It's a Good Moment to be a Black Artist in the U.S.

 "Despite the really horrific climate we've reached, it still doesn't distract me from the fact of how amazing it is to be a Black artist right now,'' Brooklyn sculptor Simone Leigh told the New York Times upon being selected to represent the U.S. at the 2022 Venice Biennale.

That was the lead paragraph of an article I wrote on Oct. 15.  You can find it here.

In a similar vein, the New York Times led it's Nov. 2020 "Weekend Arts" section with an extensive write-up of Derek Fordjour, a Black artist who paints, sculpts and makes film and video.

"I'm benefiting from a moment," he told the NYT, echoing the sentiments of Ms Leigh. "I recognize that I'm an artist in society and when society goes and moves in a different direction I've still got to be rooted in what I'm doing."

Where society, as represented by the art world, is going now is in the direction of strongly promoting the work of Black artists, not necessarily unfairly in view of a certain amount of neglect if not outright discrimination in times past.  But the point is, times have changed, for the moment (as Fordjour put it)  at any rate. White privilege has been replaced by Black privilege and artists like Mr. Fordjour are clearly enjoying their recognition.

According to the NYT, Fordjour "was a market sensation in 2019" as evidenced in part by the sale of one of his paintings at auction for a price double the estimate. And, the paper noted, he was sued last March by a former New York gallery owner for not living up to an agreement allegedly made back in 2014 to deliver 20 canvases. The case, which Fordjour's attorneys are seeking to have dismissed, is still pending. But it is illustrative of the current state of demand for the artist's work.

Fordjour, now 46, had a considerable climb up to his current prominence. It took 20 years from his first stab at art school to his first museum show earlier this year at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. That followed a commission by New York's Whitney Museum to create a mural near its building. entitled Half Mast (2018). It depicts a crowd of people with some depicted as rifle targets as a commentary on violence in the U.S. against people of color.

The New York Times write-up of Fordjour was occasioned by a current show of his works, entitled "Self Must Die," at New York's Petzel Gallery. It runs through Dec. 19. At a full two and a half pages of a section that ran only 14 pages, that's definitely indicative of "the moment."

More on Black Artists Doing Well in the U.S. at Present

 A couple of posts ago, I quoted Brooklyn sculptor Simone Leigh as saying how amazing it was to be a Black artist at present. My point was that, at least when it comes to the high-culture art scene, the much bandied about notion of "white privilege" appears to have been replaced, for the time being at least, by "Black privilege." In other areas of life, probably not so much.

"Mea culpa," or "it's about time," or "lots of ground to make up," or whatever.

An artist who would probably agree with Leigh is painter Sam Gilliam, a Black abstract expressionist credited with introducing draped and wrapped painted canvases in the mild 1960s.  An example can be seen below.

 

 According to a recent Wall Street Journal Magazine article,  Gilliam, now 86 years old, was for the first time represented by a New York Gallery, Pace, only last year. Apparently as a result, his art appears to be commanding significantly higher prices than before.

"This May, his 1973 "Patched Leaf" painting, for instance, sold for $905,000 against a high estimate of $500,000," the magazine article noted.

A selection of new Gilliam paintings and sculpture will be exhibited at Pace from Nov. 6 through Dec. 19, 2020.

Moreover, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC is scheduled to mount a retrospect of Gilliam's work next year.

"It's a real beautiful ending," Gilliam told the WSJ.

Gilliam is a distinguished artist with a long and productive career and appears fully deserving of wider acclaim -- and greater financial success. I bring this to the attention of readers only because there is so much commentary out there that seems to suggest nothing has changed.

The Arrival of "Black Privilege" When It Comes to the Arts

 "Despite the really horrific climate we've reached, it still doesn't distract me from the fact of how amazing it is to be a Black artist right now,'' Brooklyn sculptor Simone Leigh told the New York Times upon being selected to represent the U.S. at the 2022 Venice Biennale.

She's right about that. 

Even if one only reads the arts sections of major American publications episodically, one thing is crystal clear. Museums, theaters, operas, galleries, the film and television industries etc. are falling all over themselves to feature Black artists and Black subject matter.

In the last couple of years or so, we have repeatedly encountered the phrase "white privilege" -- the notion that whites are showered with benefits, thanks to a county having been founded on "systemic racism." While there may be some truth to that, there are plenty of whites who have not been at all privileged and many of them seem to have voted for Donald Trump on the view that it was time for change. Experiencing now prolonged economic stagnation or decline, they see immigrants and minorities as a threat from below (fears Trump plays upon), but they also feel totally dismissed by the coastal elites who are for the most part, but not exclusively, white.

Many of these people, particularly in the Middle West, are descents of immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island with no money in their pockets and started their American journeys in New York garment industry sweat shops, in coal mines, in lumber camps or on hard scrabble farms. 

But back to the arts.  The pendulum is swinging and many are probably saying it's about time. Blacks in particular, but also other U.S. minority groups, of one definition or another, are finally getting their due. At the extreme of this trend is the "cancel culture" movement -- not just getting rid of statues of Confederate military heroes and removing the names of people like Woodrow Wilson and Flannery O'Connor, deemed to be unacceptably racist, from buildings, but at its extreme, dumping pretty much anything deemed to be "Eurocentric" in nature. We may be back to book burning before it's over, but maybe climate change will get us first.

There's nothing wrong with selecting Simone Leigh -- clearly a sculptor of distinction -- to represent the U.S. in Venice. Interestingly, as the Times article points out, Blacks represented the U.S. in the last two Venice Biennials as well: Martin Puryear, a sculptor in 2019, and Mark Bradford, a painter, in 2017. They also are artists of distinction, but how many points on a line does it take to make a trend, some might ask? Still lots of lost time to make up, others would say.

But as I read the arts pages and material sent to me by various opera, theater and music groups, one cannot help but wonder if, in the current environment, the race, sexual orientation, and gender of artists has a lot more to do with the prominence that they currently achieve than the works of art they produce, many of which are hailed more for sociopolitical messages than for aesthetic values.  But that's another topic. One that I have addressed before and will probably return to.

To be fair, however, aesthetic considerations are a major element in the work of Simone Leigh and her statues can be fairly evaluated on such considerations alone.   

Here's an example - a photo I took of her sculpture "Brick House" (emblematic of the character of a strong Black woman) near the north end of New York's High Line Park.

The bottom line: in at least one area of American life -- the world of high-culture arts -- "Black privilege" has arrived. As Ms Leigh put it: "how amazing to be a Black artist right now."