Oliver Lee Jackson, the People’s Painter
“The Painter” moves expansively but in fits across the second side of Dogon A.D., a pendulous free jazz masterpiece self-released by Julius Hemphill in…
Read MoreKerry James Marshall
With Sharper Tools: Defending the National Endowment for the Arts
The Heritage Foundation and conservative groups like it have been trying to kill the National Endowment for the Arts for decades. Last month, the Trump…
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Invisible Labor and Black Burnout
One might think that the recent swell of interest in black art would have eased some of the burdens faced by those who have…
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“If You Are Black, You Really Are Coming from Behind”: Orders of Visibility in Kerry James Marshall’s “Mastry”
In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. described the collective imagination of black people in America in terms of freedom dreams, and these dreams…
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The Inequality of Contemporary Art
In an 1854 painting called The Meeting, a young Gustave Courbet depicted himself encountering a rich art patron and his servant. Such was the…
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Labor Lost: Okwui Enwezor’s Artworld Biennale
Consuming visual art is conspicuously, if oddly, social. You are inherently distracted, aware of watching and being watched, even, perhaps especially, in the darkened…
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