Jacket, T-shirt, Jeans, Sunglasses, Bracelts, and Ring s Tiona’s Own.
The late abstract painter and sculptor Melvin Edwards once said, “One of my discussions within the Black art community was with people who said, ‘Abstraction can’t be Black.’ Well, I don’t know why not. It always was.” He might have been thinking of a Black artistic legacy running from African textiles to American jazz. The point stands: abstraction, like all art, comes from a specific place and perspective, and its power runs deep in the Black art community. This fall, MoMA PS1 hosts Hard Art , a historical exhibition spanning three generations of Black abstraction, from 1969 to the present. Alongside blockbuster names like David Hammons, Sam Gilliam, Barbara Chase-Riboud, and Edwards himself, the show features several exciting younger artists carrying the banner today. Here are five of them, on what abstraction means to them, in and out of the studio.
Current town: Berlin, Germany, and Sydney, Australia.
Rindon Johnson wears Coat and Tie Ferregamo. Shirt Hermès.
There was a while when I did figurative work—self-portraits— but I started to feel odd making and selling images of Black people. I could not get over the feeling that if I was making images to be digested, was I any better than someone else who’s profiting off Black bodies? Visibility is a trap. My discomfort meant the only obvious choice was to start working with abstraction. It’s so beyond, yet full of language, total and full of intensity. I love how hard it is, rigorous, full of emotion, very high stakes, and confusing. It’s freeing and intense.
Who’s the first person you show a new piece to?
My 13-year-old Chihuahua- Dachshund mix, Mies van der Rohe, is usually in the studio with me, so him.
Does Black abstraction mean something different to you than the broad genre of abstraction?
Of course. If you are referring to what you’d call the canon—a canon of abstract painting— you’ll find it is shaped by, framed by, a politics of race and class. Blackness is discursive, and so much of our history, our culture, is rooted in the history of abstraction. We play a major role in its development.
If you could design a new flag for the United States, what would it look like?
I think what you are asking me is, do we belong? I am deeply saddened by the state the country is in when I think about how it owes its African American citizens. It owes reparations and a reinvestment in our communities. African American people have worked hard, slaved, and stitched the flag we have today. I have no idea what this new flag would look like.Maybe it’s green, red, and black.
Hometown: Blytheville, AR and Greenville, SC.
Jacket, T-shirt, Jeans, Sunglasses, Bracelts, and Rings Tiona’s Own.
Does Black abstraction mean something different to you than the broad genre of abstraction?
Black abstraction draws from a subjective Black experience, both socially and intersubjectively, much like Black compositional music. In many ways, how I’ve approached Black abstraction also aligns with Black vernacular and syncretic values found across a range of Black social and spiritual practices.
I am wholeheartedly taken by Melvin Edwards’s Lynch Fragments series. It’s always been a body of work that feels urgent, and I haven’t even seen it all. I keep finding new pieces in group exhibitions, art fairs, or even archival materials. Edwards spoke about finding painting limiting and how this work helped him move beyond it; that gave me so much courage to pivot and move beyond some of the forms I was stuck in.
It’s the only way to make sense of the world. I’m pretty suspicious of the way we use language to form meaning and the way that meaning constitutes narratives of the world. Abstraction is a way to remind us that everything we think of as inherent, as simply the natural way of things, started off as a thought in someone else’s head, with no symbolic articulation yet. Purely abstract.
Who’s the first person you show a new piece to?
Does Black abstraction mean something different to you than the broad genre of abstraction?
It’s about a visual strategy of Black people. Black abstraction has a connection to resistance and refusal and a focus on humanity and fragility.
What artwork from the past or present do you love the most and why?
David Hammons’s Untitled (Night Train), 1989, a circular sculpture constructed from individual Night Train liquor bottles. It’s strong but weightless. It reminds me of Harlem and the architecture of the Hirshhorn Museum in D.C.
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