Kara Walker, Restraint, 2009. Editions & Works on Paper New York.
—Written by Folasade Ologundudu
While it is true that the Western world has long placed Black artistic expression at the fringe of society, it is also true that Black artists have railed against this subjugation. By expanding the canon of modern and contemporary figuration with resourcefulness and ingenuity, Black artists continue to sit at the fore of some of the most socially and politically relevant art being created today. Catalyzing materiality and form vis-à-vis the figure, the body becomes a site for reclamation, refusal, and artistic innovation.
Bisa Butler

Bisa Butler, Daughter of the Dust, 2020. Editions & Works on Paper New York.
Fusing the long-standing legacy of quilting and storytelling among African Americans, Bisa Butler pays homage to the traditions of care and resourcefulness enslaved Africans passed down through generations. As both an engagement in practicality and protection, quilts offered warmth on cold nights for the enslaved and provided a visual backdrop for stories of love and loss, celebration and mourning, and even the marking of time. Both Butler’s mother and grandmother shared the time-honored tradition that would later lend itself to the rigorous practice of the painter-turned-textile artist. In Butler’s, Daughter of the Dust (2020) inkjet print, we bear witness to the archive; a repository of history collected over time that has become integral to the artist's oeuvre. Inspired by World War II-era photographs found in the Farm Security Administration database through the Library of Congress, the print illustrates Butler’s engagement with America’s past. In rendering Black figures with rich, densely layered West African wax printed fabric, kente cloth, and Dutch wax prints, we meet figures whose stories, often unknown, are woven within the fabric of American history.
Elizabeth Catlett

Elizabeth Catlett, Keisha M., 2008. Editions & Works on Paper New York.
For Elizabeth Catlett, regarded as one of the most important African American artists of the 20th century, to be an artist and an activist were one in the same. During her lifetime, Catlett created hundreds of wooden sculptures, masks, terracotta figures, and lithographs, many of which harkened to the stylistic traditions of African sculpture. Centering the lives of Black Americans and the urgent need for social justice reform, she infused figures with emotional depth and spirituality. Lithographs, such as Keisha M. (2008), bear the resemblance of African sculptures rendered with angular lines and pronounced features. Catlett deftly explored the nuance of colour, composition, and patterns, as denoted with Keisha M.’s bright blue dress and pronounced sleeves. Her unrelenting belief in social justice led the United States to declare her an “undesirable alien” in 1962 for affiliation with Taller Gráfica Popular (People’s Graphic Workshop), an influential artist collective in Mexico, dubbed a "communist front organization” by the US government. Barred from entry to the US for over a decade and up until the end of her life at the age of 96, Catlett continued to draw attention to the plight of Black Americans through her visionary sculptures and paintings, marked by an insistence in the pursuit of Black liberation.
Wangechi Mutu

Wangechi Mutu, WaterSpirit washed Pelican, 2022. Editions & Works on Paper New York.
Upon encountering a work by Wangechi Mutu, one instantly wonders if they’ve seen her hybrid creatures in a dreamscape or sci-fi film. Figures leap and float through unknown terrain. They dance across wondrous, fantastical landscapes. Stunningly familiar yet eerily strange, they conjure images that interweave history and myth. Using a diverse array of materials from tea to synthetic hair, the Kenyan-born Yale graduate, who earned her master's degree in sculpture, has long investigated notions of gender and race through the figure. In Mutu’s WaterSpirit Washed Pelican (2022), we meet an anamorphic hybrid creature whose body mimics what one might describe as an alien-mermaid with an outstretched arm-like form and a long, winging split tail. Over the course of Mutu’s illustrious career, the artist has unearthed culturally charged materials, including soil from her native Kenya, while experimenting with figurative forms that defy easy categorization.
Tschabalala Self

Tschabalala Self, Out of Body, 2020. Editions & Works on Paper New York.
Depicting the Black female form in varying sizes and sinuous shapes, Tschabalala Self renders her figures as self-actualized agents of change. Out of Body is a perfect example of Self’s deft ability to translate her tactile, mixed-media works into an equally engaging fabric appliqué multiple that continues to further excavate new visual representations of Black femininity, beauty, and power. In it, she combines composed color blocks of solid, textured, and patterned textiles to depict the female body. Subverting normative archetypes by performing the unexpected, her figures corrupt systems of oppression by holding court on their own terms. Her depictions are large and life-sized; some are massive sculptures standing 10 feet tall. In her work, an interplay of formalism and abstraction expands the canon of Black figuration through collage and composition. Self’s women admire themselves, take delight in their own shadows, and provocate dialogue around racialized and gendered hierarchies and the demeaning attitudes towards Black women they ensue.
Toyin Ojih Odutola

Toyin Ojih Odutola, Untitled, 2016. Editions & Works on Paper New York.
Born in Nigeria and raised in Alabama, Toyin Ojih Odutola is never far from her native home through her artistic expression. Her richly detailed surfaces draw inspiration from African textiles, evident in the intricacy of her patterns and abstract marks.
In her practice, the artist expansively draws on the human form — specifically the rendering of skin — as a site for experimentation. Her distinctively imaginative approach to figuration, where she often utilizes pencil, pen, charcoal, graphite, and pastel onto paper and panel, exemplifies a well-developed painterly language. Her mark-making techniques bear the foundation of her visual lexicon, filling her subjects with emotion that seductively draws the viewer in.
Mickalene Thomas

Mickalene Thomas, Portrait de Priscilla la Petite Chienne Deux :), 2012. Editions & Works on Paper New York.
Every now and then, an artist breaks with their own convention. In Portrait de Priscilla Le Petit Chien (2012), Mickalene Thomas does just that. The pigmented collage print of her long-haired miniature dachshund, Priscilla, a gift from fellow artist Kehinde Wiley, is adorned in classic Mickalene fashion with rhinestones, bright patterns, and bold colors. Although this time, her muse — typically a beautiful Black woman — is replaced with a furry canine. For more than 20 years, Thomas has expanded the canon of Black figuration, asserting agency for straight, queer, and non-binary women. Her collage work, laden with geometric shapes and abstract forms, depicts portraits of Black women, at rest, in repose, and as active participants in their objecthood. Sensuality, sexuality, vulnerability, and power lie at the center of her works, providing visual testimony to the vast and varied lives of Black women.
Khari Turner

Khari Turner, Rest and Wellness, 2022. Editions & Works on Paper New York.
Soil and sand mix with water from personal and spiritual histories in Khari Turner’s figurative paintings. Water sourced from his native Milwaukee commingles with that of the Great Lakes, the surrounding water bodies of his current home in New York City, and even farther afield, along the shores of Senegal, all blended and unifed in the paint and pigments on his canvases. Infused with the transcendent nature of water to hold memory, Turner explores elements of Black American life through the body. Faces and limbs hug and stretch over canvases suggesting joy, love, solace, and healing. In the telling of the Black American story, the criticality of water as a site for memorial and the dark history it holds, reveal a brutal past of unimaginable violence and subjugation. Instead of focusing on these tragic realities, Turner asserts the element of water to draw on texture, shape, and the convergence of materials and elements to birth new expressions in figurative painting. In his limited-edition print, Rest and Wellness, a woman leaning against a panel of wood veneer is rendered in charcoal, hints of paint reveal her nose and mouth. The work furthers Turner’s material investigations with hand-finished sand application, paint, and strips of African mahogany.
Kara Walker

Kara Walker, Freedom: A Fable, 1997. Editions & Works on Paper New York.
America's brutal history is ever present in Kara Walker's lexicon of prints, paintings, sculptures, and laser-cut silhouettes. Recounting the violence and horror at the center of America’s founding, she reveals the truths evident in our past and present. In Walker’s Freedom: A Fable, the use of cut-paper silhouettes, a traditional Victorian art form, illustrates the jarring realities of racism and gendered discrimination in the form of what appears to be a children’s book. In truth, the book tells the story of an emancipated female slave who continues to experience oppression long after receiving her ‘freedom.’ In recognizing the profundity of race, gender, sexuality, and violence, she persists in signifying the prevalence these issues have on African American women. Walker’s prolific commentary on race in America has garnered critical acclaim, making her one of today’s most important contemporary artists.
Kehinde Wiley

Kehinde Wiley, The Gypsy Fortune-Teller, 2007. Editions & Works on Paper New York.
Black men have never flourished as freely or rested as peacefully as they do in Kehinde Wiley’s classical-style paintings. Wiley’s inclusion of Black men draws on the centuries-long practice of repudiating visual representation of Black bodies from the sightlines of art history. For centuries, Black figures — both men and women — were scarcely included in the canon of Western art. Within contemporary art, Wiley’s decades-long oeuvre is paramount in its contextualization of Black figures rendered in scenes that historically elevated the image of wealthy Europeans. The Gypsy Fortune-Teller, reimagines an 18th-century French tapestry by François Boucher that features French aristocrats lounging in a Rococo garden. In Wiley’s modern rendition, we meet five Black men donned in sports jerseys, baggy jeans, and sleeveless shirts, framed by a lush pastoral scene of Black babies frolicking, surrounded by plant and animal life. In his practice, Wiley refuses to adhere to the narrow categorization the Western art world has subscribed to Black men. Instead, he insists on individuality and autonomy.
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