Curator’s Notes

Brandon Foushee’s Light Stepping, 2023  begins this investigation through assemblage photo and transfer, resulting in a hazy composition of a body of water. What can be read as an ocean, sea, or pool is depicted in his father's home. A Black figure can be seen resting or contemplating, off-centered to the right of the piece, subverted by an image that can be assumed to be a depiction of Jesus Christ floating above it. Both figures are enveloped in haze, contrasting with the bright clarity of the left side of the piece, allegorically reflecting the promises of modernity as the Atlantic gives way to the Pacific through expansion, and what that means for shifting notions of Black diasporic identity.

Dreamy disbursements of imagery through photography continue in Markele Cullins' work, which catalogs expression through meme culture. This decentralized approach to humor becomes a study of codes, jokes, and communal understanding. Cullins layers glimmers atop photo transfers of screenshots from popular videos. The translucent material echoes the disembodied space of the internet, referring to the layered understanding of Blackness. An Urge to Adorn in The Broken Mirror, 2024  looks into gender expression and sexuality in Black American media in the ’90s. Using footage from Martin and In Living Color along with a poem, the piece meditates on loopholes of expression to expand and complicate identity politics. The pieces of plywood and hardware portray surreal interior and exterior spaces and portals that play on memory, mirroring, and the relationship between safety and harm.

Simultaneously, Jabari Wimbley's Off-White, 2024 tapestry traverses relational dynamics by mining memories and consumerism. The fabrics combine elements of both American Eagle and the kente cloth he grew up with at home. The combination of Italian cotton, polyester, canvas, nylon, polyethylene, and polypropylene reflects shifting material cultures. Wimbley reconfigures aspects of Black American identity while nodding to West African textile traditions, luxury, and the high-low dynamic present in streetwear. Fabrics are sourced from friends gifting Virgil Abloh's Off-White Fall 19 collection, which can be seen on the lower right-hand side. Other sources include a thrifted American Eagle shirt, moving blankets, pillowcases, and a found tarp. As he re-identifies and creates feelings of belonging and transition, he establishes a home for the disparate understanding of “African” and “American” identifiers.

Leeban Farah addresses the nuanced diasporic identity and existentialism. Through realistic displays of relational dynamics, Farah examines his identity by using loved ones, neighbors, and friends as staged subjects, creating narrative images that function as both documentary work and internal self-portraits. His lens explores themes of dislocation, cultural disembodiment, and dreams. In Solola, 2024  titled after a word Farah heard in a dream, we see the central figure bathed in darkness, his features only faintly visible. The background is warm but disconnected from the figure, mirroring Farah’s own experience. The work is accompanied by two other pieces that explore this central figure’s place within his community, mimetically reflecting Farah’s own experiences.

Similarly, photographers like Renée Uba and Channelle Triplette investigate privacy and safety by recontextualizing the viewership of the female body. In This Is The Only Time I Really Feel Seen, 2017 Uba explores the connection between assimilation, personal style, and safety by concealing her body with wigs, thereby negating intimacy or viewership of her naked body. Simultaneously, her direct gaze, framed by a bare face and cornrows, evokes a feeling of distance, as if she is peering out from within symbols that reflect European standards. The photograph draws us into a liminal space, provoking reflection on the contemporary interpretation of Black femininity while also acknowledging the intersecting standards of adornment that become synchronous with Uba’s identity.

In contrast, Channelle Triplette’s work explores concealment inversely. In Elsa, 2023 we see a seductive figure who feels in full control, even within the voyeuristic frame; it feels as though we have stumbled upon her. With her face concealed. The concealment of her face creates a barrier between the audience and the central figure, rendering her anonymous and allowing context to shape our interpretation of her character. This interplay of concealment and identity fosters a rich conversation between the works, offering insight into how Black femininity can be ascribed within the contemporary canon.

Austin Pope continues the legacy of documentation through realism, focusing on expressions of social dynamics with Black queer joy in Chicago in 2021, capturing liberation through movement. Black-and-white images ground each photograph in the diptych, mirroring historical documentation and extending the legacies of Alvin Baltrop’s cruising series.

Works by Zay Monae resonate in this vein as she explores community spaces emerging from the 2020 racial uprising through reconstructions of safety, pleasure, and joy. Monae elevates neighbors and frames them in shots that imply kinship. Warm images and an attentiveness to expression are found in her portraiture, proliferating an archive of the contemporary community of Los Angeles rooted in Blackness.

This method of cataloging continues in the work of Loupy D, who investigates capital shifts in urban planning in his series 20/21, which records the evolving urban design of La Cienega Blvd from the vantage point of Kenneth Hahn Park. The photographs transition from 35mm film to digital as technology progresses, mirroring the simultaneous development of Crenshaw and Culver City. The images create a comparative survey of this street in 1991, 1999, and 2023, communicating the visual markers of gentrification that coincide with the economic displacement of Black centers in South and West Los Angeles.

Akin to the aforementioned, Francis Agyapong grapples with the complex history of violence and labor at play in the West, East, and Congo in his sculpture Hands on the Wheel, 2024. The rubber tire is depicted with 3D renderings of Black hands attached to it at the top of a rubber tree. This gestures to an inquiry into exploitation, extraction, and evolution in the context of Central Africa. The piece visually articulates a wheel, which can be understood through different levels of engagement as both the first symbol of human advancement and a question of the unseen labor central to modernization. The work establishes the Congo as a symbol of diasporic commodities exploited to further Western interests. The Congo remains central due to its continuous exploitation for resources such as rubber (for vehicles), uranium (for nuclear weapons), and coltan (for phones, bombs, and batteries). Agyapong's work is informed by his time at MIT BAN (Bombs Away Network) and articulates the way diasporic identity is constantly in tension with commodification, objectification, and violence.

Amanuel Getachew continues the examination of violence and nationhood through a surrealist approach in Blue Onions, 2024. A figure can be seen almost floating amidst a commonly used pattern found in mattresses made by the Ethiopian company Kangaroo Foam. This sets the image within a domestic frame, juxtaposed against the military camouflage worn by the figure. This hints at the constant ethnic violence in Ethiopia. The blue onions reference Ethiopia's transition to an ethnofederal state. We see the figure almost floating above the onions in a motif reminiscent of the Disappearing Christ, which can be found in medieval Christian paintings and reflects the chaos of contemporary times. Getachew utilizes his figure to acknowledge the distance he experiences as an American-Ethiopian while grappling with the responsibility he bears in investigating the doctrines at play in Ethiopia.

A continuation of this conversation centered on the African American experience is deeply involved in artist Deshion Mckinley’s grappling with the tension and emotional weight of converging realities that come with being seen in the world as Black. His sculpture Crybaby, 2024 holds elements of protection in tandem with investigations of innocence, as amalgamations of the two emerge. It embodies the gray space of reality in which the Black body and identity must exist to survive. Most materials are made from scraps: Trader Joe's bags, paper towel rolls, old cloth, rope, aluminum foil, wire, barbed wire, and found carriages, which speak to the economic, social, and emotional resilience that must be embodied to continue in the wake of historical disenfranchisement and the increasing awareness of diasporic violence globally through the internet. Mckinley’s works become an outward expression of grief while simultaneously allowing for an intimate look into the innocence of the Black diaspora, as the understanding of the histories at play forces us to grow resilient and develop self-protective identities in flux between Blackness, whiteness, and otherness.

In contrast, Karine Fleurima explores remedies, extending the exhibition to a surrealist proclamation of Black futurity. Fleurima employs performance, assemblage, and sound to address collective feelings of frustration and apathy, converting historical documentation of Carnival and Black femme performances to assemble a world of pleasure, frivolity, and freedom. Deep blue and purple embody an ocean of identity held in the memory of levity, finding ways to expand what modernity can look like through the application of technology, lived experience, and historical record. By imposing herself, her ancestors, and the audience into a projected heightened reality, she honors moments of rest, femininity, and vulnerability.