Black creators
It’s art, but not as the hierarchy knows it — and all the better for black creators on the rise
: There’s been a meteoric rise of black influence on the global commercial art world — and it’s only getting faster and further-reaching.
Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock of late, you might have noticed there’s been a meteoric rise of black influence on the global commercial art world — and it’s only getting faster and further-reaching.
Last year’s Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age
of Black Power at Tate Britain shined a light on the vital contribution of black artists to a dramatic period in American art and history, opening with 1963 at the height of the civil rights movement and its dreams of integration. In its wake emerged more militant calls for black power: a rallying cry for American pride, autonomy and solidarity, drawing inspiration from newly independent African nations.
It was a landmark show, but more retrospective than futuristic. It’s no small irony, and one little promoted, that of all American artists, the highest price paid for any was not Warhol, but his black protégé, Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose Untitled (1982), a painting of a skull, sold for $110.5 million to 42-year-old Japanese collector Yusaka Maezawa in 2017.
Contrast this with contemporary Britain, where black work is art’s new mantra. Afrofuturism, Afropolitan and even Afrotrash work is entering the galleries, the language and the lexicon as writers like Zadie Smith pen pieces for Vogue about the new cultural trope.
Then there’s curator and writer Bolanle Tajudeen, who runs Black Blossoms, a collective celebrating and giving a platform to the work of young black hipster artists, with its exhibitions since 2015 including Dionne Ward, Sarina Mantle, Camilla Daniels, Sharon Foster and Dorcas Magbadelo. Unfortunately, Tajudeen’s storage cupboard was raided in March this year; 20 pieces of work in preparation for an upcoming exhibition were stolen.
Undeterred, she and Tate Britain put black art at the forefront again this year, starting from October with Art in the Age of Black Girl
Magic, a course investigating the paucity of black women in the art world. With good reason, too — forecasters in 2016 said African art’s value had risen by 200 percent since 2012. While the current art culture doesn’t want to label “Chinese artists” or “Korean artists”, so too is the case with “black artists”, except that their very blackness has often rendered them invisible in art’s ivory-towered world.
Yet now, the value of black creativity and the works of its artists are absolutely on the money. Kerry James Marshall’s Past Times (1997) sold for $21.1 million on May 16 via Sotheby’s in New York to rap mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs.
The nine-by-13-foot painting, which depicts African-Americans engaging in leisure and recreational activities, had been expected to fetch between $8 million and $12 million; the price paid was four times higher than the artist’s previous record. To put that in even greater perspective, Past Times had been purchased in 1997 by the Illinois-based Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority for $25,000. One of Marshall’s latest works, Rush More, shows the faces of eminent black women carved into trees, with Gwendolyn Brooks and Oprah Winfrey among them. The commercial rush for that work can’t be long in coming, either.
Then there’s Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze. She may be Nigerian-born, UK-educated and Brooklyn-based, but the artist feels she’s “not any one of them. I’m all of them and it is just what it is.” Thus, while her collage-y, largescale, narrative-based and multidimensional drawings bespeak aspects of her upbringing to date, ultimately she feels the world she’s “creating on paper is a representation of all of ‘us’.
It cannot be told for us and it certainly cannot be told through the lens of being so-called ‘authentically African’,” she explains. Instead, Amanze sees her work as contributing to the global conversation of drawing and of contemporary art by African artists, particularly those who are female. “We need more of these voices,” she says. Amanze’s work is currently on show outside the Hayward Gallery in London’s Southbank Centre, where she was commissioned to create a special mural over the summer period.
Ironically, more than Amanze being black or black-African, time spent observing her work positions the protagonist somewhere between nowhere and everywhere. She’s an architectural, geometric, shamanistic geomancer, whose works feels like moodboards to a post-internet, post-global, pre-futurist world. With titles for her works including A
Slice Through the World and Where Do We Stand?, it may take the rest of the planet some time to catch up with Amanze’s message, yet her drawings sample old-school print and new-school digitalia with breathless technique. She’s like a latter-day Leonardo, creating drawings on i Brushes for Instagram where no frame exists, so infinite is the message.
And don’t forget Toyin Ojih Odutola, also Nigerian-born, Alabama-raised and New York-based, whose most recent exhibition of Nigeria’s beau monde (a sort of sampling/ mash-up of Marshall and Amanze) graced the Whitney Museum of American Art in a form of African utopia last year. Ojih Odutola takes on black aristocrats and princelings, barons and baronesses with country estates and accessorial African It-girls by their side. It’s Afrogra m for the turbo-charged spending set, yet oddly nostalgic — more VictoriAfrogram. This newly wealthy, energized and globally cultivated set are coming; make way for the blackstocrats. Singer and performance artist Solange (Beyoncé’s younger sister) even occasionally models and collaborates with Ojih Odutola.
This new art and creative elite has its tentacles everywhere. It’s in Kehinde Wiley’s regal depictions of Barack Obama and Michael Jackson. And it’s in the ruling hip-hoppification of luxury brands and products which has blinged, blanged and blunged the bottom lines of every artisanal-yet-global player, from Louis Vuitton to Chanel. If you think that’s a “yes we Kim and Kanye” or a Pharrell too far, you ain’t seen nothing yet. To wit, it’s also in Wakanda, the nation-state of great wealth and advanced technology in the blockbuster movie Black Panther, and the rise of technology from Silicon Valley in California to Silicon Savannah in Africa. From slavery to freedom and now with dreams transcending liberty and wealth, it’s the Afro-garde, the Afroternative, Afronauts and Afrotech.
Last but not least, let’s highlight Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga, born in 1991 in the Democratic Republic of Congo, whose pastoral, gilded artworks meld motherboard-like patterns into the multi-texture of black skin, marking a contrast between the digital world and African tribes. Bizarre but amusing, and familiar yet foreign, Ilunga may be the most on-brand for contemporary culture. If earthlings were simultaneously androids and aristocrats, he has cultivated a brave new world of blurred humanity. Beyond the black and white, it’s the iridescent glow and blur of trans-human narrative.
And that’s something we should all get behind.