Black and Abstract

Shapeshifter (Sm. II), 2020, acrylic on panel, 11" x 14"

Last year, during the social upheaval and protests after the extra-judicial killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and countless other Black and Brown people by police, I questioned whether my work could be relevant for the moment. Being a Black artist working with abstraction, I felt like what I do wouldn’t mean much to people, and other Black people, in particular.  Art made by Black artists has almost always been expected to reflect the Black community; its struggles against white supremacy, strength in community and various aspects of Black life. Realism being the preferred avenue of messaging. In this context, abstraction by Black artists, until relatively recently, has been, at times, disdained by Blacks and willfully ignored by the greater art world. This is the lens through which I understood things as a young artist in my late teens and early twenties, even though it took me a bit longer to fully understand and fully embrace my own need and reasons to make non-objective art. 

My last years of high school on through to my sophomore year of college saw a big shift in the type of work that I wanted to pursue as an artist. I had learned and practiced the basics of color, drawing, line, form, composition, etc… through realism. Going into my last couple of years in college, I had begun to discover that realism had limitations for me that I couldn’t ignore. By this time, in the late 1980s, I’d begun paying more attention to contemporary art through regular trips to galleries and museums in Philadelphia and New York. A whole other world opened up for me. At the same time, I was finding out more about how Black artists were highly underrepresented in the wider mainstream art world and when they were accepted, there seemed to be a very narrow view of the type of artwork made by Black artists that was acceptable. Basically, almost anything that centered around Black figuration and themes of struggle and community were “acceptable”, a trope that seemed to be the consensus of the Black community and the white-dominated mainstream art world. This is how I understood it at the time. There were very few Black artists, male or female, that were being recognized with shows in New York and other big art cities around the U.S. The biggest exception that I knew of at the time, was Jean-Michel Basquiat. It wasn’t until much later that I would become aware of Black abstract artists like Sam Gilliam, Howardena Pindell, Norman Lewis and Ed Clark, to name a few.

Around the late 80s to early 90s, I took an interest in the work of American Abstract Expressionists and later abstract artists, which provided the aesthetic kick that I needed to move into the beginnings of discovering and molding my own non-objective voice. Just prior to this, I had begun to lean into a kind of rejection that would fuel my practice for a long time. The rejection I focused on was what I perceived at the pigeon-holing  of Black artists and art by both Black and white establishments. Both Black communities and the mainstream art establishment only seemed to champion a type of social realism that felt overused and limited in its scope, in my view. An only child, I had developed an independent streak pretty early on, so it’s no surprise to me that I took the route that I did in my work. Later, after high school, one of the things that spurred me on as a young artist, was wanting to prove, mainly to myself, that I could make non-objective work that was just as good as any of the white abstract artists that I had knowledge of at the time. 

Flash forward to now and with almost 40 years of art making behind me, I still have moments of wondering if what I’m doing matters in certain ways. The truth is, what I do as a Black artist working with abstraction isn’t going to resonate with everyone and it definitely isn’t going to directly solve any of the social ills that continue to plague the Black community or other communities. What it can do is provide another way of seeing, another way of helping people to see, to question their world and themselves, perhaps. Also, to show a way forward, to be a testament to hope and a future. The one certainty about making art is that it is an act of faith. It’s an act of faith that assumes a future simply because of its existence. The will to make a painting, sculpture, film or other creative endeavor means that there is some amount of faith in the maker that a future is possible. 

The events of 2020, now bleeding into 2021 are way beyond the scale of what my painting can do. However, the smaller scale individual value that I and my work bring to the table is that of questioning, standing in one’s own truth, through confidence and perseverance. I don’t know what people look for or see in my work. My only hope is that it can provoke a feeling of some kind, good or bad. That is communication, that is making a connection. Whatever connections viewers make with the work is out of my hands, on the other hand, having had the faith to make the work and put it out into the world for people to witness and experience is all I need. I have other goals, like having my work represented in major art institutions and collections worldwide. However, those ambitions have been a secondary concern for me. At this point, I have good  gallery representation, my work is included in many private and university collections and I continue to have work shown, something that I didn't imagine would happen as a teenager, so I now know that it's possible and I welcome bigger things. However, continuing to paint and make the non-objective work that I want, being in dialogue with other artists across time, regardless of who may or may not see it, like it or not, or whatever else is going on in the world is the ultimate success for me.