Activist Imagination Artist’s Talk: April 24

When [Studio Museum in Harlem director Thelma] Golden and her friend the artist Glenn Ligon called the 28 young American artists [in the 2001 exhibition, "Freestyle,"] “postblack,” it made news. It was a big moment. If she wasn’t the first to use the term, she was the first to apply it to a group of artists who, she wrote, were “adamant about not being labeled ‘black’ artists, though their work was steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness.”

The work ranged from mural-size images of police helicopters painted with hair pomade by Kori Newkirk, who lives in Los Angeles, to computer-assisted geometric abstract painting by the New York artist Louis Cameron. Mr. Newkirk’s work came with specific if indirect ethnic references; Mr. Cameron’s did not. Although “black” in the Studio Museum context, they would lose their racial associations in an ethnically neutral institution like the Museum of Modern Art.

Ethnically neutral? That’s just a code-term for white, the no-color, the everything-color. For whiteness is as much — or as little — a racial category as blackness, though it is rarely acknowledged as such wherever it is the dominant, default ethnicity.

Holland Cotter, The Topic Is Race; the Art Is Fearless, NYTimes.com, March 30, 2008

April 24, 2008, 7–9 pm : Artists’ Talk

{Posted by Christine Wong Yap, artist, Activist Imagination}