#black american art

[bidaubadeadieu]

Photos of Hugh Hayden's Exhibition Home Work, as seen at the Rose Art Museum (Brandeis University), 2024. Throughout this post, text present in the gallery (written by museum curators, not me) is intended in block quotes.

Through his prodigious studio practice, Hugh Hayden (b. 1983, Dallas, TX) has become one of the leading artists of his generation. His meticulously crafted sculptures, hybrid forms, and poignant installations evoke profound reflections on the human condition within a complex, volatile, and often threatening world. hayden combines a probing analysis of serious and often painful topics with humor, visual puns, and wordplay, provoking a unique blend of visceral and critical responses.

I was captivated by Hayden's work from the moment I stepped into the gallery. Really stunning stuff. Names of all pieces in this post (left to right, top to bottom), as well as excerpts from gallery text, can be found below the Read More. I highly encourage you to check it out in more detail!

American Gothic (2024)

Hayden merges two skeletal figures with agricultural and domestic tools, examining aspects pertaining to labor and the dignity of work. The artist deliberately positions himself as part of a genealogy of American artists, referencing Grant Wood's 1930 painting American Gothic and Gordon Parks's 1942 photograph, American Gothic.

Eden (2022)

Eden presents two ribcages locked together in an intimate embrace. Hanging on a clothes rack, the ribcages are meticulously crafted from cedar wood, a material often used where clothes are stored to repel moths. The fact that the skeletal lovers are closeted suggests that this embrace needs to be kept a secret. The title references the bliss associated with the biblical Garden of Eden.

Hangers (2018)

High Cotton (2015-2020)

High Cotton, emulating and arcade claw machine, is clad in lustrous, Chippendale-inspired Honduran mahogany, carved to the recall the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century furnishings of high society. Sharp-edged cotton balls (replacing the game's expected toys) force a player to "pick cotton," a task directly associated with slavery. The work highlights the raw material used to produce the fine cotton clothing found around the world--and once neatly folded inside the mahogany armoires of slave owners.

Fairy Tale (2023)

Fairy Tale features a pair of interlocking Tiffany rings, with HIV-prevention medication replacing the expected diamonds or gems. The title suggests a "happily-ever-after" gay love story for those who once lived in the shadow of AIDS. The word "fairy" in the title, sometimes used as a slur, is here reclaimed with pride.

The Kiss (2020)

In The Kiss, two football helmets are caught together like stags whose horns are locked in battle. Their interlocking forms and the title of the piece suggest a range of relationships, from homosocial camaraderie to same-sex intimacy. Many of Hayden's sports-related sculptures expose the fact that the very devices supposed to protect may also wound. The Kiss recalls the high number of brain injuries suffered by football players.

Positives (2019-2024)

Hedges (2019)

This installation features a model of an archetypal suburban home. Rather than associating the domestic with security, Hayden transforms the familiar abode into an unsettling place where menacing branches sprout from and overpower the structure's walls, window, and roof. Hedges is experienced within a mirrored chamber that situates the viewer amid an endless row of uncanny houses. Hayden often notes that home ownership is considered one of the key goals of achieving the American dream. Yet this path is hardly assured for many people, given the inequities in society and the financial precarity that so many endure. As shown here and throughout the exhibition, Hayden's visceral sculptures reveal the disquieting contradictions of the American dream.

[tricksterontheweb]

" The moon was shining, and it drew my attention.

He showed me that animal, on that ring around the moon.

I was playing out in the streets,

'cause i wasnt old enough to go to school.

Children said, 'Minnie, what are you looking at?'

I said 'I'm looking at those elephants going around the moon .'

They laughed at me, 'Minnie's crazy, we don't see no elephants'

I thought everybody could see them.

I wasn't like the other children.

One night I had a dream

This voice spoke to me

'Why dont you draw, or die'

I said 'is that it?

My.' "

-Minnie Evans

[panafrocore]

"A Shady Nook: Le Jardin du Luxembourg Paris" by Lois Mailou Jones (1991)

“A Shady Nook: Le Jardin du Luxembourg Paris” is a captivating painting created by Black American artist Lois Mailou Jones in 1991. This masterpiece showcases Jones’s exceptional skill and her profound connection to the beauty of the world. As the viewer gazes upon this artwork, they are immediately transported to the enchanting atmosphere of Le Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris. The painting…

[afrodytis]

Leroy Campbell,Best Friends

[brownthoughtsrainbowperception]

It was a must within my dust to understand the things that did not rust

Can you trust to believe and rejoice to see

Do you dance within the amber leaves

The gleam of things pristine

That is how I dream

[zenxith]

https://archive.org/details/twocenturiesofbl00dris/page/56/mode/2up

[shabazzy75]

Living Art....5 Reasons Why We Should

[thehighpriestofreverseracism]

Jinn (2018)

Directed by Nijla Mu’min

Official website

Official twitter

Director twitter

[maybe-brave]

[publicarthistory]

Carrie Mae Weems (American, born 1953), Untitled, from the series Kitchen Table, 1990, gelatin silver prints, Gift of the Contemporary Art Council, © artist or other rights holder, 94.19a-c

This work is not currently on view.

"This body of work was inspired in part by the influential essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975) by the critic Laura Mulvey, which addressed the lack of nonobjectified representations of women in film and other cultural expressions. Like Family Pictures and Stories, the series offers a valid portrait of an often overlooked subject, in this case, a modern black woman, "the other of the other." The images trace a period in the woman's life as she experiences the blossoming, then loss, of love, the responsibilities of motherhood, and the desire to be an engaged and contributing member of her community. The protagonist is Weems herself - a practice that will continue throughout the next decades of her career. The role of words has become more prominent with fourteen stand-alone text panels that relay the at times rocky narrative. Near the end, the woman stands alone, strong and self-reliant, looking directly at the viewer, her arms squarely planted on her kitchen table, where the entire story has unfolded under a light of interrogation. Although Kitchen Table Series depicts a black subject and is loosely related to her own experiences, Weems strives for it to reflect the experiences of Everywoman and to resonate across racial and class boundaries."  

Kathryn E. Delmez, edit.,Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2012), 76.

[sincerely-ignorant]

You need to know; Rob Pruitt

You need to know; Rob Pruitt

https://doctanian.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/thundercat-lotus-and-the-jondy-off-main-st-excerpt.mp3

Robert Pruitt’sWomen, currently on exhibition at the Studio Museum of Harlem, is a series of 20 portraits of contemporary black women embodying such graceful restraint that they become curative in the present moment.

Drawn on brown butcher paper with conté-crayons, every single one is more…

[coffy22]

You need to know; Rob Pruitt

You need to know; Rob Pruitt

https://doctanian.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/thundercat-lotus-and-the-jondy-off-main-st-excerpt.mp3

Robert Pruitt’sWomen, currently on exhibition at the Studio Museum of Harlem, is a series of 20 portraits of contemporary black women embodying such graceful restraint that they become curative in the present moment.

Drawn on brown butcher paper with conté-crayons, every single one is more…

[panafrocore]

"Te Adoremus Domine" by Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (1921)

Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller’s sculpture “Te Adoremus Domine,” created in 1921, is a powerful and emotive piece that captures the essence of spiritual devotion. The title “Te Adoremus Domine” translates to “We Adore Thee, O Lord,” setting the tone for the reverence and worship depicted in the sculpture. At the center of the piece are figures with outstretched arms, conveying a sense of supplication…

[samueldelany]

Is it possible to be a shape-shifter while remaining strongly grounded at the same time? Robert Pruitt's crayon series, simply entitled "Women," shows such an existence is not just possible -- it is everywhere.

[scenerylabel]

Fauvist flowers by William H Johnson, 1945

Source: www.wikipaintings.org

[issueswithcurating-blog]

The Body and Spirituality in Ben F. Jones’s Shrine for the Spirit

We were first drawn to Ben Jones's Shrine for the Spirit because of its colorful geometric shapes, which were assembled in a neat, rather digestible (read minimalist lol) way. It did not feel as though this was an art piece created in 1976. Unjustly, we sort of subconsciously refused to associate such vibrant color with the era that brought us dull-colored TV series such as M*A*S*H. 

After color and shape, we noticed the body in Shrine for the Spirit. There was a head (or four heads), a torso and feet made abstract through dismemberment and (re)assembled. The aesthetic was Afrocentric (the masks, beaded necklaces on encircled torso, etc.). The masks and torso are not rounded but open in the back giving the illusion that this altarized body will wake up and step out from the wall. This effect is heightened by the fact the eyes on the masks seem gently closed. The close-up image of the man’s youthful face gives a humanizing effect on what could have otherwise been an artful assemblage of abstract items. The masks themselves are definitely an eye treat, striped, dotted and decorated with loud with fluorescent and metallic paints, their mouths slightly open with red stars on each lip. His use of wall reliefs are reminiscent of his more famous Black Face and Arm Unit (1971) which consisted of at least twenty-four decorated wall reliefs made from plaster casts of the artist’s arms and face. As some folks (such as Sharon Patton in African-American Art ) have done with Black Face and Arm Unit, the masks in Shrine for the Spirit could be read as a nod to ritualized body painting seen in masquerades, carnivals and rites of passage ceremonies throughout the Black Atlantic. On a similar vein, we definitely saw the piece as a depiction of spiritual action. We noted shrine is an altar, a cumulative project, a site of assemblage. Each segment in Shrine for the Spirit operated and felt as if it was its own altar, creating the sense that the artist pieced together multiple altars to make one. We also couldn’t ignore that the shrine is a house and that in using the body Jones was concerned with connecting the corporal with the spiritual, a very significant treatment of the Black body during the decade in which the piece was created up to now. 

Through research we realized that Shrine for the Spirit was in fact, part of the exhibition Assembly Required: Selections from the Permanent Collection. (We came to see the exhibit on Gordon Parks on an empty stomach, so we missed some cues.) Organized by the Studio Museum of Harlem's Assistant Curator Naima J. Keith, Assembly Required is comprised of photographs, drawings, sculptures and paintings from the Studio Museum’s permanent collection. The selected items were brought together with the aim of exploring “the ways in which certain works are dependent on site, and the viewer’s conceptual and perceptual experience of that locale through the artist’s intervention."

Benjamin F. Jones (b. 1941) is a mixed-media African-American artist, printmaker and professor. His work has often combined cultural and spiritual symbolism from the African diaspora with political iconography from the American Civil Rights and Gay Rights movements. For more info on Ben Jones go here.

Ben Jones. Shrine for the Spirit, 1976. Photo by Elijah Black.

Currently on display at The Studio Museum in Harlem as part of the Assembly Required: Selections from the Permanent Collection exhibition which is up until June 30.