If Black Art, a show at Seattle Art Museum, could be
condensed into a single work of art, it would be a piece that’s not
actually in the show but hanging in the contemporary gallery instead.
I’m referring to Glenn Ligon’s Stranger in the Village (Excerpt),
#7, made in 1997, a painting of black words on a black background,
made in sparkly coal dust and thick oil stick. The words, taken from
James Baldwin’s account of his experience as the first black person
ever to visit a remote Swiss village, are basically illegible. In such
a context, cast as an extreme minority, Baldwin has no voice, only a
color: black. And Ligon takes the moniker of “black artist” to the
literal extreme, making an insistently black work (it’s part of a
series, actually) that refuses to communicate clearly.
Following the history of race relations in the United States, in
fact, might leave you standing in front of Stranger in the
Village. Ligon does not want to celebrate blackness, and he does
not want to protest whiteness. He wants away from the poles of
assimilation and difference. He doesn’t want to be black and proud,
black and ashamed, or black and pretending blackness doesn’t exist in a
post–civil rights era. (He is long past colorblind—that
whole idea, while well-intentioned, was predicated on becoming
blind to certain things, anyway.) Not much later, Ligon and
Thelma Golden of the Studio Museum of Harlem coined the term
“post-black.” And then comes the uncategorizable Barack Obama.
SAM acquired Stranger in 1998, but Seattle is playing a new
role in the national conversation about race, thanks to Sandra
Jackson-Dumont, who was hired two years ago as the deputy director of
education at SAM (after working under Golden in Harlem), and thanks to
an endowment given by the estate of the late artists Jacob Lawrence and
Gwen Knight Lawrence. Black Art is the first themed show in
the gallery that the Lawrences endowed—a gallery permanently
devoted to the issues and artworks of artists of African descent. (It
opened when the expanded museum did.)
One visitor mistook the title of the exhibition for a museological
category. She thought “Black Art” was like “Contemporary Art” or “Glass
Art,” and she assumed all the artists represented in the room are black
(she asked Jackson-Dumont, in fact, whether the curator considered
calling the room “African-American Art”). A quick read through the text
on the wall cleared up that confusion, but presented a more compelling
illegibility, like Ligon’s: Black Art means almost too much to
mean anything at all. In a good way.
In the show, there are black abstractions made by white artists
(Richard Serra), black silhouettes made by black artists (Kara Walker),
a portrait made in black ink of a person of indeterminate race by a
white artist (Mark Tobey), portraits of black people by a black artist
(Whitfield Lovell), a snapshot of black baseball batting helmets by a
white artist (Stephen Shore)—and you only know this stuff if you
know art. The race of the artists is not listed anywhere, and how
exactly would you use the information if you had it? The large,
affecting cutout painting by Randy Hayes of two boxers who look like
they’re walking out of the wall—one black and one not (Italian?
mixed race?)—makes the show’s, and Ligon’s, statement another
way. Victor/Victim, it’s titled, leaving it entirely unclear
as to which word applies to which boxer. (And in what arena—in
the ring, in America, or more personally.)
Does any other generalist museum in the country have a black art
room? What might happen in this room? As an opening salvo, Black
Art opens a broad conversation about the viability of even having
a room for black art, while also, with its unearthing of numerous
rarely seen objects from SAM’s permanent collection, signaling that
this room will represent perspectives that are otherwise buried at the
museum—all of which seems exactly the right place to begin.
Future programming in the gallery has not yet been announced,
besides a solo show for Titus Kaphar next year, but I hope it continues
the complex dialogue begun here and in Ligon’s work and commentary.
What does post-black mean, anyway? In a 2004 essay in
Artforum, Ligon considers the trajectory of (black) artist
David Hammons, who once said he wanted to make abstract work out of
nothing but light, like (white artist) James Turrell, “but we’re too
oppressed for me to be dabbling out there.” After making that
statement, Hammons eventually did make a work of light—of black
and blue light, full of certain associations if you knew his other
work, but maybe not if you didn’t. In response to Hammons’s light
installation, Ligon wrote: “It’s hard to leave your body behind,
especially when your body is always being thrown up in your face. But
being heavy is a motherfucker. The question is: How to remove weight,
to move toward lightness, as Hammons has? How to do this while still
acknowledging the particular history of a body that has been used, as
Stuart Hall suggests, ‘as if it was, and often it was, the only
cultural capital we had’?”
Seattle has fast become a good place for discussion about race.
Although years of work went into their creation, two museums devoted to
telling histories and asking questions about race seemed to appear
overnight this year in the city, both situated smack in the middle of
the ethnic neighborhoods they reflect and record: the Northwest African
American Museum and a majorly expanded, pan-Asian Wing Luke Asian
Museum. Both have made art a central part of their operations, and both
have stunning exhibitions up now (don’t miss being up close to Jacob
Lawrence’s enormous enamel mural, usually seen at a distance in the
convention center, at the former; or George Tsutakawa’s sharp modernist
demi-sculptures, at the latter).
Earlier this month, I spent an entire day at these museums. It was
the day that Hillary Clinton dropped out of the presidential race and
left Barack Obama the only Democrat standing. Are we finally getting
somewhere? 
