Relics and Remnants
Arlene McKanic
"Relics and Remnants: Contemporary Reinterpretation of African American Images" at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning was a tough sell, according to curator Heng-Gil Han. "We actually tried to get a guest curator but I approached three guest curators and they said ‘no.’ No one was comfortable exploring exclusively African American artists because of the stereotype. And as for the artists they don’t want to participate in this kind of show, and that created difficulty for me of course. They don’t what to be pigeonholed." More Han didn’t know much about African American history except through what he read and through the media. "The artists had to help me a lot. They helped me to see new territory that I didn’t know about, like the Black Panthers. I want to thank all the artists and collectors. JCAL is an organization that supports black artists–though we’re not as committed as the Studio Museum of Harlem, say–and we want to confirm the perception. African American culture is driving and spearheading the 21st century art." The show had forty works, though many of them were William Pope’s small, ink on paper drawings of absurd sayings. Eleven artists and one performance artist participated, and most of the works were created between 2002 and 2004, with one or two being made specifically for the show. "That shows the devotion of the artists," says Han.
He thought up the exhibit’s title himself. "Relics have to do with time,
remnants have to do with space," he explains. One of the more fascinating works in "Relics and Remnants" was Deborah Grant’s Cast the First Stone, a mixed media masterpiece based on a concept she calls "random select." The 89" x 173" work is mostly black and white and silver, save a few patches of bloody red, including a map of Iraq dominated by a toy attack helicopter and a distantly placed red machine gun. The work references just about everything that can be imagined in our chaotic world, and the central figure, if there is one, is a demonic priest springing up like a jack-in-the-box. Silhouettes of children cavort on his elongated and decidedly phallic nose, a nod to the Catholic priest scandals of a couple of years ago.
Kehinde Wiley’s St. Bartholomew, Apostle and St. Roch, are two enormous (5’ x 6’) oil paintings in old fashioned golden frames. They feature a rapper and a chap holding a rather large knife standing against and among backgrounds that recall Victorian wallpaper. The paintings are both a homage to and a poke at the solemn portraits painted by the old masters. In Xaviera Simmons’ video Like I was Ink, an African American woman on a beach progressively makes herself blacker, applying the color as if it was sunscreen. Beside her a white woman dozes on a blanket. In the end the African American woman, now black as tar, puts on an Afro fright wig. This video alternates with Well, None of Us Is This, Simmons’ video of a man simply eating a slice of watermelon. Dread Scott’s small screen prints are made up of photos, articles and other graphics depicting racial strife, including ghastly and famous photos of lynchings. Hank Willis Thomas has three faux credit cards in Plexiglas in a vitrine table. The size of real credit cards, they’re a bit hard to read, but if you look carefully you can see that the American Express Card is actually the Afro-American Express Card, and it’s edged with tiny, shackled slaves. Beneath, the words "Member Since 1619."
"Just another form of slavery," shrugged the artist, referring to credit card debt.
There’s also William Pope. L’s "Skin Set Drawings," which are twelve framed ink-on-paper proclamations. Many are nonsensical, such as "Red People Are Briefcase of Sand" and "Black People Are Grape," pointing, among other things, to the absurdity of racism. Marc Andre Robinson’s Shame is a surface painted black with a trickle of motor oil running down it. The surface is so shiny and so utterly black one is really tempted to touch it. It also makes one wonder "Is such blackness shameful?"
