Browsing by Subject "African American art"

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Br(others) only : Rashid Johnson, class, and the fraternal orders of Afrofuturism
(2012-08) Richardson, Jared C. 1988-; Smith, Cherise, 1969-
Br(others) Only conceptualizes the wall sculptures of Rashid Johnson as free-standing “altars” that play with different and sometimes divergent brands of black masculinity and classed homosociality. Primarily, I analyze three of Johnson’s sculptures from the late 2000s: I Who Have Nothing (2008); I’m Still in Love with You (2008); and Souls of Black Folk (2010). I argue that, by invoking the history of black renaissance men, gentlemen scholars, and entertainers, Johnson’s work plays with various kinds of black masculinity and homosociality that simultaneously straddle the past and future. By doing so, his art not only enacts a racialized temporality, but it also chips away at monolithic notions of black masculinity by fabricating contradictory amalgams of race, class, and gender. For my analysis of Johnson’s artworks, I utilize Cassandra Jackson’s Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body (2010) as the chief framework for conceptualizing the waxy coats of Johnson’s sculptures as wounded bodies in an effort to “flesh out” the vulnerability of black men. Theorizing the putrescent surfaces of Johnson’s sculptures as violable bodies allows me to consider the ruptures between seemingly impenetrable black masculinity and the always-present vulnerability of the black male body to violence.
Freaks of the industry : peculiarities of place and race in Bay Area hip-hop
(2010-05) Morrison, Amanda Maria, 1975-; Hartigan, John, 1964-; Flores, Richard R.; Stewart, Kathleen; Perez, Domino; Wakins, Craig
Through ethnography, I examine how hip-hop’s expressive forms are being used as the raw materials of everyday life by residents of the San Francisco Bay Area, home to what many regard as one of the most stylistically prolific, politically charged, and racially diverse hip-hop “scenes” in the world. This focus on regional specificity provides a greater understanding of the impact hip-hop is having on the ground, as an aspect of localized lived practice. Throughout, I make the case for the importance of ethnographically grounded localized research on U.S. hip-hop, which is surprisingly still relatively rare. Most scholars simply stress its continuity within a set of deterritorialized Diasporic African and African-American verbal-art traditions. My aim is not to contest this assertion, but to add to the body of knowledge about one of the most significant cultural inventions of the twentieth century by exploring hip-hop’s racial heterogeneity and its regional specificity. Acknowledging this kind of diversity allows us to reconceive what hip-hop is and how it matters in U.S. society beyond the ways it is usually framed: as either an oppositional form of black-vernacular culture or a co-opted and corrupted commodity form that reinscribes hegemonic values more than it actually contests them. Examining hip-hop within a specific, regionally delineated community reveals how hip-hop’s role in American life is more nuanced and complex. It is neither a pure vernacular expression of an oppressed class nor merely a cultural commodity imposed upon consumers and alienated from producers. In the Bay Area, hip-hop “heads” simultaneously consume mass-produced rap while producing homespun forms of music, dance, slang, fashion, and folklore. Through these forms, they construct individual and group identities that register primarily in expressive, affective terms. These novel cultural identities complicate rigid social markers of race, gender, and class; more specifically, they challenge the widely held perception that hip-hop is solely the terrain of inner-city young African-American men. More fundamentally, a sense of belonging is engendered through localized modes of expression and embodied style that manifest through shared practices, discourses, texts, symbols, locales, and imaginaries.
The ontological riot : Julie Mehretu and the visuality of (im)possibility
(2020-03-26) Karazija, Lauren; Shiff, Richard
This paper addresses HOWL, eon (I, II), 2017, by artist Julie Mehretu (American, b. Ethiopia, 1970), two monumental paintings installed in the foyer of the newly renovated San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In a bottom-up approach, moving from the underlayers of the compositions, this essay explores, almost exclusively, the contents of these two works. The text identifies curated images of 19th-century American landscape painting digitally enmeshed with the viral photographs documenting anti-police demonstrations in London, 2011, and throughout the United States in 2014 and 2015. Mehretu’s procedure prompts me to investigate the contents of that exchange between historical and contemporary imagery as a point of entry to the paintings. Beyond their immediate readings, the images establish a context that perpetuates attitudes of anti-blackness and coloniality, sustaining discursively a hierarchical structure of power. As part of her strategy, Mehretu obscures the digital content of the paintings beyond legibility. She introduces an alternative field of visuality, one based upon her own musings and improvisational, performative acts of abstract, gestural mark-making. Mehretu’s mark becomes her means of searching for "the break," the fissure to be discovered in the discontinuities between the reality professed by dominant narratives and the realities of those whom such narratives purportedly represent. The visual field, a landscape, envisions a path paved by violence and the refusal that conditions black life. The radical dream to end this world and dream of something other, a flickering space of possibility—a dream that, indeed, may seem illegible, fanciful, criminal, and impossible—begins, first, with the "ontological riot"