ojih Odutola’s figures are stark, resolute in their darkness. The surface of her subject’s skin becomes ribbon-like, lines weaving across the contours of their head and neck.

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.

Photography (Photography)

Natura Negra , which translates to “Black Nature”, is a black-and-white photographic series by Chanell Stone that explores the connection between the Black body and nature within man-made environments. The series features a compilation of environmental portraits staged in urban “forests” that explore the notion of “holding space” within one’s immediate environment. Each image depicts an effort to reclaim and reconnect with the earth, even in spaces of compartmentalized nature like backyard gardens, flora intended as urban beautification, and lush public spaces.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The performance title A Gente Combinamos De Não Morrer (BANDEIRA #1) / Us Agreed Not To Die (FLAG #1) is taken from a short story by Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo, whose work addresses violence, resilience, and necropolitics with an Afro-diasporic lens. This artwork by Jota Mombaça articulates connections between black and trans people’s challenges and struggles. Mombaça points out that an ongoing genocide of these minorities underscores the established power structures, and their resistance is to survive.

Painting (Painting)

In his series Hanging and Beheading Paintings Mike Cloud speaks to the suffering of a series of named (and occasionally unnamed) individuals, addressing their trauma within the language of abstraction. They offer the viewer an aesthetic account of individuality, death, and the empathic space of communion in absence via avant-garde portraiture, unbound by the rules of anatomy or even representation, but instead by purely expressive compositional and aesthetic goals. Untitled (Beheading) embraces the individual subjectivities of notable and mundane contemporaries — from pop stars to serial killers — in cryptic ways, connected only by the physical circumstances of their deaths.