Noel W Anderson Read Bio Collapse
Noel W Anderson is a Clinical Assistant Professor in New York University’s Art and Art Professions Department, and Area Head of Print Media. Originally from Louisville, Kentucky, he holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Ohio Wesleyan University, a Master of Fine Arts in printmaking from Indiana University, and a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture from Yale University. Anderson’s research considers aesthetics as a means of redressing the constrictive configurations informing the politics of black representation. He has received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, and he recently completed a major residency in papermaking at Dieu Donné in Brooklyn, New York. His essay “Confederacies, Tensilities, Fugitivities: Those Eyes,” coauthored with Andrew Weiner, was published in the summer 2018 issue of October. His essay “Schien, Schein Negro Sun: Black Radical Radiance” will be published in the summer 2019 issue of Effects Art Journal. Anderson’s works have been exhibited at the Studio Museum of Harlem, the Tilton Gallery (NYC), and the Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery (Luxembourg). A major solo exhibition is scheduled for fall 2019 at the Hunter Museum of American Art, located in Chattanooga, Tennesee.
100 octopuses, 3 synthesizers, happy hour, and more
# 99
Echoing Ellison’s protagonist speaking from the hole, the American artist David Hammons presents three objects: Untitled (2014), Bird (1990), and The Door (Admissions Office) (1969). … Developed in the shadow of black folk traditions, these works by Hammons engage the spectator in a series of tricks and games. Through considering the evasiveness (fugitivity) of these works—they paradoxically resist capture, as they enact deception and deadpan humor—we can think about critiques of racialized class; the aestheticization and exhibition of leisure as wealth; the possibilities of a base/black materialism that dissolves class in race; and a continuation of the black radical tradition as established during slavery. Furthermore, Hammons’s black aesthetics absorb, display, rehearse, and reinforce Ellisonian maneuvers of advance and withdrawal in a critique of economies internal and external to black social life. Ellison’s lyricism of blackness as “most-black” reverberates retreat towards a hole. It is from this protective, performative position that Hammons enacts a strategy of darkness-as-darkness. An excessive radical blackness!