Questioning the Canon

Kara Walker’s Salvation depicts a caricatured black female figure declaiming or, perhaps, choking. The swamp setting, associated with mystery and stagnation, makes for an ominous scene. For Romantic painters of the late 18th and 19th centuries, the landscape often functioned metaphorically as a site of the sublime and a territory to be tamed and colonized. Walker overturns this approach, in part, by rendering her forms in the craft tradition of cut paper silhouettes. The ambiguity of the figure’s gesture begs the question of who is being saved and from what.

Mickalene Thomas’ Le déjeuner sur l'herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires partly shares a title with the famous 19th-century Edouard Manet painting. However, the clothed European male figures, and unclothed female figure of the original have been replaced with three stylishly dressed African American women, all of whom coolly confront the viewer’s gaze.

In Faith Ringgold’s story quilt series The French Collection, Willa Marie Simone—a fictitious heroine who has left America to pursue a career as an artist in Paris—is seen posing for Henri Matisse before his famous painting La Danse (1910). The tense situation of an unknown African American female artist (even a fictitious one) posing for a famous European male painter underscores a racial and gender hierarchy that has largely defined art of the past.

Saar’s Strange Fruit inverts the classical pose of the central figure in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (1482–85) to speak to the historical atrocities visited upon the black female body, as well as its resilience in the face of them.

The luminous Plexiglas slabs that make up the main sculptural element of Kerry James Marshall’s The Ladder of Success clearly make reference to minimalist works by artists like Donald Judd. Marshall, however, has inscribed his pristine forms with the principles of Kwanzaa and 19th-century American values believed to lead to financial fortune. Nearby, an image of the Ebony-Jet building, taken at night, sits as a symbol—and perhaps a critique—of African American aspiration.

The apparent abstraction of David Hammons’ shifting tonal composition becomes legible as the product of an unconventional process on closer inspection. The artist made Traveling by bouncing a basketball covered with Harlem dirt on a sheet of paper. The title refers to basketball’s “traveling” rule but takes on multiple meanings, especially when one notices the suitcase hidden behind the framed drawing (see detail).

In Duke, Ellen Gallagher has culled images of African American football players, gridded them, and lightened their skin. Pomade has been added to the print in selected sections. ‘Duke’ refers to a once well-known hair pomade and skin lightener. Here the modernist grid is pressed into the service of a totalizing racial conformity.

Adrian Piper’s Untitled invites us to meditate upon representation and identity through the drawing of a face sketched over an employment application. The demographic and somewhat arbitrary designations of the form—citizenship status, military service record, references, etc.—stand in contrast to the expressiveness of the face, lips parted as though about to speak.

Nick Cave’s Soundsuit removes the artist’s body from the viewer’s gaze, even as it creates a spectacular presence through the use of strong color, pattern, and fine craft. The artist and others have danced in several, though not all, of his Soundsuits, so named for the distinctive noises that many of them make when worn.

A crudely drawn ghost and devil contrast with a more refined figure, painted in dark pigments that spill into an expressionistic background. The classical male nude has long been associated with strength, victory, and moral excellence. Here the nude’s coloration both obscures its form and dominates much of the composition. An exception lies in an area next to the figure’s feet, where a pile of police hats raises questions about the politics of race and authority.

Glenn Ligon’s White #17 is reminiscent of the monochrome black canvases made famous by artists such as Frank Stella. However, the canvas contains a passage from Richard Dyer’s 1997 essay White, which looked at the biased portrayal of white and black cultures in movies. Hovering at the edge of legibility, the composition oscillates between pure abstraction and an assertion of the cultural connotations of the color black.