Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle. The Sower, 2015; india ink, acrylic paint, and polyfilm on wood panel; 11 x 14 in. Courtesy of Jenkins Johnson Gallery and the Artist.

In the early decades of photography, many Europeans and European Americans employed the nascent technology in conquered lands across the planet to document colonial subjects. These images became historical records, though they were often inscribed with colonial fantasies—subjects were presented as dwelling in prehistory or dressed in attire from cultures that were not their own. This approach to both ethnography and tourism has been widely critiqued, but the resulting documents persist, as do the worldviews built upon them.

Interdisciplinary artist Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle uses reproductions of these antique photographs as sources for one of three bodies of work in Who Among Us… The Art of Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco. The Uninvited Series displays over a dozen black-and-white and sepia-tone photographs of African women on a single wall, each of which Hinkle has reclaimed with ink, paint, glitter, gouache, and collage.

Some of the pieces are kaleidoscopic interventions that adorn the figures with ornate headdresses, body armor, or auras. In The Transfiguration (2015), for example, the portrait of a woman is mostly obscured by a sea of pink protozoan blobs and a web of intricate ink drawings that wrap around her chin and protrude from her forehead. Hinkle gives the woman a regal and fantastical headdress and the power it connotes—if only retroactively, imaginatively. In The Huntress (2014), a woman wearing a barely perceptible smile faces the viewer. Spirals of ink radiate from one of her eyes, creating a mask that covers half of her face, stretching upward and outward. The mouth of a roaring tiger cut from a photograph rests between the woman’s bare breasts. The tiger’s defiant roar seems to represent emotions concealed by the subject’s sardonic smile—emotions she may not have been at liberty to display to the photographer.

Read the full article here.

Mickalene Thomas. Sista Sista Lady Blue, 2007; chromogenic print; 40 3/8 x 48 1/2 in. Collection of SFMOMA; gift of Campari USA. © Mickalene Thomas/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Katherine Du Tiel.

Now on view at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), Portraits and Other Likenesses from SFMOMA asks its audience to consider: What is a portrait? This may seem like a straightforward question, an inquiry more related to the particularities of style and form than to complex historical narratives. But as the thirty-six artists whose work is included in the exhibition reveal, portraiture bears its own troubled relationship to genealogies of violence and erasure that excluded nonwhite bodies from representation in Western art. By asking their audience to consider what “makes” a portrait, the show’s curators Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins and Caitlin Haskell provoke far more trenchant questions about race and subjectivity. How do you define your identity when your physical likeness has been culturally othered? And how do you engage with representational traditions that have historically denied people of color?

The forty-eight works featured in Portraits and Other Likenesses fill the top two floors of MoAD’s galleries and represent a wide range of media, from painting and photography to installation and performance-based sculpture. Many of the works are by African American artists and engage volatile histories of racial violence in the United States. Kara Walker’s bi-paneled charcoal and pastel drawing Daylights (After M.B.) (2011), for instance, depicts a man on safari next to a Josephine Baker–like dancer in a torn skirt as part of a dense visual narrative documenting the exoticization of people of African descent in American and European popular culture during the early 1920s. Kenyan-born sculptor Wangechi Mutu’s mezzanine installation High Chair and Strange Fruit (2005), by comparison, uses less readily charged objects (a spilled and upturned bottle of red wine, a child’s wooden high chair) to create potent metaphors about bodily violence that transcend specific nationalized histories.

Read the full article here.