WILLIAM CORWIN: The Aesthetics of Matter is the curated section of Volta. Mickalene and RC , you have zeroed in on the idea of collage, as well as the model of the artist’s collective as a vehicle for change. What historical models are you looking at?

RACQUEL CHEVREMONT: The Dadaists. Political turmoil really brought that movement together and a lot of the work was based around collage. Given the times we’re living in with the current political situation, especially as it relates to people of color; we felt that was a good model to follow.

Do you have any favorites of the Dadaist group?

RC: Hannah Höch.

MICKALENE THOMAS: I think of them as a collective and I don’t necessarily work out of them: it just makes sense to find an historical thread of how one would work when it comes to our political and social endeavors.

You’ve talked about collage as a political vehicle, can you give me your own definition?

MT: It’s making sense of all these things that are in your everyday life, in the sense of using this information—how does one decipher and use this information practically? To make sense of that, you take all of the components and you make it into your own. When you do this you are sourcing very various aspects of society: cultural, metaphorical and spiritual, and combining them in a pastiche; putting them together, which is collage.

For me, that’s what’s happening right now. As an artist in 2018, what type of art is one to make when you have a history of genres? Which genre would you pull from? If you look at a lot of painters today, they’re pulling from various genres trying to find their own voice—they’re trying to authenticate their own language.

RC: The #Metoo movement, Black Lives Matter, and then the political environment as it is, we needed to figure out how to make sense of all this information coming in. That was the other impetus for collage.

And the influx of technology?

RC: Social media, all of it, there are so many things going on that artists are having to deal with; collage is just what you naturally go toward.

MT: It’s a metaphor, something you can’t and shouldn’t always define, but you know it when you see it. For example, Devin Morris: when you look at his work, you would not immediately think of collage; but how he puts together the images, the sets, the space, and the performativity of the work. What’s executed is a photograph, but everything that went into making that photograph is collage.

How did you two co-curate? What was your process?

MT: It was natural: she would bring an artist to the table, I would bring an artist to the table, and immediately [snaps]. As soon as Racquel presented me with the work it was a must, and likewise [with my selections], and some of them we came to together. Naturally, we’re two women here, so I think out of the gate most people would think we’re going to have all women artists, and we would love to do that, but we wanted the work to be conceptually about groups of people, regardless of their gender and background, so you’ll see a really beautiful balance.

RC: There’s an MFA from Yale, then you’ll have someone who hasn’t even gotten a BFA.

MT: Some that are represented at galleries and some that don’t have any representation. There’s a dialogue with all of the work.

RC: It probably isn’t all that well known; we’re starting something called the Deux Femmes Noires. It’s an initiative to help bring exposure, and use our platform and visibility, for artists of color, in particular women. We all know, as a female artist, it’s extremely difficult to get funding for museum shows—a lot of museums don’t show women because of that—and then add to that being an artist of color, and then your odds go up even more dramatically.

MT: There’s a misconception that these funds are available, and then when you get to the door, you realize they are available, just not for you.

RC: We’re trying to bridge a little bit of that gap. We can’t do it all, but we’ve gotten to a point in our careers where we want to give back. We’re starting it off with this show at Volta.

Switching to the exhibition “Figuring History” at the Seattle Art Museum; it’s very rare to have the artist and the muse at the same table. I want to investigate that relationship. Several images of you, RC , are in the show, so I think it’s very a propos that we discuss this. How do you work together as the artist and the subject, what is that relationship like?

MT: It’s fantastic. It’s magical.

RC: I don’t actually feel like a subject, I feel like it’s a collaboration and we’re working together on it, so it’s wonderful.

You’ve been a subject many times before, Racquel, so you’re used to this in a way, being the inspiration.

MT: There was a lot of apprehension on my part to make and show some of her images. It’s for my own selfish needs, you know, not wanting anyone else to have any other images of her but me. A lot of these works come from previous bodies of work such as photographs and collages that I made three years ago, but I just had the creative space and the emotional space to gift them now. It is a gift from me to make a work of art of my partner, the person I’m in love with, the person who I’m growing with on all these different levels of partnership.

Do you feel like you’re giving part of that away?

MT: I was, but now I think it’s a great gift, because I’m showing the world what I feel and my connection to this muse, if you will. It was a lot of apprehension and resistance to present those, I was holding onto them for a long time.

Racquel, do you feel this apprehension, almost jealousy, in sharing this as well?

RC: I wish we could own all of them, but I do love that they’re going out there into the world. I am, we both are, very protective of them and where they end up, if they end up somewhere other than in our home. A part of it initially was she was nervous to paint me.

Were you nervous to be painted?

RC: I wasn’t because I love her work.

MT: I wake up with her, I was on eggshells: what if I paint her and she hates it? Or, the depiction is wrong, or something is awkward and she can’t stand it? All of that anxiety is around someone you love, you want to put them on this high pedestal. You want them to see it, and when they look at it, it speaks; it resonates; it glows.

What if she doesn’t like the image? Has that ever happened?

Both: No!

Mickalene, you’ve said that when you entered art school, you entered an abstract painter and you left a figurative painter. What caused that transition? What instilled that new found idea of the power of the image?

MT: Photography.

RC: I’m going to sneak in—I’m not sure she considers herself a figurative painter…

MT: Yeah, the use of figuration: image-maker, or one who uses representation. When I think of figurative painting I think of Eric Fischl and all those painters. I don’t necessarily look at the figure in the same way. There’s a different way of looking at, and seeing, the body that interests those particular practices that doesn’t necessarily interest me. But, I respect them. There is an element, a thread of that which comes into the work, but it stops at a certain point and I put it on the shelf because it’s about representation and the subject. What the subject embodies to me is most important: how I come into that is through photography. Using photography as a reference tool to make a painting was an avenue to how I approached using representation. I was making these crazy abstract paintings and I enjoyed making them. I received a pre-requisite letter in my mailbox as everyone does after their first semester at Yale that recommended that I take a photo class. I took that photo class and it changed everything.

I would never have thought that photography would be this huge facet of my work, every aspect from the collage to the installation to the painting is about photography, and I never imagined I would work out of that as a language. Thinking about materiality, concepts, and how I execute my work has lead into video and film. Though there are various disciplines I use in my work, there’s still that underlying thread that connects, and…that…is…collage [laughs]

Racquel, what is the motivating factor behind your practice as an advisor and a collector?

RC: I work within a narrow spectrum in the art world. I essentially collect African American, diaspora, and latino work. I began advising because there weren’t a lot of people that looked like me that were collecting. There are a lot of people that look like me who had the means, but didn’t have the interest. I thought it was really more that they didn’t have the [art] education and they weren’t told this was something you did. I began doing these salons in my home in Brooklyn where I would invite young people to come and listen to artists, curators, and other collectors speak.

While I was modeling I was travelling a lot. I wasn’t a party girl, so I wasn’t at night clubs. First off, I was reading investment magazines, and about art. I would go to every museum in every city I could—I was in Europe for a long time. The first few pieces I purchased were French artists, but then I got back to the U.S., to New York and really focused. I said “I’m going to build a collection: what do I want it to be when I’m no longer here, what do I want it to represent?” Mickalene was one of my early purchases; Laila Ali, Kehinde Wiley.

My passion is to make sure that people who look like us have a part in this history, and I felt they weren’t even being excluded, for the most part; because they weren’t even attempting to get involved.

The Aesthetics of Matter features Christie Neptune, David Shrobe, Devin Morris, Didier Williams, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Tomashi Jackson, Kennedy Yanko, Troy Michie. Figuring History also includes the artists Kerry James Marshall and Robert Colescott

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July 12 to August 24, 2012
535 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues,
New York City, 646 230 9610

In “Post Black America” can an all-black art exhibition still bring novelty to the artistic discourse, especially when the artworks solicit consideration for an arguably exhausted topic – what does the black body symbolize in contemporary society?  Before answering this question, let’s recall the most comprehensive and perhaps infamous iteration of the concept:  Thelma Golden’s 1994 Whitney exhibition, Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art. The contemporaneity and symbolic character of O. J. Simpson and Rodney King ensured the theme’s gravitas and relevance, in excess and when contrasted with present day representations of black masculinity e.g. Air Force One, it is evident that times have surely changed.

That said, in 2012, an all-black show with an all-black focus can still facilitate provocative and relevant debate, especially with so acclaimed a curator as Mickalene Thomas and featuring an artist of such unflinching socio-political determination as LaToya Ruby Frazier, a stand-out in this year’s Whitney Biennial.  The exhibition is dominated by portrait photography from both African and American Artists: Derrick Adams, Frazier, Jayson Keeling, Deana Lawson, Zanele Muholi, Clifford Owens, Mahlot Sansosa, Malick Sidibe, Xaviera Simmons, Hank Willis Thomas and Mickalene Thomas herself rounds out the group exhibit with her own authentic and conceived Polaroids. The title, tête-à-tête, denotes a private conversation, with implications of a candid encounter, and yet the exhibition does not, to quote Jean Baudrillard, “mournfully shoulder the burden of representation.”  The lure to defend or legitimize the black body has given way to the demands of contemporary pathology – the spectacle of the image.  As such, the show glows with vivacious enthusiasm: golden brown, deep-mahogany, and sable skin is presented with arousing desire and in high definition.

The exhibition’s foremost portraits confront the viewer with the gaze of a homo-erotized male: Clifford Owens’ Anthology (Jacolby Satterwhite). The artist commissioned instructional text from various black American artists, exercising carte blanche to interpret the submitted texts which comprised the bases for a series of arresting and authoritative performances at MoMa PS1 last winter.  This performative “score” (Owen’s term) is presented as a print in which the upper two-thirds contain the void of a bare white wall while Owens places himself in the lower third, his dark body fully nude but partially concealed by flowing white linen and sprawled across a bed in the manner of countless historical muses.  Though presented as an instrument for sexual pleasure, Owens’s face exudes a palpable indifference to this objectification. The simple but richly layered and historically engaged image touches the exotic “celebration” of Robert Mapplethorpe’s Black Book (1988) and scrapes the abject protest of Lyle Ashton Harris’s Construct #10  (1989).

This salacious image is counter-balanced by cerebral works that continue the investigation of performance and collaboration, conveyed through diverging motifs: mother and child, couples, and shadows of the self. In Nuit du 31 Dêcembre (1966/2002) Malian artist, Malick Sidibé presents a modestly sized black and white gelatin silver print that captures a group of fully-dressed party-goers. This seemingly authentic and spontaneous photo depicts a quiet and ordinary human story, one that wades in the mind deeply and resolutely for it paradoxically contradicts standard depictions of “celebration” while still confirming to its conventions.

The photograph from Xaviera Simmons’ closes the exhibit with the same vibrancy with which it commenced.  Her piece investigates the myth of the landscape and the body through implications of fractured and loaded narratives.  In Untitled (Pink), 2008 a pigment print, the artist performs the role of the female protagonist whose voluminous afro carries associations of seventies insurrectionist Angela Davis.  The female figure stands in a fluorescent green patch of land, overgrown by dense forest and tangled vegetation. The character wears an haute couture, flamingo colored dress fashionably tailored to expose her breast. With accuracy and force the chic warrior princess swings a long thin branch in the direction of what can best be described as an ominous and animated mound of vegetation whose sculptural contours bring to mind…a large gorilla?  The image is saturated with textured meaning, sophisticated absurdity and aesthetic pleasure.

The most relevant works in the exhibition not only present the black body but point specifically to the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and history. Despite the overall celebratory nature and consumability of tête-à-tête there is still something of “the shock of the new” at play here, the historical discomfort that accompanied the rise of modern art.  The black body alone provides the key ingredient for this shock and when combined with contemporary society’s obsession with the spectacular image with all its connotations of glamour and desirability, a peculiar tension is created.   In a system of exchange-value the work in tête-à-tête simply brings the white or non-black body face-to-face with its inverse — the “other”.  But, to paraphrase Emmanuel Levinas, the other is an unknowable object and cannot be made into an object of the self.  Thus, this exhibit joyfully presents a condition without remedy—the black body.

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