This post was originally published on artnews.com
A range of interpretations and depictions of the Black figure is currently on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (through February 9). Organized by British writer and curator Ekow Eshun, “The Time Is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure” features more than 60 artworks by 28 Black and African diasporic contemporary artists, including Kerry James Marshall, Amy Sherald, Noah Davis, Wangechi Mutu, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Claudette Johnson, Titus Kaphar, Denzil Forrester, and Danielle Mckinney in a variety of styles and approaches.
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A Brancusi-esuqe, bronze sculpture of a Black woman’s head by Mutu, for example, rests on a wooden plinth not far from Marshall’s iconic portrait of a Black woman painter with a palette in her hands as she takes a break from her canvas. A dreamy, almost nightmarish, tableaux by Davis, titled Black Wall Street (2008), referring to the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in Oklahoma, hangs near Kaphar’s poignant Seeing Through Time 2 (2019), in which a Black woman’s elegant portrait peeks out through the silhouette of a 17th-century portrait of a white duchess that has been excised. An inky black-and-green scene of a Black woman at leisure—in a robe sitting on a sectional couch as she reads—by Mckinney precedes a dense, almost abstract view of a crowded club scene, Itchin & Scratchin (2019), by Forrester.
To learn more about this exhibition, ARTnews spoke with Eshun by Zoom.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and concision.
ARTnews: How did you come to conceive of “The Time Is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure”?
Ekow Eshun: I first proposed the show to the National Portrait Gallery in London, who were the first venue to host the show, at least five years ago. If we can look back to the previous 10 years, it seemed to me that we are in a moment of particular flourishing when it came to the work of Black artists working in figuration and depicting the Black figure. In the US, we could look at the ascendancy of Kerry James Marshall, Amy Sherald, Wangechi Mutu, or Noah Davis. We could look at a range of people and see this real, extraordinary, and powerful moment that has been taking shape across this last decade or so. I wanted to mark that as a moment, but then I also wanted to think further into that and to follow the lines of inquiry, the roots of exploration opened up by those artists themselves. My proposition with the show is that what these artists are doing is not only articulating and thinking about the Black figure, but they’re also inviting a shift in perspective in the span of Western art history. Going back to the 18th and 19th centuries, the Black figure has chiefly been depicted by white artists. It’s only in the 20th century that we start to see a shift: Black artists depicting the Black figure.
In the 21st century, which is where this exhibition is situated, we see a further shift taking place, where these are artists are inviting a shift in gaze, from the historical looking at the Black figure to a looking with and from the perspective of those artists or those subjects. With that shift in perspective comes an expansion, both of the territory around Black figuration but also thinking a greater invocation with Black bodies as a site of expansive expression, richness, complexity, depth, or fraughtness. All of these come into play. This was one of the things I could see happening. The aim with the exhibition really was to say, Look, this is the moment that we’re in. This moment did not come out of nowhere. This moment is not just about a transient phase. This is a body of inquiry that a range of artists in different places around the world, are engaged in. Some of these know each other and in communication with each other. I felt that there was a conversation taking place that I wanted to overhear. That’s what the exhibition tries to depict.
How would you characterize that conversation that you’ve witnessed?
It’s a conversation about nuance, about depth. It’s a conversation that takes away from a notion of naturalism. As I said, historically, the Black figure has been looked at in art. One of the things that means is that if we go back in time, depictions of the Black figure have striven for an idea—in drawing, painting, sculpture—that the surface of the Black figure is enough to tell you everything that’s inside the sitters. I would suggest that this recent conversation is predicated on interiority and subjectivity. It’s predicated on not knowing. It’s predicated not on fixed parameters about what it means or what it should mean to be Black.
These artists begin from a question mark. A question mark about how might Blackness feel? How might it feel to walk through the world as a person of color, with all of the potential for hostility and challenge that comes with it, but also the opportunity for kinship, connection, solidarity that is part of an African diasporic heritage? Even though these artists have different origins from around the world, to some extent, they’re dealing with aspects of a shared diasporic heritage that has accumulated over 400 years of Black presence in the West. All of this is some aspect of the subject matter that these artists are speaking to. So there’s an attempt then, not to consider this as a simple or linear set of experiences or histories that can then be depicted straightforwardly. The proposition begins from an awareness of the complexity of that history, but also at the same time, from an awareness that the idea of race itself is a socially constructed fiction in itself. It doesn’t have a scientific basis, a factual basis, but is part of the looped reality within which we exist.
All of that is to say that as a consequence, these artists, I would suggest, each of them in one form or another approaches the depiction of the Black figure from a conceptual position, not from a naturalistic, realist position. We might look at Kerry James Marshall and consider the exaggerated, deep Black skin tones that he uses. They are a way of thinking overtly about that presence and absence from the art historical record, also an invitation to think about Blackness as a site of richness, depth, flexibility, or beauty. We can look at Amy Sherald, who approaches this from a similar perspective, in as much as she uses this kind of gray skin tone that is decision of hers to sit between black and white, to complicate depictions of race. When we think about her figures, they have whatever we might designate as black features, in terms of their nose, their eyes, but their skin tone is something that’s entirely outside naturalism. Think about Noah Davis’s paintings and the strange, mysterious, fantastic Black aspects he brought to those paintings. Noah Davis paints this porous space where the ordinary can tip over into the dream-like or into the nightmare-ish because he was interested in the psychological invocation of Black being, not as a fate, but as a state of mind. In many cases, these artists are deliberately problematizing and stepping into a space to invite new ways of thinking and looking and feeling Black being.
You organized the exhibition into three themes. How did you select those themes and why did you want to curate the show that way?
The exhibition is organized into three themes: “Double Consciousness,” “Past and Presence,” and “Our Aliveness.” The goal of each of these is to highlight different aspects of the work of different artists. It’s also a loose framework. We have Noah Davis in more than one section. I wanted to do that more [throughout the exhibition] because the sections are ways to organize but the idea is not to restrict or define, and say “We can only see these artists in these terms.” It’s also a way to think on a few different levels about these paintings. The exhibition begins with “Double Consciousness,” the term that W. E. B. Du Bois famously coined in 1897 to describe what he calls the “peculiar sensation” of living as a Black person physically within, but psychologically outside, mainstream society. Here, I was interested here in artists who approach their works with a desire to think into complexity, interiority, from the psychological. Noah Davis is certainly part of that, but also Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Kerry James Marshall, and Michael Armitage.
With each section, I wanted to highlight a way of reading the work that takes us into a territory of exploration within which we might see that work. I came to those terms because those seem to me a generous way of apportioning space and allowing artists to speak to each other within the space. It offered a way for audiences and visitors to discover those works. With these terms, it opens up how else might we think about these artists and what other forms of association might we bring to this.
How does the Philadelphia Museum of Art presentation differ from the original at the National Portrait Gallery in London?
Context-wise, the change [in venue] was interesting. Presenting the exhibition at the Portrait Gallery was a great experience, but what I was conscious of and wanted to guard against was that the goal was never to present the show in conversation with the collection of the Portrait Gallery. I wanted to create a space of its own, a space of Black possibility, a space of black aliveness. At the Portrait Gallery, we worked with Jayden Ali and his architecture firm, JA Projects, to create a space that as soon as you stepped over the threshold, you felt like you were in an environment where the conversation was determined, not by those histories, but by the histories that these artists have been working in and speaking to, which the larger framework of art history and the conversations that Black artists have been having about Blackness, Black people, Black seeing that have been taking place across 100 years or so. I wanted to create a space that did that.
At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, there is this great moment, where we come into this very high-ceilinged space and there’s a gap in the wall behind a sculpture by Thomas J. Price. You can see through into another section. The invitation then is to regard these sections as porous territories—you can reach from one into the other. They’re not exclusive zones. They’re ways of seeing. The PMA space is also larger, so we introduced six new artists into the show, including Philadelphia artists Jonathan Lyndon Chase and Roberto Lugo. We were also able to bring in Danielle Mckinney, Deborah Roberts, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, and Arthur Timothy. In Philadelphia, the show is more expansive—it’s physically larger, we take up more space. The interesting thing is that the week we opened [the exhibition] was the week of the election. From my perspective, this was a poignant moment. Many of the works in the show speak to the fraughtness and vulnerability that Black people feel within aspects of mainstream society, and so within the context of election, the show acquired an extra poignancy and pointedness. It also, I think, acquired an extra value. Many of the people I talked to, at the opening which was a few days after the election, felt that the role of art came into focus at this moment in time. The way artists can conjure beauty, possibility, fragility, and vulnerability all at the same time felt like something that had a special worth at that time. So to that extent, having the show in America allows us to continue to think in-depth about the experience of being Black in the world.
Earlier, you mentioned that we’re in a moment where there has been a lot of attention within the art world given to Black figuration. Some critics have written about the limits of this kind of representation. I’m curious what your thoughts are on this part of the conversation?
For me, the goal is not simply to put these works on the wall. The goal is not representation as a moment of celebration. I’m not particularly interested in that or in saying, “We’ve gotten here. Here are the works.” This is only the start point. We do a disservice to the work itself if we say its purpose is only to represent the Black figure. The question is, How are these artists doing this? What questions are opened up by the gaze of those artists? Where does that take us? I would suggest that this work is an invitation toward inquiry. It begins from a presumption of an unsettled ground, from an unfixed position, from a gaze that is moving, not still. This show and these works are not trying to confirm a known world. They’re not trying to celebrate a moment of ascendancy or arrival.
The title itself, “The Time Is Always Now,” points to that. The title comes from a quote by James Baldwin, who is writing at the height of the Civil Rights struggle: [“There is never a time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.”]. What I take from the title is that the urgent term is not just the “Now” but the “Always”; if one listens to discourse in visual art, poetry, literature, music that Black people have been part of, what you hear is always a searching. What you see is a lattice of connection and influence that’s built up across time, of people listening to each other, looking at each other. People are having this historical conversation, but it’s never a finished conversation. It’s always an unfinished conversation. The invocation is to further looking, further searching. How can we arrive at what it means and how it feels to be brought back? This is a condition that changes from moment to moment. In this case, the artists themselves are encouraging us to keep looking, to keep feeling, to keep reaching. Because the now it’s always a momentary thing—it’s not a fixed place. So “The Time Is Always Now” is to say we do this at this moment in time. It is a moving moment. It’s not a single moment of arrival. It’s a continued mode of inquiry. The urgency of that title has to do with the necessity and the value that comes from continuing to look, think, and allow how it might feel to walk through the world—to walk through an unstable, uncertain world as a Black person.