Sentences

Golden: Thelma Golden, curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, in the exhibition catalogue for Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art (1995) at the Whitney Museum of American Art (where Golden was then working), presents a history of black male representations in art from the 1970s to the 1990s, by examining the works of white artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe who photographs black men in a beautiful yet exploitative manner to David Hammons’ body prints which suggest the way the contemporary society has molded representations of black men.

Mercer: Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s identity as a Nigeria, specifically Yoruba man as well as a gay man is explored through his photography in which the body becomes a location for exploration of erotic desire and Yoruba religious traditions

Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston: Issac Julien traces gay culture through the life of Langston Hughes in the 1920s and beyond by exploring Hughes poems as well as imagery depicting black gay males such as the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe.

Response

The exhibition, Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art (1995) at the Whitney Museum exemplifies the ways in which black male bodies have been comodified, exploited and even ignored. Thelma Golden’s analysis of the exhibition for which she is the curator, provided a comprehensive example of the history of the black male presence in art and the origin of such representations. Golden’s method of conception for this exhibition is, in my opinion the most compelling portion of the piece. There was a five-pillar understanding of how the exhibition would be composed, in other words five events that controlled representations of black men in contemporary art. They were 1) the Black Power Era 2) the rise of blaxploitation films beginning with Melvin van Peebles Sr.’s Sweet Sweetback’s Badassss Song (1972) 3) the debate about the endangered music 4) the rise of hip hop over rhythm and blues 5) the Rodney King incident in south central Los Angeles.

Interestingly, in the beginning of the Thelma Golden highlights the work of Adrian Piper and David Hammons, two artists whose work we have examined extensively this semester and who in fact were listed as artists who operate in the Hammonsian mode as defined by New York Times art critic Ken Johnson. Johnson, claims that Hammons, Piper, Fred Wilson, and Kara Walker among others approach blackness in a way that is not aggressive for those who might not be used to dealing with race in art. This becomes almost comical in conjunction with Golden’s description of Piper’s performance piece and film Mythic Being (1974), in which she dresses up as black man with an Afro and large sunglasses engaging narratives of the Black Power Movement and simultaneous examining whites fear of blackness.

Fred Wilson, an African-American artist working within the framework of institutional critique concludes the show with his work that is part of the permanent collection at the Whitney Museum. The work entitled Guarded View (1991) which features four black headless mannequins dressed in museum security guard suits, engages notions of black male invisibility is a variety of spaces including museums. This notion of invisibility pertains directly to the work of Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Isaac Julien’s film Looking for Langston, which both discuss the invisibility of gay black men with in African Diaspora and Westernized culture. This is clear through Fani-Kayode’s want to not be identified as black or gay in considerations of his art as well as Julien’s examination of great black poet, Langston Hughes, who sexuality is rarely discussed in connection with his prolific poetry, as it was probably not acceptable at the time he was working during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s. Looking for Langston has clearly inspired other films such as Brother to Brother (2004), a feature film that engages a contemporary black gay artist in connection with the Harlem Renaissance.