Fahamu Pecou. Rock.Well (Radiant Pop, Champ) (After Norman Rockwell’s Triple Self Portrait), 2010; acrylic on canvas; 48 x 48 in. Courtesy of Scott and Teddi Dolph and Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina.

Taking the concept of the remix as a theme, the show features forty artists who recontextualize familiar visual forms in their own works. Several works interpret famous pieces from art history and popular culture. As such, the show exemplifies a dialectic model in which the works are synthesized through the artists’ engagements with art history. Instead of focusing on collage and digital media—two formats closely aligned with the concept of the remix—the curators also present works in more traditional media, such as painting and drawing, that evince the diversity of creativity.

In the exhibition, the artworks that plainly cite famous predecessors introduce the idea of the remix. One of the first such works encountered is Fahamu Pecou’s Rock.Well (Radiant, Pop, Champ) (After Norman Rockwell’s Triple Self Portrait) (2010). Pecou’s version of the popular painting replaces Rockwell’s artistic influences (Dürer, Rembrandt, Picasso, and van Gogh) with his own: Muhammad Ali, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Andy Warhol. Bob Thompson’s Bathers (1964) is a scintillating amalgamation of similar erotic scenes painted by Europeans such as Paul Cézanne and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres; Thompson’s insertion of Black bodies into the picture reminds the viewer of the exploitive, exoticist paintings of the late 18th century. Similarly, Robert Colescott’s brilliant and sardonic Between Two Worlds (1992) blurs racial boundaries by portraying the figure in Diego Velazquez’s famed Toilet of Venus (1647, known as “the Rokeby Venus”) as a Black woman with a White reflection; her palpable angst in this scenario anticipates the country’s current inability to reconcile racial differences more than two decades later.

Renee Cox. Liberation of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben, 1998; dye destruction print, mounted on Diasec; 48 ½ x 61 ½ in. Courtesy of the Artist and Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina.

A number of artists use pop-culture references within their work, and the majority of such works specifically engage the facets of the dominant culture that marginalize and caricature Black bodies. Damond Howard’s Untitled Diptych from his Wearing the Mask series (2007) features two large charcoal drawings that juxtapose his own body with a blackface caricature. The artist’s pose mimics that of the inflammatory cartoon, but his performance of it forcefully establishes his own identity as a Black man. Krista Franklin riffs on the infamous album cover of the Ohio Players’ 1975 release Honey, which features a nude woman seductively consuming the eponymous substance. Whereas the original image presents the woman as an object of desire, Franklin’s collage Oshun as Ohio Player(s) (2013) extrapolates from the album cover, portraying the woman as the Yoruba goddess Oshun. Iona Rozeal Brown’s A3 Blackface #65 (2003) is reminiscent of a Japanese woodblock print of a female entertainer: The woman in blackface presents a stark contrast to the typically white makeup of a geisha.

Damond Howard. Untitled Diptych from Wearing the Mask series, 2007; charcoal on paper; each 84 x 57 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina.

In the exhibition’s final gallery is a juxtaposition that encapsulates the central conceit of the show. On one wall stands a massive work by Mickalene Thomas, Three Graces: Les Trois Femmes Noires (2011). Using vivid colors and rhinestones, Thomas’s rendition updates the classical trio of nude figures as a monumental portrait of three powerful black women. Opposite this work is Tarleton Blackwell’s Hog Series CCX: Las Meninas (Diptych) (1999), an imaginative version of Velazquez’s 1656 masterpiece. Replacing the Spanish royal family with his own family—and several hogs—in this exuberant painting, Blackwell positions himself as Velazquez, collapsing the divide between one of Spain’s most famous painters and a contemporary artist living in a small town in South Carolina. Blackwell’s expressive, painterly style and jocular humor contrast with the power and grace of Thomas’ painting, yet both works synthesize facets of the art-historical canon with the artists’ experiences as African Americans in Western culture.

Colin Quashie. Plantation Monopoly, 2012; mixed media; 20 x 20 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina.

With a multitude of works on display, the exhibition presents the results of this dialectical model. In an essay for the catalog, the independent curator Jonell Logan emphasizes that “the artists participating in the exhibition are not borrowing from western culture; they are of western culture [sic].”[1] This distinction is crucial to understanding the work of artists who have historically lacked access to mainstream institutions. The nuance elucidated by this show will help as curators continue to erode the barriers and mythologies that persist in a global art world.

Remix: Themes and Variations in African-American Art is on view at the Columbia Museum of Art through May 3, 2016.

Live !, 2013. Acrylic, ink, and gold leaf on wooden panel. 72 x 60 in. Image courtesy of the artist and Salon 94 Freemans.

Brown works out of the personal tradition of a repetitive attempt to merge a fetishization of Japanese and African-American culture, thereby cultivating a mixture of projective fantasy and recollective myth. introducing. . . THE HOUSE OF BANDO, on view through April 25 at Salon 94 Freemans, presents a series of portraits of Benny and Javier Ninja and Monstah Black; these legendary voguing performers collaborated on Brown’s critically acclaimed dance epic the battle of yestermore. . . at Performa 11. no one’s ever gonna love you, so don’t wonder, which ran through March 29 at Edward Tyler Nahem, featured Brown’s repurposed examination of shunga, the specifically erotic form of the Japanese woodblock painting tradition of ukiyo-e. These modern shunga feature a series of heterosexual couplings of Japanese courtesans and royalty sporting a variety of signifiers of an African-American aesthetic, along with blackface makeup deliberately painted over bluish skin.

Brown’s work pays great attention to style. The installation at Salon 94 is symmetrically arranged according to the color of the dancers’ outfits, and each line, painted or drawn directly onto wood, is clean and deliberate. The artist’s commitment to a specificity of technique often associated with the deft, graphic movements of graffiti and street art corresponds to the Kabuki sense of deliberate aesthetic gesture in what seems to be a very tactical simile.

As the artist’s gallery page notes, Brown frequently draws parallels between the intercultural juxtaposition of her paintings and her “artistry as a DJ,” and her artistic practice involves a process of “self-sampling and remixing. . . [creating] endless permutations of representations and meanings.” [i] Brown’s work claims to be a subversion of the original traditions that it mines for its stylistic quality. But remixing is not necessarily subversion—and subversion cannot simply be read as a 180-degree flip of the original. The permutations of Brown’s subjects do not seem endless, but rather quite specific and even finite. Remixing is a postmodern construction that requires a new subject to emerge from the constituents of previously present elements. But as this “newness” is, in fact, merely a re-constructed product of the old, such mixing risks translating as didactic and over-produced.

Pod 222: The Reunion (Song of Solomon 5:10-11), 2013. Acrylic, marker, ink, krink, and graphite on wood panel. Diptych 60 x 48 in. each. Image courtesy of the artist and Edward Tyler Nahem.

Brown seeks to articulate contemporary concerns regarding the economy of fetish, dissecting the commerce and resistance of the black aesthetic image in popular culture. But I am interested in what it means to transpose blackness as a fetish onto mythical, ancient subjects. The subjects of Brown’s investigation into Japanese culture are rarely contemporary; instead, the artist uses established and ancient Japanese tradition in order to elevate black popular culture to the language of myth. In the development of these myths, Japan itself is relegated to an idea, to a stylization. Brown has spent time in Asia and as a guest artist in Japan studying Kabuki drama technique. She does endeavor to discuss a more current Japanese trend, ganguro (literally translated as “blackface”), in which Japanese youth adopt the slang, dress, music style and, even, skin tone, of black culture. However, this examination is an undercurrent that is not yet fully visible on the surface of her work. In investigating how blackness is globally fetishized, we must ask what Brown seeks to accomplish through her admittedly self-conscious cultural appropriation.

Brown’s blackface constructions examine race as a performative gesture versus as an inherent and precious tenet of identity. Implicit in the language of the statement, “no one’s ever gonna love you, so don’t wonder,” lies an allusion to the storied economy of revulsion and praise towards the black image via its different cultural contexts. Brown’s endeavor to construct new myths, to elevate and love the Self by re-constructing it in another/an Other, may thus be read as a fervent and essential practice. Both exhibitions feature idols and couplings made totally unreal—and this unattainability affords Brown’s subjects power. The search for this power is the motivation behind Brown’s ritualized chopping and screwing of her own original material. This work yearns to be a part of a certain canon, to fabricate its own canon, and to thereby insert itself back into a fantasy pocket of history.

introducing… THE HOUSE OF BANDO is on view through April 25 at Salon 94 Freemans, 1 Freeman Alley, New York, NY 10002