Black People Art

So black artists always seem to be making work about race. Actually it's possible that I have encountered the work of black artists that don't make work about race and I just didn't know that they were black. I guess if you have a need to make things andyour work is personal and you are black in America then your racial identity will consume your work. It's probably easier to find an audience for work about the black experience in the US. The audience of these works is sometimes an issue. One view is that Fine Art is a white thing and so if an artist has a show at The Whitney mostly educated white people will go see it. Also if we assume that black = not rich, then most of an artist's collectors will be rich white people. So if an artist make work that references or appropriates racist imagery and it is popular with collectors then at face value you have rich white people enjoying and supporting offensive and stereotypical images if black people. I don't think that this is what's going on but is is interesting that thats how things work out. Anyway I'm going to do some posts about black artists.

Kori Newkirk






Jubillee


Untitled (Modernist House)



Merk



Glint



These are made of plastic pony beads, beads, artificial hair, and pomade. The artist in the way hair and beads could be used to represent the black body.

Whitney Biennial 2006 page here. Listen to the audio clip.

Another article here

Writing about art is hard for me. My impressions about the art and artists I like comes from looking at images and reading articles and forming an opinion and I find it hard to convey that. Maybe it would be best to just show a few pictures and if you're intrigued you can google them yourself and have the experience I had. I'm trying to avoid the TLDR (too long didn't read) effect.