Brenna Youngblood with Sandra Jackson-Dumont (R), the curator of the show. NATALI WISEMAN
There’s a secret black language on display at the Jacob Lawrence Gallery, put there by the New York artist Steffani Jemison. Hieroglyphs painted in black acrylic on transparent sheets of polyester film are hung on the white walls like long calligraphic scrolls. The scrolls don’t stop at the floor but continue to flow along it resting on low, white pedestals that extend outward. The pedestals are subtle but important. They make it so the viewer only ever sees the black language against a white background.
“I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background,” Zora Neale Hurston once wrote. “Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself”…
