Gathering Around What We Love: On Increased Institutional Interest in Black Figuration

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Dominic Chambers, Self-Summoning (shadow work) (detail) (2022). Oil on linen, 84 × 72 × 2 inches. © Dominic Chambers. Image courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London. Photo: Daniel Kukla.

“To live with [John Singer] Sargent’s water-colours is to live with sunshine captured and held.” This line, borrowed from the artist’s first biographer, was one that I would become intimately familiar with during my time working in the gift shop at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, which holds the most complete collection of his works.¹ The museum’s PR campaign for the exhibition used the word “dazzling” more than once and, sure enough, visitors would exit the show enamored, perusing rubber erasers, scarves, postcards, and umbrellas featuring the artist’s paintings with a newfound buoyancy. There was something about Sargent’s lounging women reading in the grass that moved people, not unlike the way Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–86), an iconic portrayal of bucolic relaxation, inspires serenity. We can find similar sentiments in response to the work of contemporary artists like Alex Katz, whose 250-plus paintings of his wife Ada elicit a certain undeniable warmth. This intimacy between subject and viewer is similar to that shared between the grinning pair enjoying each other’s company over a couple of drinks in Kerry James Marshall’s Untitled (Club Couple) (2014), a print of which hangs from my living room wall and, without fail, always prompts my guests to mirror the contented smiles of the figures. Marshall’s figures are just as relaxed and at ease as any of those painted by Sargent, Seurat, or Katz. What immediately sets the work apart is that the figures in his paintings are Black (as is the artist himself), and until somewhat recently, images of Black figures relaxing or lounging—who are, decidedly, not suffering—were not particularly celebrated within mainstream art institutions.

In 2023, it’s no longer very interesting to scrutinize why major museums and galleries are looking to diversify their rosters by showing more BIPOC artists—the case for diversification among exhibited and collected artists has been made abundantly clear by now. But it is worth considering how more diverse rosters have played a part in the increased institutional interest in Black figuration, and how this interest has made overdue space for images of Black subjects at rest. More representation means that there is less pressure for individual works to depict monolithic representations of the Black experience. Historically, institutions have looked to Black figurative works to immortalize specific, painful historical moments that singularize the meaning of Blackness.² From Romare Bearden’s Cotton Workers (c. 1941), to Kara Walker’s silhouetted scenes of slavery’s violent legacy, to Faith Ringgold’s bloody American People Series #20: Die (1967), many of the most famous works by Black artists have depicted Black pain and suffering.³ While the diversification of galleries and museums has been drawn out over decades, as of late, the works being shown by Black artists that depict Black contemporary life contain noticeably more breathing room, play, looseness, and nuance in their explorations of sovereignty.

Such scenes are currently on view in the retrospective Henry Taylor: B Side at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), which celebrates the longtime Los Angeles artist’s more than 30-year career. Featuring figurative paintings alongside sculptures, drawings, and installations, the exhibition arrives in a climate quite different from the one in which Taylor began working as an artist. Taylor has been painting subjective scenes of contemporary Black life for decades, but the recent surge in demand for this kind of work has created a scenario in which artists like Taylor (and the aforementioned Marshall) are experiencing delayed recognition, while a new school of Black figurative painters is thriving. Younger Black figurative painters like Jordan Casteel, Dominic Chambers, Nina Chanel Abney, Devin Troy Strother, Jennifer Packer, Umar Rashid, and Toyin Ojih Odutola—to name just a few—test the limits of the genre with layered scenes ranging in tone from cheeky to uplifting to reflective.

Born in 1958, when Taylor emerged in L.A.’s art scene in the ’90s, Black figurative artists—like Ringgold, Charles White, Jacob Lawrence, and Barkley L. Hendricks—had already been capturing quotidian Black joy, triumph, ambition, and grace without significant mainstream enthusiasm. While White was included in a three-person show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 1971, it was exhibited in the bowels of a basement,⁴ and only at the urging of the Black Arts Council.⁵ White died in 1979—his first above-ground exhibition with the museum was a retrospective, in 2019, 40 years later. A longstanding continuum of twentieth-century Black artists have been experimenting with figurative painting alongside their more widely-known white cis male counterparts, yet these artists often remained under-appreciated and unrecognized. And while Taylor has been showing regularly for more than a couple of decades (he had his first solo gallery show in Los Angeles in 1995, and he is most recently represented by Hauser & Wirth), the MOCA exhibition is his first hometown institutional retrospective. Artworks by still-living Black figurative painters that have been working in the genre across their careers—Taylor among them—are being looked at with a fresh perspective from those who may have previously failed to understand the radical nature of their self-affirming scenes of Black figures at rest, play, or engaging with art, music, and literature. The market is noticing, too. Taylor’s portraits have become a hotter commodity in recent years: In 2018, eleven collectors bid on his 2004 painting I’ll Put a Spell on You, which sold for nearly $1 million—five times its high estimate.⁶

Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Club Couple) (2014). Acrylic on PVC panel, 61 × 61 × 2.75 inches. © Kerry James Marshall. Image courtesy of the artist; Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; and David Zwirner.

Embracing scenes of self-affirmation, joy, and leisure does not necessitate avoiding painful events, but it has sometimes felt like the most celebrated works—by Taylor and other Black artists—have been those that directly address trauma. Of the several paintings by Taylor included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, it was his painting THE TIMES THAY AINT A CHANGING, FAST ENOUGH! (2017), which depicts the 2016 murder of Philando Castile at the hands of Minnesota police, that seemed to receive the most attention—the work now resides in the museum’s permanent collection.⁷ And yet, subtler but still charged works, like The 4th (2012–17), shown at the Whitney, and Resting (2011), featured in the exhibition at MOCA, have always been a significant part of Taylor’s oeuvre. Resting, for instance, shows two figures lounging on a couch that’s been brought outdoors, but while it shows its subjects at leisure, it remains layered with violent undertones. A tractor-trailer branded with the logo for the Corrections Corporation of America (now CoreCivic, one of the nation’s largest for-profit prison companies), can be seen in the distance, alongside a wall painted with the phrase “WARNING SHOTS NOT REQUIRED.” Space collapses in a mischievously cubist manner: We’re somehow in someone’s house, out in nature, and in a prison all at once. In this way, Taylor’s scenes of commonplace Black experiences are often coupled with deeper political nuances, as if to insinuate the multiplicity of the human experience, that moments of rest (or even joy) are experienced against the backdrop of harsher realities.

Another of Taylor’s paintings featured at MOCA that embodies this kind of duality is Cicely and Miles Visit the Obamas (2017). The painting, which references a well-known paparazzi photo of Cicely Tyson and Miles Davis at the film premiere of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1968), appeared on the cover of Art in America on the heels of Trump’s Presidential Inauguration. Though it pictures the couple in front of the White House, the painting was made as the Obamas were departing it. And while Tyson and Davis look perfectly natural standing in the foreground of the grassy North Lawn, their 1968 selves are an anachronism in 2017—the pair divorced in 1989, and Davis died back in 1991. This fiction is further heightened by the bare flagpole behind Davis’ left shoulder, no American flag in sight. The painting is indicative of Taylor’s capacity to breathe complexity into works that seem straightforward. It’s defiant, and a little cheeky, to insinuate that the Obamas are still in the White House, whimsical to picture a young-and-in-love Tyson and Davis as their guests, and then utterly bleak to consider the reality that the work was painted within: Trump was, in fact, the president-elect. And just like that glamorous snap of Davis and Tyson, Obama’s presidency was by then, too, a flashy blip of the past.

If Taylor has helped pave the way for the kind of Black figuration that expresses a range of emotional tones, increased mainstream enthusiasm for Taylor and others of his generation (like Lorna Simpson and Mickalene Thomas) has encouraged emerging Black figurative artists to continue to push boundaries with less restraint. Artist Dominic Chambers (b. 1993, St. Louis), for instance, paints Black people reading books, engaging in Jungian shadow work, and just sitting a spell without allusions to trauma or politics. Chambers’ use of gestural abstraction paired with fabulist elements comes from his interest in magical realism, and his dreamy surreality shines through in paintings like Self-Summoning (shadow work) (2022), which features a figure alongside a pair of his shadow selves—one reading beneath him, and the other looking down at him as he, himself, reads. These figures appear to be grounded in reality. Yet, the rarity of seeing imagery of Black people at rest, let alone engaging in mysticism, heightens the otherworldliness of his narrative.

While Chambers creates serene, introspective space in his paintings, the work of Nina Chanel Abney (b. 1982, New York) is more frenetic and pop culture-infused in its expression of radical self-affirmation. Still, like Taylor, the painter doesn’t shy away from mixing in provocative subject matter. Paintings like Why (2015), which displays a chaotic scene of white police officers—one wears a shirt that says “OINK”—shooting a Black man, led to the somewhat flat readings of her work as activism, particularly related to the Black Lives Matter movement. Abney was boxed in (not unlike Betye Saar before her, who was dubbed an “activist artist” due to works like The Liberation of Aunt Jemima [1972] despite the fact that she addressed a wide range of subject matter).⁸ Abney has been outspoken about her desire to break past expectations placed on her by a white-normative arts economy, instead painting an array of subject material.⁹ Her vivid, cubist works bend toward depictions of celebration and joy—as in the painting Issa Saturday Study (2019), one of her more fanciful works. In it, two nude figures appear to be in domestic bliss as they float against a colorful background, two martini glasses hanging mid-air between them. A contented animal looks on, while bananas, hearts, and other geometric shapes abound. Abney’s insistence on play corresponds with an expanded institutional awareness of a broad range of Black experiences, rather than a myopic focus on pain and suffering alone. Artist Derrick Adams (b. 1970, Baltimore) talks about his paintings of Black figures resting or lounging in pool floaties as a larger project to depict Black joy. “I’m hoping we are at a place where difference does not mean superior or inferior. It means different,” he explains. “What I’m trying to represent is not different for me—it’s normal—but I’m trying to normalize the idea of difference.”¹⁰

A white woman once asked the poet Ross Gay how he could write about flowers at a time when his people, Black people, were actively suffering. Recalling this incident, Gay noted how often such a question is asked of Black artists, as if non-Black viewers are more interested in angry, urgent reactions to traumatic events when scenes of joy can be equally powerful. “Gathering around what [we] love might, in fact, be the process by which we imagine the lives that we want,” Gay said.¹¹ As mainstream imaginations catch up to the urgent value of depicting the rich, multitudinous reality of Black life, a new generation of Black figurative artists forges on, guided by the lineage of artists who have long insisted upon Black joy, even when such depictions weren’t widely celebrated by the larger public. This fresh public embrace feels like a step in the right direction, allowing this emerging cohort more space to experiment, play, and further push the boundaries of the genre.

This essay was originally published in Carla issue 32.

Henry Taylor, Resting (2011). Acrylic and collage on canvas, 64 × 77.75 inches. © Henry Taylor. Image courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Collection of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg.

Henry Taylor, Cicely and Miles Visit the Obamas (2017). Acrylic on canvas, 84 × 72 inches. © Henry Taylor. Image courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Kravis Collection. Photo: Sam Kahn.

Nina Chanel Abney, Issa Saturday Study (2019). Acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 60 × 60 × 1.25 inches. © Nina Chanel Abney. Image courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Neyat Yohannes is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in Criterion’s Current, Mubi Notebook, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Bitch, KQED Arts, cléo journal, Playboy, and Chicago Review of Books, among other publications. In a past life, she wrote tardy slips for late students.

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