The flag was meant to mobilize and unite all of the people of the African diaspora. These were the colors of the Black Liberation Flag created in 1920 by Marcus Garvey, the leader of the Pan-Africanist movement, and members of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. 1990 in Harlem), says Tuliza Fleming, the museum's curator of American art, "challenges conventions of art historical cannons." The conceptual artist David Hammons (above c. An African American flag was Hammons' response and on a napkin, he drew an American flag and identified the red, black and green colors. And we still are."įor the exhibition, Braun told the artist that he "needed something special to install outside the building," perhaps using the flagpole, as a way to express "a kind of liberation" for Black art. We spoke about confusing the boundaries between what's expected and what isn't. "He pointed my special attention to Sun Ra. "We exchanged thoughts about the art world, also about free jazz, Ornette Coleman, Thelonious Monk and Cecil Taylor," Braun explained in a statement. When Braun finally caught up with Hammons, the pair quickly found kinship. The art historian Kellie Jones, who is one of the few to have conducted an extensive interview with the artist, suggested Braun try the American Academy in Rome. “The word ‘elusive’ sticks to Hammons like a Homeric epithet,” The New Yorker’s Calvin Tomkins once observed. The artist routinely avoided such ventures. Hammons, says Thames, “is a singular figure in the African American canon because he’s the first Black artist who was accepted totally by the white canon.”īraun, for his part, had been trying to identify the best Black artists in America for his exhibition, working at the Schomburg Center in Harlem to research Black culture when he set out to find Hammons. During another meeting, Hammons showed Thames how to rid himself of his schooling and its rules to create real art. Thames confesses that Hammons disrupted his studio practice. It was a private reception where Hammons told the young Thames, who had just graduated from the Yale School of Art, to follow him throughout the night and witness how he engages with the gallery visitors. The artist was sitting in the gallery eating olives wearing a hat inside out. Thames recalls having met Hammons at the Tilton Gallery in 2010. He also addresses stereotypes and perceptions of African American culture” says Tuliza Fleming, the museum’s curator of American art. “Hammons challenges conventions of art historical cannons and defies categorization. He preferred found materials-chains, wires, tree limbs, empty wine bottles and he made art in peculiar places, performances that were outside the conventional gallery and museum spaces- selling snowballs on a sidewalk or crafting sculptures from hair swept up from barber shops. It situates African Americans as the backbone of the country by the labor it took to build this country.”īy the time of Hammons’ and Braun’s collaboration, the artist’s reputation for brilliance and his capricious nature was already well established. “ The African American Flag is a quintessential David Hammons gesture,” says the New York-based artist and curator Felandus Thames. Replicas of the celebrated artwork (above in 2014 at protests in Ferguson, Missouri, following the police killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown) frequently turn up at protests. When asked why he chose to give African American Flag to the museum, Braun’s response was a simple declaration: “Because it belongs there!” The National Museum of African American History and Culture recently acquired Hammons’ African American Flag, one of five in a series, as a partial gift from Jan Christiaan Braun, who collaborated with Hammons for the ground-breaking exhibition “Black USA,” which opened at Amsterdam’s Museum Overholland in 1990. “I can’t stand art, actually, I’ve never, ever liked art,” he famously told an art historian in 1986. The flags were replicas of a celebrated artwork African American Flag, created by the conceptual artist David Hammons, who is recognized as much for his insightful paintings, sculptures and prints, as he is for challenging the art world, and all of its conventions. Rising among the plethora of signs decrying police brutality and pleas for justice, waved the stars and stripes in the colors of red, black and green. In Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, after a white police officer fatally shot 18-year-old Michael Brown, protestors took to the streets.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |