marisse cato - Art of the Black World

  Skunder Bohossain  Nightflight of Dread and Delight   1964  Oil on Canvas with collage  5x5 ½ ft   Bohossain’s  Nightflight , also referred to sometimes as  Juju’s flight of Delight and Terror  immediately captured me. I think it is the blurring of edges, the multiplicity of forms in the aesthetics, and the necessity to figure out different layers of structures formed from this superimpositions that appealed to me. Presented in  The Short Century  exhibition, this                                                                                                                                       ...

 The metaphor of chromatic blackness with African-American perspective is one I find deeply compelling both aesthetically as well as a sense through which to read work. It reads to me in some ways an emphasis of the way that darker pigmented eyes let in less light/are less light sensitive than lighter coloured eyes and therefore a way to culturally and subjectively situate an African-American perspective in these contexts. For this post I would like to expand upon my discussion of Roy DeCarava's Graduation, 1949. The clear binary of light concentrated in perhaps a third of the image where the subject is positioned whilst the rest of the image is mainly darker hues of grey and black is poignant from many perspectives with regard to reading American culture. The first being the subject bathed in light in her Graduation gown, whereby this tradition of a white graduation gown is aligned with EuroAmerican whiteness in many ways. White often associated with purity and wisdom and new begi...

 The way curation has evolved throughout time in mainstream art spaces in the EuroAmerican tradition continues to move increasingly toward interdisciplinary perspectives and modes of engagement. Whilst is it clear there continues to be many ways institutions as vehicles between artists and the public manage this relationship concerning how different works should be thought about, the difference between the Carrie May Weems exhibition and the original Africa: The Art of a Continent is indicative of the ways in which Blackness is art is permissible to engage with. The overall transition is reflective of moving from engaging with African art objects from an anthropological view with an aim to find sameness and commonalities indicative of difference compared to the West, toward a more nuanced engagement with work that deals explicitly with Blackness (among other views of gender and class) across one artist's oeuvre. This shift to a more complex engagement with conditions and expression...

  When I first saw this post, I was excited to read Roy DeCarava’s “Graduation”. This piece has intrigued me from the beginning, from a combination of its overall aesthetic composition as well as the positionality of the subject in their surroundings.     Despite it dating 1949 and the   Black Male  exhibition from 1994-5, I seek to consider what it means for this work to be exhibited in 2024 in relation to DeCarava’s subjectivity.     The young woman in her graduation gown is bathed in light, contrasting greatly with the rest of the image where trash, and the waste of deserted and abject industrialism prevails in the shadows, multiplicitous in its presentations; an empty single wagon wheel, a Chevrolet advert, toward which her eyes are sternly cast, graffiti of “princ”-  on the wall. Whilst each of these could present its own individual set of challenges for symbolic interpretation I would first like to discuss the subject’s stance with rega...

    The differing ways Anthropology and Art as disciplines approach African and African Diasporic Art according to their own values through the examples of the Harvard Art Museums and the Peabody Museum highlights the underlying assumptions about their engagement with material culture. I title this blog post “Art/(ifacts)” in light of the readings this week which showcase the fluidity between these nomenclature as representative of differences associated with incurring market value, ideologies of post-Enlightenment rational thought and discipline-specific values from a western perspective, despite empirical commonalities.   The art museums position a more universalised approach to knowledge regarding art/(ifacts). Their approach to their value of Truth’ and ongoing dialogue indicates this implied tending towards a something honest that reflects our life through engaging with the art/(ifacts) as a reflection of life in a nuanced (but perhaps still corny) manner. This multi...

    Alexis Peskine, French, “Aljana Moons 3,” 2015. Color archival ink photograph on Hahnemüle paper. Aljana Moons 3, Alexis Peskine 2015 depicts two boys sat at the beach with the waves behind them. Both are dressed in astronaut-esque attire using tomato tin cans of the brand “Dieg Bou Diar”, a tomato paste brand that is commonly used in Francophone West African, especially Senegal. This particular print from the packaging has been used across other art works including in a necklace made by Senegalese Moussa Thiam with Dutch Mieke Groot and Edwin Dieperink called  Dieg Bou Diar 1  2006 and on a Metal Case that was auctioned online in 2022. The central older boy stares directly at the camera with a collected assertiveness, whilst the younger is positioned on the diagonal, sat looking at the older boy with a same collected astute gaze.    Dieg Bou Diar 1  (no date)  Smithsonian Learning Lab . Available at: https://prod.learninglab.si.edu/resources/...