Taking Stakes in the Unknown: Tracing Post-Black Art

Description

In 2001, Freestyle, a survey exhibition curated by Thelma Golden at the Studio Museum in Harlem, introduced both a young generation of artists of African descent and the ambitious yet knowingly opaque term post-black to a pre 9-11 and pre-Obama world. In Taking Stakes in the Unknown, Nana Adusei-Poku contextualizes the term post-black in its socio-historical and cultural context. Whilst exploring its present legacy and past potential, she examines works by artists who were defined as part of the post-black generation: Mark Bradford, Leslie Hewitt, Mickalene Thomas and Hank Willis Thomas - and, by expanding the scope of the definition, the Black German artist Philip Metz. Cover Contents Acknowledgement I. Introduction II. Destabilizing Meaning 1. The Textures of History 2. What is the script of your time? 2.1 I am everything and now what? 3. Economies of the Double-bind 3.1 ADS IMITATE ART, ART IMITATES LIFE, and LIFE IMITATES ADS. 3.2 The Economy of Blackness in Unbranded III. Historical Entanglements of Black Revolutionary Women 1. De-Interpellating Interpellation—Visual Disobediences 2. How do I look? (Very good, I must say I am amazed!) 3. O my Body, will always remain in question!—Reviewing the Fanonian Moment 3.1 The Colonial Gaze 3.2 Entanglements IV. Heterotemporality as a Way of Understanding the Contemporary 1. Reclaiming our time 2. Riffs on Real Time and the present that is fleeting though captured 2.1 Possible Presents 3. Rewind Selecta 4. Hetero-temporality V. Paradox Synchronicities 1. Contextualization 2. IWHISHIWAS or WISHIWASHI ? 2.1 Taking a Closer Look 2.2 Disposed Desires 2.3 Retrospective Introspectives 2.4 Visual and Temporal Polyphonies 3. From Leitkultur to Leightkultur VI. Abstract Facts 1. Enter and Exit the New Negro 1.1 Quare—“Built in History” 2. Enter and Exit the New Negro—From Invisible Visibilities 2.1 (Qu-)hair Politics and Material Connections 3. Enter the New Negro 3.1 Exit the New Negro 4. Ambiguity as Chance—Abstraction as Means of Identity 4.1 hidin’ like thieves in the night from life, Illusions of osasis makin’ you look twice 4.2 Norman Lewis—the not quite “invisible man” of abstract expressionism 4.3 Playing by the Rules—Turn off the light! VII. Post-Post-black VIII. Bibliography