At a party in a vacant house full of young people, the reggae pounding and ganja smoke thick in the air, Gates was struck by the joylessness of the revels. The mood was brittle. Faces were set hard. Nobody laughed or even spoke.
Catalogue Essays
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Praying for Life
Sahelian forms of artistry are a manifestation, or a visual translation, of an overarching ontology. Its plastic language can be understood as the language of a philosophy of the force of life.
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Why Are the Noses Broken on Egyptian Statues?
This essay is an account of truly learning to see what is and is not present in these objects.
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From Marking Time: An Excerpt
The book and exhibition center prisons in contemporary art and culture and the robust world of art-making inside US prisons.
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Jeffrey Gibson: Culture, Materials, Identity and Trade
Over the last decade Jeffrey Gibson has moved from creating lyrical, abstracted acrylic landscape paintings with beaded and sculpted paint elements to a dizzingly multi-varied practice, which interfaces with the rubrics of fashion, gender, and ethnicity.
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Hip-Hop’s Afrofuturistic Hive Mind
Basquiat’s oeuvre can now be said to constitute a Black male wall of fame, one exploding with markers of the fraught conquests, Pyrrhic victories, and traumatic vicissitudes of Black male being-and-nothingness in America.
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Notes on Living a Translated Life
From the John Singer Sargent frontal nude painting of McKeller in Boston’s MFA, I’d imagined Thomas as tall and slender. Looking more closely, I can see that even 100 years ago a body like Thomas’s was not accidental.
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Sunday Edition, Catalogue Essays: 🗿 From Broken Noses to Hip-Hop’s Afrofuturism 🔮
A selection of some extraordinary essays found in art museum exhibition catalogues across the United States.
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The Beatitudes of Bill Traylor
I wonder if it is possible for black Americans and white Americans to really see the same thing when they look at the creations of institutionally minted “modern” black artists.
