Last summer I was lucky enough to catch ‘flow’, the last in the Studio Museum of Harlem’s trilogy of vangaurd exhibitions examining works by emerging African diaspora artists (all under the age of 40). I found the show exhilarating and was blown away by the kalaidoscope of ideas, familiar and unfamiliar, relating to what it can mean or how it can feel to be a part of the African diaspora. As a British born daughter of African-Caribbean immigrants, feeling part of and yet detached from an African identity, is a conundrum I both relate to and am inspired by.
Works by artists like Mustafa Maluka and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye challenged my own expectations and offered up tantalising questions about what African diaspora art should represent. And they steered me towards a head on collision with the idea of a “post-black” artistic position, a term coined by Thelma Golden – senior curator at the Studio Museum of Harlem and renowned champion of African diaspora artists.
So, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to listen to the diminutive curatorial powerhouse speak about this idea at Tate Britain earlier this month . To a packed audience sprinkled with friends, collaborators and luminaries including Chris Ofili, Yinka Shonibare and Sonia Boyce, Thelma explained that the term “post-black” had arisen from an attempt to capture a creative “attitude or stance” taken by younger artists who felt liberated from increasingly entrenched expectations of what ‘black art’ should represent. It was never meant to describe “an aesthetic way of working” and she expressed regret at the way the term has since “become collapsed” and used as an adjective to box in and essentialise work or artists that were in fact challenging that very effect.
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The Thelma Golden Talk was part of a year-long series, which ends in Decemer 09, called the Status of Difference. It’s aim is to provide a platform for leading artists and thinkers to layout their visions about the status of cultural difference in the fast-evolving visual arts landscape. Click here for more info.
The conundrum that you describe of the artist who becomes entrenched or boxed into a certain – and often quite limited – political ‘style’ is a very familiar one.
I attended a talk on disability arts a few years ago and the conversation surrounding what is or isn’t disability art became very heated.
Obviously disability and ethnicity are different things. But in terms of how funding is metered out, in terms of how diversity checkboxes are checked and in terms of how lazy critics are inclined to pigeonhole, the mechanisms by which artists and art projects working in either territory get boxed in and essentialised are remarkably similar.
The whole woman-artist thing is a related struggle for creative freedom when working specifically within the territory of identity politics.
I will look out for Thelma Golden, thanks for the heads-up; we always need more intelligent, aware curators.