Huey Copeland (Northwestern University)

In this lecture derived from his forthcoming volume, ‘Touched by the Mother’: On Black Men, Artistic Practice, and other Feminist Horizons (1966–2016), art historian and critic Huey Copeland returns to Glenn Ligon’s Untitled (I AM A MAN) painting of 1988 and to the 1968 Ernest Withers photograph of the posters held up by striking Memphis sanitation workers that inspired the artist. In looking back to Ligon’s work, along  a touchstone for his critical practice, Copeland corrects his earlier writing on the painting in light of subsequent archival research as well as his own entanglement in the artist’s discursive construction. In exploring these questions and their implications for the writing of contemporary art history, he will rely on his and Krista Thompson’s theorisation of the afrotrope, a term referring to those visual forms, such as the iconic poster, that recur within and have become central to African diasporic notions of subjectivity, race and gender in the modern era.

Reparations for Black People Should Include Rest: How do black female artists employ ‘rest’ as an aesthetic motif within their artistic practices?

Janine Francois (University of Bedfordshire / Tate)

The transatlantic slave trade produced racist tropes about black bodies being inherently lazy whilst forcing them into centuries of unpaid labour. One of the many legacies of chattel slavery is the wealth gap, and understandably this is where conversations regarding reparations focus on. However, North American research dubbed the ‘sleep gap’ (Lauderdal  et al. 2005; Gradner et al. 2015), suggests that black people get significantly less sleep than white people, and according to Reiss (2017), this is a legacy of slavery. This paper will problematise reparations by offering ‘rest’ as a pleasure-based alternative historically denied to black bodies and structurally afforded to white ones. More so, it will explore how art/cultural institutions are pleasure-based pursuits as a result of the Enlightenment’s imperialist modernity project which dictates the art canon/history and who ultimately has the ‘time’ to become an artist. By comparing the art practices of Hersey’s The Nap Ministry (2016–19), Knowles’ Binz (2019) and Cullors’ Respite, Reprieve and Healing: An Evening of Cleansing (2019), this paper will discuss how each artist performs ‘rest’ as a ritualised motif and aesthetic, evoking pleasure as both a historicised and contemporary resistant strategy that critiques racialised notions of un/productivity. I will draw on Gilroy’s concept of ‘the Black Atlantic’ (1993), Copeland and Thompson’s ‘afrotrope’ concept (2018) and Brown’s ‘Pleasure Activism’ concept (2019) to discuss how these practices form part of a wider visual and cultural discourse that sits in the context of the #carefreeblackgirl phenomenon; and in particular, how such visuality is re/produced, circulated and consumed within physical and digital cultural spaces.

Afrotopes in East European Art: Self-identification with Africa in the Polish culture of late socialism

Katarzyna Cytlak (Universidad de San Martín, Argentina)

In October 2016, an exhibition of the Senegalese artist El Hadji Sy took place in Warsaw, which was the first solo show of an African artist in Poland. The curatorial board of the Centre for Contemporary Art (CSW) Warsaw made an effort to build a bridge between El Hadji Sy’s work and the Polish context. On that occasion, the CSW displayed an installation tilted Voodoo Africa – a giant board in the shape of the African continent, suspended from the ceiling and filled with rubbish. The installation was authored by the Polish group Luxus which was founded in the 1980s, during a period of fascination with African cultures in Poland. By analysing the controversies that emerged after Voodoo Africa’s display, my paper proposes to focus on the issue of real and imagined connections between African cultures and East European art during late socialism. The paper will especially focus on the strategies of self-identification with African culture at that time, which was manifested by the young painters and artists of the Polish ‘New Savages’ movement. Created to criticise the Polish government, the everyday reality of the People’s Republic of Poland and the conservatism of Polish society, their artworks consisted of multi-layered images inspired by local politics, Soviet visual propaganda, the Non-Aligned Movement and the Rastafari movement. The paper will highlight in which way artworks identifying the People’s Republic of Poland with African countries, or even representing Polish artists as Africans, activated the stereotyped image of blackness as described by Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe.

‘Blackness as Blackface’: Repetition of tropes as political statement in Theaster Gates’ Black Chapel (2019)

Cole Collins (Independent Researcher)

In October 2019, Theaster Gates opened his show Black Chapel at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. The large-scale installation examines a sense of self through repeated tropes of blackness. As with Copeland and Thompson’s defining of the afrotrope, Gates’ ‘negotiation and reconfiguration’ (Copeland and Thompson's 'Afrotropes') of symbols of blackness are amplified by their setting. He presents a vision of blackness, that I will elucidate as ‘perceived blackness’.

The title of this talk comes from a question posed by Gates’ conversation partner, Hamza Walker. Confronted with the idea that ‘black culture’ is one that white people want to consume, he asks if we might consider such displays of ‘blackness as blackface’ (Artist Talk with Theaster Gates and Hamza Walker, Director Laxart (Los Angeles), Haus der Kunst, 24.10.19). The repetition and appropriation of black imagery, iconography, expressions of culture and the popularisation of said cultures might cross the line from admiration to parody; especially as they are co-opted from without the community. This context is further problematised when we consider the almost exclusively American (arguably Chicagoan) context from which the signifiers of race are lifted. Therefore, the viewer must consider the distinctions between ‘African’, ‘African-American’ and ‘black’.

Its placement as an American-centred expression of black identity is also troubled by the context of a German contemporary museum, in a city that is predominantly white and middle class. While Gates claimed in his conversation with Walker that this piece was not reacting to the site of Haus der Kunst and its history/legacy, I believe this context cannot be ignored. As such, this paper will examine these concepts through repeated/juxtaposed tropes in Gates’ Black Chapel and will also consider the problematic (yet welcomed) exhibiting of this work in Haus der Kunst, utilising the concept of the afrotrope to understand the sense of self portrayed within the work.