Jordan Casteel, Kevin the Kiteman, 2016. Oil on canvas. 78 x 78 in. The Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum purchase with funds provided by the Acquisition Committee 2016.37. Photo Credit: Adam Reich. © Jordan Casteel. Courtesy American Federation of Arts
SILVIA COXE WALTNER: You've shared that Connie Choi, curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, suggested two ways of presenting the show. Tell us, by way of introduction to the exhibition, how you chose to install the works.
AMANDA DONNAN: Yes, we were presented with two different ways to group the works in the exhibition. The first was based on broad themes like “Materiality,” “Notions of Progress,” and “Call-and-Response,” which is a concept employed in music, dance, worship, and other practices that is often associated with African and African-diasporic traditions. The other option, a slightly modified version of which we went with for the installation at the Frye, centers the institutional history and mission of the Studio Museum in Harlem, with sections like “Founders,” “Framing Blackness,” and “Artists in Residence.”
I gravitated to the latter framework because I liked the idea that the Frye was hosting a takeover by another museum—a museum with a storied past, a special connection to its community, and a highly respected curatorial program. The Studio Museum in Harlem championed artists like Kerry James Marshall, David Hammons, Mickalene Thomas, and Kehinde Wiley before they were big stars and, through its unique residency program, really helped launch these and other artists’ careers. The Museum is itself a star, so I thought it was important to underscore that for West coast viewers who might not be familiar with it or know that much about Harlem. I think it’s also crucial to understand that what might appear to be a sweeping survey of Black art of the last 100 years is in fact one institution’s lens on Black art, on artistic production of the African diaspora, which is of course hugely diverse and impossible to sum up neatly. Broadly speaking, it demonstrates the extent to which any museum’s collection is a reflection of specific individuals’ interests, choices, and relationships.
Installation view of 'Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem', Frye Art Museum, Seattle, May 22 – August 15, 2021. Photo: Jueqian Fang
SCW: The large work by Jordan Casteel is a great example of the relationship between the show's artists and their communities, which have long waited to receive due prominence. Can you expand on that idea and on this work in particular?
AD: I love Jordan’s work and actually wrote the essay on her painting included in Black Refractions, titled Kevin the Kiteman (2016), for the exhibition catalogue. Of course that was three or four years ago now, since the exhibition has been traveling nationally for quite some time now and was delayed by the pandemic. In the meantime, as I know you’re aware, Jordan had a big solo show at the New Museum and has, as you say, become a "Big Name." But the series of community portraits—mostly of Black men—that she has become known for grew out of her time at the Studio Museum, where she was one of the 2015-2016 resident artists. She had just finished her MFA at Yale in 2014 and was already painting tender portraits of Black men, mostly nude and in domestic settings, but living in Harlem and meeting all these people on the street took her work in a new direction. She would form relationships by approaching strangers and asking to take their photo for a painting; she became known as “Painter” around the neighborhood. Kevin the Kiteman is one such individual—she noticed him with his kites from her studio window and ran out to take his picture. The exuberantly colorful portrait that resulted really encapsulates the aims of the entire series, which celebrates the unique subjectivity of Black men contra harmful stereotypes that portray them as violent, for example, and affirming their worthiness as subjects of artistic representation, or really, of care. The short videos that Art21 produced about Jordan capture how meaningful it is to her subjects to see themselves at large scale in the context of an art museum.
Barkley L. Hendricks, Lawdy Mama, 1969. Oil and gold leaf on canvas. 53¾ x 36¼ in. The Studio Museum in Harlem; gift of Stuart Liebman, in memory of Joseph B. Liebman 1983.25. © Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks. Courtesy of the artist's estate, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, and American Federation of Arts
SCW: The works of Barkley L. Hendricks and Titus Kaphar in the show share an art historical reference to Icon paintings: flat, frontal facing portraits against a gold leaf background. The works by Faith Ringgold and Kerry James Marshall also relate as portraits representing everyday people or calling out established stereotypes. How do you see these art historical themes coming into dialogue with contemporary social issues?
AD: That’s a big question! Maybe I’ll focus on the Hendricks and Kaphar to keep my response semi-succinct. You’re right to point out the aesthetic relationship between the two works—actually three works, since there are two pieces from a single series by Kaphar included—and both in different ways focus on a family member of the artist’s but have broader political implications. Hendricks’s early portrait Lawdy Mama (1969) depicts his cousin, but her natural hairstyle evokes iconic women of the Black Power Movement like Angela Davis and Kathleen Cleaver. The hairstyle was something like a statement of solidarity with the Movement. At the same time, the format of the work, with a rounded top akin to an altarpiece, and the soft metallic gold glow of the background connect the work to art historical traditions as you mentioned and suggest that the subject is worthy of veneration. Hendricks was responding to a paucity of representations of Black subjects in the art historical canon, so this choice signifies beyond the specificity of his subject or his affection for her.
The Kaphars, Jerome IV and Jerome XXIX (both 2014), are from a series of 99 small paintings on wood that all feature a portrait of a different individual against a gold ground, the bottoms of which have been dipped in tar. The portraits are based on mugshots that Kaphar found while searching online databases for his father’s prison records—he ended up finding ninety-nine other men who shared his father’s same first and last name and were jailed for nearly identical crimes. The series demonstrates the disproportionate imprisonment of black men in the United States and gestures to a community deeply affected by mass incarceration. So, the Hendricks was created right around the time of the Studio Museum’s founding in 1968 and the Kaphars nearly fifty years later, but both speak powerfully to issues impacting the Black community then and now.
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