(header image: Amy Sherald, “What’s precious inside of him does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence (All American),” 2017)
Ms. Sherald has spoken about her desire to see her work be regarded not solely for its representations of Black people, but rather for its universal quality. In other words, as an art critic wonderfully describes it, the portraits are “Blackness without the gaze of whiteness”, without the burden of this particular kind of obligation to complicated and fraught depictions that foreground race. This is not to say that Sherald is unconcerned with Black representation, as it’s quite obvious that she is, but rather to note that she works in a space that simply and profoundly reflects who she is and what she sees.
Her subjects pose as if for a camera, as if for historical posterity, as if they know of (and perhaps wish for) this particular kind of immortality. Here they are, existing, both in this moment and outside of time. This is how we look, now, and forever, in our bathing suits, in our dresses, in our jeans and t shirts, in our hooded sweatshirts. If these portraits are political, it is perhaps not simply because they depict Black people, but instead because they dare to show us at our most quotidian. We do not always have to be at life or death, in agony or ectasy, the exception and not the rule. And this is what I cherish about Amy Sherald’s work. The paintings dare to suggest a Black interiority that is not reactionary, and not subject to the limitations of Blackness that are often inscribed on visual images of Black people.
As opposed to last year, where I had a very specific project in mind, I’m being a bit more playful. There is no hierarchy at work here, just the very modest framework of the English alphabet, stretched out over Black History Month. If there is anything that links these artists together other than the fact of their Blackness (and their identity as Americans, given that February is Black History Month in the US, but not in other parts of the world), it is almost the inverse of what I was so interested in finding in 2024. In that project, I hoped to separate performance from artist from image, to examine each separately, but then also to reflect on the sum of these parts. Here, I tried to select Black musicians, albums, record labels, songs, that are in a lot of ways unconcerned with performance. Almost a sort of push against respectability politics, a ‘I am what I am’. It’s interesting to think about how the stakes of creating music that is uncompromising varied for many of these artists depending on the time and circumstances in which they worked. Some things changed- others did not.
Familiar or not, from the 20th or 21st century, here are some ABCs of Black American music. Just some things I like. I hope you do too!
A new post will appear in the comments every evening in February around 7pm CST.
Previous years:
2024- https://the-avocado.org/2024/02/01/black-sound-and-image-24/
2023- https://the-avocado.org/2023/02/01/28-days-of-blackity-black-songs/
2022- https://the-avocado.org/2022/02/11/black-women-making-music/
2021- http://disq.us/p/2ms05wf (link to individual posts!)