Twenty-two Black artists pointing in different directions
THE TIME IS ALWAYS NOW Artists reframe the Black figure The Box, Plymouth, June 29 to September 29
THE TIME IS ALWAYS NOW Artists reframe the Black figure EKOW ESHUN, EDITOR 192pp. National Portrait Gallery. £35.
IN “DEARLY BELOVED OR UNREQUITED? To be ‘Black’ in art’s histories”, an essay published in 2021, Sonia Boyce and Dorothy Price investigate how artists of colour have generally been treated by critics, collections and researchers. Noting the many “phrases in the English vernacular that mark out difference from whiteness” – including “Black and minority ethnic”, “culturally diverse”, “diasporic”, and “people of colour” – the essay lays out how, with the transatlantic slave trade and in the discourses of colonialism, “‘Black’ bodies became matter out of place, interlopers to the recognizable norm”.
Boyce knows something of the change, galvanized by the Black Lives Matter movement, that has begun to correct that wrong. In 2022 she became the first Black woman to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale and won a Golden Lion. Of course, the “economy of racial signs”, as Boyce and Price put it, is still at work in the art world, as in society at large, but the power of the people who designed it is not what it was. The canvas is being redrawn.
Among those helping to redraft it are the twentytwo artists whose work appears in the National Portrait Gallery’s touring exhibition The Time Is Always Now. The title, taken from an essay on desegregation by James Baldwin, argues that reflecting on history and its legacy in the present is never not relevant. Now in Plymouth, then travelling to Philadelphia, the exhibition presents about fifty works by artists from the African diaspora working in Britain and the US. In three sections, addressing three themes, it seeks to “question what it means to visualise the Black body” and to prioritize “seeing from” and “seeing through” over “looking at”. Ekow Eshun, who devised In the Black Fantastic at the Hayward Gallery in 2022, is its thoughtful curator.
The works that open the first section, Double Consciousness (W. E. B. Du Bois’s term to describe the Black person’s “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others”), are at once quite easy and quite hard to contemplate. Two screen prints by Lorna Simpson, the first Black woman to represent the US in Venice in 1990, overlay in rich blues images of models from Ebony magazine; in the resulting facial montage one eye is obscured and the other cannot meet the viewer’s gaze. In Thomas J. Price’s bronze sculpture “As Sounds Turn to Noise”, meanwhile, we see a radiant, dreadlocked young woman whose eyes are closed. Here are works that invite us to look at them yet clearly, demonstrably, resist being look
