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The RISD Museum announces two new exhibitions and the release of a companion issue of Manual: a journal about art and its making.
Defying the Shadow
November 20, 2020–June 6, 2021
Defying the Shadow presents images by Black artists and of Black figures that resist the consumptive impulses of looking. As anti-portraits or visages that challenge the impulse to be known, comprehended, categorized, or easily identified, these works oppose a historical narrative of dispossession and domination that continues to violate the humanity of Other-ed bodies. By examining how Black subjects operate in and against contemporary political systems—and their constant negotiation of surveillance and the risk of violence—this show considers the defiant body as not only a site of possibility, but also a challenge to authoritative systems of knowing, including the white-supremacist function of the traditional gaze. Beginning with Sojourner Truth’s abolitionist portraits stamped with the slogan “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance,” these assembled works—ranging from 19th-century photographs to contemporary prints—focus on the appearance of shadows in formal and metaphorical settings.
Black Flyyy
November 21, 2020–May 2, 2021
In Black Flyyy, six short films and videos by artists including Sophia Nahli Allison, Bree Newsome Bass, and Charles Burnett explore self-revelation, craft, legacy, and ancestral knowledge(s) in ways that center Black narratives and challenge white cultural hegemony. These dreamlike meditations consider cultural traditions of and from the African Diaspora related to the meaning of the word “fly,” focusing on style and originality and making reference to stories of human flight or return to homelands. From stories that undermine stereotypes of Black abjection to Afrofuturist provocations that reimagine memory, these works engage themes of movement, imagination, transcendence, spirituality, and the supernatural.
Black Flyyy and Defying the Shadow are curated by Anita N. Bateman, PhD, former Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow, Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs.
Manual 14: Shadows
This anti-visibility is not the same as being invisible, rather it is the power to operate against systems of imperial domination, including the gaze. It asks: How do we force the gaze to surrender? What if explanation were off the table? By enabling a petit marronage that can be expressed in the visual and symbolic use of shadow, the gaze is challenged.
This issue of Manual and the accompanying exhibition (opening at the RISD Museum fall 2020) posit that the right to opacity de-burdens contemporary work by artists who identify as Black and/or queer and/or feminist and/or non-binary and/or OVER IT—whatever sociocultural constriction “it” signifies. Opacity extends to artists who are simply not interested in explaining themselves or offering the emotional labor that is expended for inclusion. This right says, “I have given enough.” It also legitimizes and reclaims the shadow as a place of refuge, instead of being a place from which to escape. –Anita N. Bateman
The RISD Museum’s fourteenth issue of Manual shines a light on the shadow, centering the Black body as a site of possibility, liberatory self-awareness, radical non-conformity, and joyful defiance. This issue serves as a companion to the exhibition Defying the Shadow.
Manual 14: Shadows opens with an excerpt on the shadow from W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, followed by an introduction by Dr. Anita N. Bateman, who elucidates: “Operating in the shadow comes with a legacy of resistance, both in spiritual and ideological forms.”
From the Files
Dominic Molon ponders the meaning of waiting for Nick Cave’s Soundsuit to arrive.
Artists on Art
Akwaeke Emezi eats the sun, removing the shadow by removing the light.
Shuriya Davis sings from Butterfly Hymnals That Won’t Disturb the Pleasant: Complacency, and Other Lullabies.
Kelly Taylor Mitchell reminds you that Black people don’t owe you shit.
Double Takes
Rashayla Marie Brown and Matthew Shenoda celebrate the love in Ming Smith’s Romare Bearden, New York, NY, 1977.
Leslie Wilson and Emanuel Admassu consider sideways glances and multiple meanings in Aïda Muluneh’s Age of Anxiety.
Andrea Achi and Gina Borromeo grapple with racial types, missing handles, and the long lost history of an ancient bust of an African child.
Kevin Quashie and Sade LaNay take a peep at Black privacy, gender, and sensuality in Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Last Portrait of the 18th Marquess.
Portfolio
Radiant works and glorious shadows from across the RISD Museum’s collection.
Object Lessons
Makeda Best highlights Calvin Burnett’s 1964 portrait of Sojourner Truth, and the photos Truth herself commissioned.
Melanee C. Harvey studies the preliminary works for and final version of Aaron Douglas’s Building More Stately Mansions.
Tayana Fincher casts new light on a 19th-century Nubian sandal, its largely obfuscated earlier history, and its purpose in a museum collection.
How To
Kate Irvin lays out how Harmonia Rosales and Fe Noel collaborated to Design the Black Imaginary to Counter Hegemony (B.I.T.C.H.).
Oluremi C. Onabanjo illuminates how Carrie Mae Weems haunts history.
