:: TRADITION CONTINUES //

“…why should I care about African American history if it can’t get me to my future?”

??In a land of reinvention and rebellion, of overnight social media success, what role does modern art in a museum setting play? These are questions I ask while driving the two hours from New Haven to see nico wheadon’s latest project, Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere: Freedom Dreams in Contemporary Art. The art works selected for this exhibition at The Dorsky Museum at SUNY New Paltz are visionary, sardonic, contemplative, funky, tactical, methodical, marvelously simple, exquisitely complex.

??There is a diverse array of wonderful work by artists Derrick Adams, The Black School & Bryan Lee Jr., Phoebe Boswell, Jesse Chun, Abigail DeVille, Zachary Fabri, Ja’Tovia Gary, Golden, Kordae Henry, Iyapo Repository, Jarrett Key, Yashua Klos, Miguel Luciano, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Zora J Murff, Jordan Nassar, Christie Neptune, Wanda Raimundi Ortiz and Xaviera Simmons.

??The show title draws from dual inspirations, poet extraordinaire Jayne Cortez, who suggests that the space between dreams and reality is ‘somewhere in advance of nowhere.’ ?The other contribution is from cultural critic Robin D.G. Kelly, in his work ‘Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination,’ writing that “without new visions, we don’t know how to build, only what to knock down.”

??These new visions, performed histories, constructed alternatives, challenge not only me as a viewer – to slow down and not consume as I normally do at gallery shows – but also challenge mainstream art world histories that silently situate works by artists of color as derivative strategies. ?This may have been true for generations coming out of art school, but the current crop of artists and makers exercise an unapologetic faith in production, evidence of things unseen, that bring others along into their struggle.

??As should be with all exhibitions, the works in this show need to be seen in person, experienced in the round, in dialogue with each other, so you know why the curator placed these nouns near those verbs. ?A Pharoah Sanders riff or ironic Ruby Dee monologue would call and say I was missing out, missing the point, if I left partway through the time-based experimental videos.

??The answer to my above question is that great museum shows, that dare to allow the cultural alongside the collectible, have the potential of performing psychic reparations upon the scarred and impaired. ?Until the material disparities, if ever, are addressed, artists in advance of nowhere provide communities and the self, much needed care. Beyond that, there is the unspoken reminder that there is much left to do.

:: WHY FREEDOM_DREAMS //

??Viewing the exhibition, I am struck by how the artists forward hope – as opposed to some fictioned science — what Octavio Butler in ‘Parable of the Sower’ painted for us as the remaking of the self and community after slaughter. ?A revolutionary insight into the year 2024, her updated allegory echoes the hope of ancestors taken as forced labor and human trafficked to subsidize the global cotton, sugar, and tobacco industry throughout the New World.

??Today, the men convicted in the murder of Amaud Arbery, were also found guilty of Federal hate crimes. ?Arbery’s strategy of self-care, was to take a jog in his suburban Georgia neighborhood. He did not survive this appeal to fresh air. ?Might the conviction lead to a form of environmental justice? ?Even the National Park Service is coming to terms with the reality some communities infrequently use their spaces due to fear of repercussion or bias.

??The excess wealth generated from those early merchant enterprises went to underwrite universities, libraries, museums, and national parks – where humanist foundational concepts of learning, knowledge, beauty, and nature can be a concomitant psychic terror for people of color. ?To ‘be present’ within that history, descendants of those once enslaved, removed onto reservations, or victims of exclusion acts – requires a variety of strategies.

??Several artists engage us through forms of subversion, which I call Un/Masking, Glam/Buoyance, and Changing/Lanes. ?Un/Masking, involves positing presence through absence, lowering the flag, and frequent misdirection. ?Changing/Lanes is an appeal to movement or The Movement, be it with interactive technologies or spatial navigation. Glam/Buoyance accesses higher realms through the casting of magic spells.

:: Un/Masking //

??The ‘Freedom Dream’ quotes of Jayne Cortez and Robin Kelly prompt new imaginings. ?Still, artists Christie Neptune, Ja’Tovia Gary and Jesse Chun show concern for language, particularly of the gaze, which here I will call the aesthetic. ?To unmask this philosophy, which traditionally privileges a universalized male transcendent bourgeois subject, who views objects of beauty, while also the object of beauty, viewing ‘other’ subjects – also unpacks whiteness.?

??Christie Neptune?uses video to evoke Audre Lorde’s provocation that the master’s tools can’t dismantle his house. ?In “The Colorline” she stages an unceremonious lowering of the flag. ?A silky green fabric, worthy of any Renaissance painting, is unhinged from its structural support, with clear melancholy on her part. ?Might dismantling bring us reluctance, implicate our own paths to power? ?As the fabric hits the ground, we see an underwhelming neighborhood parking lot.

??Two photographs.?The first depicts the artist in simple black shirt, pants, and shoes. Her posture is as a dispassionate victor. ?The green fabric in her hand drags the ground like a captured flag. In another image, the artist is absent. ?The cloak remains, lying flat on the street. Two stalks of sugar cane lean against an abandoned warehouse like lost props.??Sugar, rum, West Indies trade, human trafficking come to mind. ?In her void, Christie calls out systems of portraiture that hide power.?

:: Changing/Lanes //

??Dreaming freedom often intersects with how we process the systems that are set in place to confine us. ?After a lawsuit, the Aztec sneaker was reintroduced as the Cortez by Nike. ?The role this dude Hernan Cortes played among Aztec ancestors either didn’t matter or was not widely known. ?The shoe was enthusiastically adopted by Los Angeles gang culture in the late 80s – a pair of Cortez was the go-to footwear on date nights – and has received wide appeal since.

??Schwinn named the bike, the Pea Picker – in common usage, a derogatory reference to poor, migrant workers during the Great Depression. ?Photographer Dorothea Lange snapped her iconic portrait of a 32-year-old mother of seven while she traveled picking crops. ?After the Pea Picker, Schwinn released in 1970, the Cotton Picker.?Claiming irony, the ‘muscle’ bikes were designed as kid-sized chopper motorcycles complete with banana seats and ape handlebars.

??Artist Miguel Luciano poetically manipulates such metaphors of dis/empowerment and consumption. ?In the exhibition, he places the hyphenated rally cry Pal-an-te, in neon for emphasis, in white along a gallery wall. ?Translated ‘moving forward’, Palante connotes cultural presence – as with the brightly colored artifacts in the exhibition – but also political sovereignty, as Puerto Ricans remain torn between remaining an American territory (colony) or becoming a State.?

??The signage serves as a backdrop for a 1971 Schwinn Cotton Picker elevated onto a silhouette isle of Puerto Rico rimmed in aquatic neon, national flag flying.?Here, street style announces ones claims to belonging.?Boricua pride insists upon American insider status, whether defiantly, by donning leather biker vests valorizing fallen heroes, such as activist Felecitas Mendez – or by romantically straddling a festively pimped out stingray while popping wheelies on the block.

:: Glam/Buoyance //

??An aspect of Afrofuturism is the adornment of the Black body as cultural technology. ?The works in this category feature crowns coiffed with unique headgear, pearls, and bracelets, even a flotation device composed of a queerly maned unicorn.?This Glam/buoyance crafts the body as beyond body, as enchantment. Protagonists own the pose, direct, and shine the light. ?Those once erased or prisoners of history, envision themselves in the process of making it.

??Bathers, often depicted as women washing by the lake or scrubbing in their boudoir, were a popular theme of modernist artists such as Pablo Picasso, Paul Gaugin, Paul Cezanne, and Henri Matisse. ?Their works capture an exteriority of the female body in repose and innocence, while projecting a new interiority at a time – a metaphor for a rapidly reshaping western industrial society, throwing held truths into upheaval.?

??Derrick Adams paints scenes I would like to call Bathers.?In his submission from the Floaters series, five figures sit inside a swimming pool. Their sanctuary is rendered in colorful hues, constructed collage-like in painted two-dimensional slices.?These ‘bathers’ are familiar, together by shared divinity, tequila spirits and Black queer unicorn identity. Theirs is a communal baptism, where freedom is not futured, but part of the everyday. The rendering of hair and skin tonality is rich in personhood.

??Three figures, he/him, face away, keeping they/their joy private. The two we see, display she/her wide eyes, full lips, and bright white teeth, full of joy – a Blackness often caricatured in art history.?At the center of the composition, amidst elements of earth, sky, and water, we see a scene grounded and real, Instagram-able. But also, a ritual of visualization, a tableaux and talisman to empowerment and agency.

??Like with cubism, these figures exist through surfaces. ?Picasso’s work frequently borrowed African markings and sculptural planes to upend Western tradition and shock bourgeois patron culture.?With Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, his brothel nudes picture cultural alienation as a primitive and ugly difference.?Adams’ Floaters offers a redemptive modern-day variation, where Black figures are mythic, transcendent, buoyant, about the magic.?

??In conclusion, Freedom Dreams inspire and catalyze engagement with new technologies and materials. ?They also depict attempts to form connection across identity, territory, and desire. I find it appropriate that so many of artist here are invested in Black futures and look forward to where all these investigations will lead. I applaud their visions that challenge us to build something new and the curator for assembling such a bright constellation.

::

Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere: Freedom Dreams in Contemporary Art

Curated by nico wheadon

February 5 – April 10, 2022

Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, SUNY New Paltz

Alice and Horace Chandler Gallery and North Gallery