marisse cato - Art of the Black World

 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...