marisse cato - Art of the Black World

    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/...

Select one of the works from the 1935 MoMA exhibition (and catalogue) and one of Simone Leigh’s works in the 2022 Venice Biennale. Compare the two works visually and discuss in relationship to ideas around “Sovereign Territory.” How is this also informed by the one of the five major themes in Loophole of Retreat? Whilst the article criticism accompanying the 1935 MoMA exhibition and Simone Leigh's Sovereignty differ hugely in the ways Black art might be constructive to a wider artistic hermeneutic, the intentionality of Leigh's citational practices in her work (perhaps as part of a wider African American cultural practice of Signifyin(g)?) allows for the visual comparison between her work and the first major exhibition of Black art in the USA as part of a broader Black aesthetic. There are striking both visual and wider aesthetic ideals in the presentation of the "God of War" figure from Dahomey whose artist is anonymous and the work belonging to the private collectio...

The first work I am interested in learning more about is October Gone...Goodnight, 1973 by Barkley L. Hendricks. This was the first work I was drawn to, in part because of its size and the representation of a Black female subject with glasses and an afro looking not unlike myself. Upon closer examination, the presentation of the body in 3 profiles presented some sort of commodification of the body as object through this presentation. I also noticed the detailed shading of the body and skin against a very flat and 2D white shape that look like a dress but also has no shading and no shape within the whiteness which makes me consider the relationship between Blackness and whiteness and how one is defined against the other in complex ways. It is interesting that the detail presented here is in the Blackness. The second work I am interested in is Plate Four 1992 by Glenn Ligon. The print becoming increasingly unclear upon and increasingly populated background also highlights the definition ...