In an age when fact and falsehood are often indistinguishable, The Ease of Fiction is a title that gives pause. The exhibition, now at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, was curated by Dexter Wimberly for the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh, North Carolina. Having been invited to participate in the exhibition’s collateral programming as a speaker during its Los Angeles run, I was mistrustful of the proposition to give way to fiction, abdicating the fight for truth when the very concept is being called into question all around us. On the other hand, a fiction need not contain untruths—perhaps personal and political realities are easier or less painful to understand if represented another way. Finding such other ways of understanding was the focus of my talk with participating artist Sherin Guirguis in December 2016, and it is a question I wish to explore further here.

The Ease of Fiction, 2016; installation view. Courtesy of California African American Museum. Photo: Andreas Branch.

The exhibition of four artists at the California African American Museum incorporates nonlinear narratives, representation, and abstraction into its definition of “fiction.” Yet for the most part, the subject matter mined by the artists is historical or autobiographical. As such, the underlying assumption is that fiction might be truth offered under a different name. In Guirguis’ large-scale paintings on paper, the Egyptian-born artist makes reference to the mashrabiya screens at Huda Shaarawi’s residence and in the windows of the Cairo train station where the early-20th-century feminist activist removed her veil in defiance of the mandate that men dictate the terms of her body. These are verifiable historical facts and real places. Still, the rich, drip-streaked marks of Guirguis’ paintings, and the soft glow of vermilion that emanates from behind their intricately cut surfaces, suggest an alternate understanding that prioritizes intuition, embodiment, and affect over official narratives.

One truth that proves to be a fiction is that of cultural uniformity among communities of African heritage, a notion promoted through midcentury Pan-Africanist and Caribbean discourse as a counter-narrative to the totalizing universalism of European cultural values. Such idealizations of Africa overlook the continent’s racial, geographic, and linguistic diversity, resulting in well-meaning but primitivizing assumptions from Americans of all races who fail to recognize the cosmopolitanism of the continent. The Ease of Fiction is notable because it expands CAAM’s constituency of African Americans to include artists born in Africa who later emigrated to the United States. Their inclusion brings a vision of Afropolitanism—of a multicultural, urban, globally connected continent—to an institution anchored in America’s Black traditions.

The Ease of Fiction, 2016; installation view (detail: Guirguis). Courtesy of California African American Museum. Photo: Andreas Branch.

The large paintings of Meleko Mokgosi reference postcolonial narratives in his native Botswana as well as South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Working in the scale of history painting, Mogosi shows us destitution amid a livestock famine, contrasted with the Edwardian elegance of a state affair. His historical remix emphasizes the abandonment of ancient, agricultural ways of life in favor of developing the urban landscape and urbane culture. Afropolitanism’s utopian narrative of global mobility and development has an underside, which Mogosi reveals, as public manipulations and official lies are exposed to be the machinations of petty individuals.

The Ease of Fiction, 2016; installation view (detail: Mogosi). Courtesy of California African American Museum. Photo: Andreas Branch.

Nigerian-born ruby onyinyeche amanze uses drawing and painting to imagine highly detailed interior landscapes populated with spirit animals, astronauts, and powerful women. Her texture-rich works exude a sparkly energy, referencing fashion and advertising images through photo transfer alongside graphite, ink, acrylic, and colored pencil. Though less overtly political than Mogosi, amanze also speaks the language of the contemporary African city—built from the hope and disappointment of postcolonial promises and state-run development schemes, and now developing, erratically, at an explosive pace. Animism collides with consumerism in a space of boundless expectations and false starts. Less focused on research than Guirguis or Mogosi, amanze experiments with psychedelic visuals and visionary poetics. Her truths are personal ones: unstable, untranslatable, and unassailable.

ruby onyinyechi amanze. Kindred, 2014; graphite, ink, pigment, enamel, photo transfers, glitter on paper; 80 x 78 in. Courtesy of Tiwani Contemporary, London, and the Artist.

Duhirwe Rushemeza, born in Rwanda, uses materials including iron oxide to reflect on the specificity of place in a globally interconnected world. Her works in the exhibition display the liveliness and hybridity of the Afropolitan youth, full of color and vigor. The thick impasto surfaces of her abstract paintings and sculptures suggest accumulations of material, experience, and loss. Though as turned on and tuned in as any other Millennials on Earth, young Africans must also contend with the legacies of recent wars, famines, and epidemics. Rushemeza’s work emerges from the conditions of “carrying on” under such circumstances, and is ripe with a life force that defies them. We need not hide our pain in order to power through it.

The Ease of Fiction, 2016; installation view (detail: Rushemeza). Courtesy of California African American Museum. Photo: Andreas Branch.

In the coming months and years, Americans will learn new truths about ourselves and the world around us. We will experience firsthand the self-inflicted failures that plague postcolonial regimes. The revolutionary optimism that swept in a new regime lasts about a decade, after which a bitter awakening from years of ethnic factionalism reveals that a few clever opportunists have absconded with the nation’s spoils and left a splintered public holding the bill. So as we in the nation’s cities prepare for the petty tirades of our tyrant-in-a-teapot President-elect, and for the political knee-capping we are to receive as bulwarks against the Gentrifier-in-Chief, we can do more than hope that our cities will remain fortresses against the homogenization and corporatization of our culture. We can adopt an Afropolitan consciousness that recognizes multiculturalism as the very nature of an urban polis.

#Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.

The Ease of Fiction is on view at the California African American Museum through February 19, 2017.

Leslie Hewitt. Make it Plain (2 of 5), 2006.

The Pew Research Center caused a stir this week when it released a study portraying the Millennials, those who came of age during the first decade of the 21st Century, as the most even-tempered generation in recent history. Unlike the Baby Boomers and Gen X-ers, the Millennials have sidestepped almost all reactionary impulses. “They look at themselves and they say, ‘Our generation is quite different than our parents’ generation.’ But they don’t say it with any rancor,” Pew president Andrew Kohut told NPR’s Robert Siegel. “The only thing they criticize the older generation for is their lack of tolerance.”

This sounds suspiciously rosy, even toothless, as though, by some accident of history, a whole generation of nonjudgmental diplomats emerged at the exact moment the U.S. entered Iraq. But the Pew study has more bite to it than Kohut suggests. Refusing the spectacle of rebellion that your parents’ generation reveled in is another way of breaking history’s patterns.

After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy, on view at the California African American Museum in Exposition Park, revisits 1968 through the work of African American artists who grew up in its wake. None of the included artists—most of them belong to the last leg of Generation X, even though their art-making careers coincided with the rise of the millennium—were adults when Martin Luther King Jr. and JFK were shot down, or when the Black Panther Party peaked. And none of them pretend to have any precocious insight into history they didn’t experience. What they do quite well, however, is acknowledge the still-opaque role the past plays in the present.

Hank Willis Thomas. The Liberation of T.O. I’m Not Goin Back ta’ Work for Massa in dat’ Darn Field, 2003/2005; lightjet print.

Leslie Hewitt, “Make it Plain”, 2006

Leslie Hewitt’s large-scale photographs and sculpture also reconsider images of the past, but her considerations are more intimate. In the Make It Plain series, Hewitt combines loosely connected historical objects in an attempt to piece together a history different than that of sit-ins, protests,n and riots. In the second of the five photographs in the series, Hewitt has placed two worn books, representing two divergent perspectives, on a shelf: Black Protest: History, Documents, and Analyses, 1619 to the Present and the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. An empty frame leans above that, and a photo of a ’60s era gathering, flipped on its side, hangs above the frame. Another photo of two men hangs on the wall to the right. It’s like an impossible game of connect the dots; the relationship between the objects is buried in a palimpsest of history that could only be decoded by those who have read the books and were there when the photos were taken—and even they might struggle.

In his recent book Timothy, essayist Verlyn Klinkenborg mentions how easy it is to “walk through the holes” in human perception. It’s hard to overlook the big events, the ones that cause fires, change laws, and are embedded into history books. It’s harder to look between the spectacles and find the threads of truth that have slipped through. Hewitt and Thomas are looking through the holes.

After 1968 also features work by Deborah Grant, Adam Pendleton, Jefferson Pinder, Nadine Robinson, and Otabenga Jones and Associates.

Jeff Sonhouse. Installation view (from left to right): "Papi Shampoo," Mixed media and oil on fiberboard; "Mateo Manhood aka Buzz Kill," Oil on fiberboard; "Decompositioning," Mixed media and oil on fiberboard; 2010. Courtesy Martha Otero.

Leslie Hewitt’s Grounded is a staircase that goes nowhere. I saw it at the California African American Museum last winter in After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy, a show about the ripples of the year a jailed Huey P. Newton said “we’re hoping the master dies” and Joan Didion experienced socio-politically induced “nausea and vertigo.” All artists included were born in the last 42 years, after 1968.

Because I walked between the wall label and Hewitt’s sculpture twice, the gallery attendant asked if I understood the art. Caught off guard, I asked, “Do you?”

She said she did, then told me what was more or less a parable: back in the ‘60s, my father and hers might have worked for the same company, lived in company houses, and been offered tools to refine these houses. To get their tools, they might’ve stood in lines, my father in the “whites only” line, hers in the line for black employees. Mine might have gotten one set of tools, hers another. Her father’s wouldn’t have fit together correctly and he might have complained to the bosses, but they would have shrugged, and said, “Those black people never get it right.” Then he would have done what he could, building the pyramid-like, non-functional staircase with its angled railing.

Though weirdly precise, this story sidesteps one key fact: Hewitt’s Grounded is the work of someone who wields the “wrong” tools like a pro. It turns non-functionality into a cool exercise in stylish lyricism, a way to control the way you’re being controlled and an f*** you to the powers that be.

Jeff Sonhouse, "Mateo Manhood aka Buzz Kill," Oil on fiberboard, 16 x 13 ¼ inches, 2010. Courtesy Martha Otero.

Jeff Sonhouse’s paintings are stylishly controlled, too. On view at Martha Otero Gallery, the cameos of masked men indulge in pattern and texture. The subject of Gravity’s Lawlessness, for instance, wears a lemon and ultramarine diamond print suit, with neck and face masked to match. In Maskulinity Resuscitated, the subject has steel wool curls, and wears pinstripes and oversized cream-colored medallions that fall past the painting’s edge. All the other figures stay within their designated rectangles, however. They’re posed head-on like Van Eyck’s and their dandyism feels like it’s festering on the panel surfaces.

This is Sonhouse’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, surprising since his debut at New York’s Jack Tilton Gallery took place eight years ago, but also fitting. His work has a New York ethos. His men could live in Brownstones and feel at home wandering through the frames of Looking for Langston (if the film were in full color, that is). The show’s title, “Better off Dead,” said the Landlord, has a New York feel to it as well. It’s hierarchical and violent but also vague.

Jeff Sonhouse, "Our Savior," Oil, gouache, watercolor, matches on paper, 22 ½ x 14 inches, 2010. Courtesy Martha Otero.

The eyes of the figures, peeking out of their various masks (or anti-peeking, in the case of Papi Shampoo, who has mirrors in his sockets) are opaque in a way that feels like refusal, maybe a refusal to acknowledge to the amorphous “Landlord” but more likely a refusal to acknowledge vulnerability of any sort.

There’s a Jesus motif in the show,  but it’s not Papi Shampoo with his purple cloak and Nazarene-worthy hair or the protagonist of Decomposition with his large, shepherding hands that play the role of the deliverer. In Our Savior, a small work on paper, a slight man stares out of a rough-cut geometric mask with eyes that are warmer than those of the other figures. The matches that make up his hair leave a halo of soot around his head. He’s turned the “tools” of convention–suits, squares, matches–into vehicles for passive aggression and seems to be toying with letting go of his “stylish control.”  Maybe he’ll self-combust, or lurch forward off the picture plane. If he does, the tension that holds Sonhouse’s show together would collapse, and it’s hard to predict what would happen next.

Leslie Hewitt, "Make it Plain (2 of 5)", 2006.

The Pew Research Center caused a stir this week when it released a study portraying The Millennials, those who came of age during the first decade of the 21^st Century, as the most even-tempered generation in recent history. Unlike the Baby Boomers and Gen X-ers, The Millennials have sidestepped almost all reactionary impulses. “They look at themselves and they say, our generation is quite different than our parents’ generation. But they don’t say it with any rancor,” Pew president Andrew Kohut told NPR’s Robert Siegel. “The only thing they criticize the older generation for is their lack of tolerance.”

This sounds suspiciously rosy, even toothless, as though, by some accident of history, a whole generation of non-judgmental diplomats emerged at the exact moment the U.S. entered Iraq. But the Pew study has more bite to it than Kohut suggests. Refusing the spectacle of rebellion that your parent’s generation reveled in is another way of breaking history’s patterns.

After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy, on view at the California African-American Museum in Exposition Park, revisits 1968 through the work of African-American artists who grew up in its wake. None of the included artists–most of them belong to last leg of Generation X even though their art-making careers coincided with the rise of the millennium–were cognizant when Martin Luther King Jr. and JFK were shot down or when the Black Panther Party peaked. And none of them pretend to have any precocious insight into  history they didn’t experience. What they do quite well, however, is acknowledge the still-opaque role the past plays in the present.

Hank Willis Thomas, "The Liberation of T.O. I'm not goin back ta' work for massa in dat' darn field," 2003/2005, Lightjet Print.

Hank Willis Thomas‘ stunningly sleek photographs, culled from advertisements and digitally stripped of all text, dominate the  gallery space’s center. All part of Thomas’ Unbranded, the ads originally appeared between 1968 and the present; Willis has been painstakingly moving  through the history of branding, selecting images that portray blackness or target black audiences. The images create a strange visual paradox. They retain the staged melodrama of the initial advertisements yet their deliberate serialization makes them feel like specimens in a study, each something to get close to and pick apart. In Willis’ 2006 rephrasing of a 2004 Peace Corps ad, unambiguously title Don’t Let Them Catch You!, young black children, who might have been from Harlem as easily as Brazil or Niger, leap  into a muddy pool of water as if on the run. A blurry haze covers the whole image, romanticizing the picture’s narrative and recalling too-close-for-comfort episodes in US history in which African-Americans have fled authority. The most disturbing aspect of  Thomas’ images is their ability to cleverly manipulate history’s visual tropes while still living in the realm of glizty glossies that suggest history doesn’t matter.

Leslie Hewitt, "Make it Plain", 2006

Leslie Hewitt’s large-scale photographs and sculpture also reconsider images of the past, but her considerations are more intimate. In the Make it Plain series, Hewitt combines loosely connected historical objects in an attempt to piece together a history different than that of sit-ins, protests and riots. In the second of the five photographs in the series, Hewitt has placed two worn books, representing two divergent perspectives, on a shelf: Black Protest: History, Documents, and Analyses, 1619 to the Present and the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. An empty frame leans above that and a photo of a ’60s era gathering, flipped on its side, hang above the frame. Another photo of two men hangs on the wall to the right. It’s like an impossible game of connect the dots–the relationship between the objects is buried in a palimpsest of history that only those who have read the books and were there when the photos were taken could decode, and even they might struggle.

In his recent book Timothy, essayist Verlyn Klinkenborg mentions how easy it is to ” walk through the holes” in human perception. It’s hard to overlook the big events, the ones that cause fires, change laws, and are embedded into history books. It’s harder to look between the spectacles and find the threads of truth that have slipped through. Hewitt and Thomas are looking through the holes.

After 1968 continues through March 7th. The exhibition also features work by Deborah Grant, Adam Pendleton, Jefferson Pinder, Nadine Robinson, and Otabenga Jones and Associates.