In his book Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama writes powerfully of his first visit to his father’s native Kenya, when he was amazed to be in a world where everyone – doctor, lawyer, legislator, chief – was black like him.
Art and architecture students at Washington University, as well as artists and architects from the local community, had a version of this experience last Thursday at a symposium held at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. For one day, everyone – artist, architect, historian, curator, critic – was black.
Not that they could even begin to agree on what that means, starting with the title of the symposium, Architecture, Art and the Experience of Blackness.
“Blackness,” the Chicago-based curator Hamza Walker repeated the topic, emphasizing its strangeness to him. “What’s with that ness shit?”
The New Jersey-based artist Willie Cole said, “Blackness is not a word that was in my vocabulary before today.”
Arkansas-based architectural theorist Darell Fields admitted to using “blackness” in his work, but said, “It is something I am struggling with.”
Seven highly accomplished guests had been invited to discuss their work in the context of something they all, presumably, share: the experience of being black. If anything, however, what they share is a weariness with the experience of being hauled before the public to talk about “the black experience.”
Presenting a retrospective of her work, New York-based architect Yolande Daniels said she is “tired of lectures where people show images of black faces and think they’ve covered it.” Instead, she works in shapes drawn from arraying race-based statistics in graphs and charts. As she said, “I am imaging data that represents black people rather than black people themselves.”
The Atlanta-based artist Radcliffe Bailey described how he had his DNA traced back to Africa “just so I can move forward.” In the end, he identified with his specific ancestors more than with his race. He said, “My work is never so much about race as just having a conversation with my family.”
Hamza Walker said, “Race is an unwieldy topic, especially as an organizing principle.” He should know; he is deeply involved in curating a show titled Black Is, Black Ain’t at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, which opens April 20.
Though they described their experience of “blackness” as different, all seven panelists do share the experience of being black in professional disciplines overwhelmingly dominated by white folks. This was evident at the symposium itself, where Washington University was not able to provide one single black faculty member as host or moderator.
“You’re in an institution, but somewhat isolated,” said Yolande Daniels, who teaches graduate students at Columbia University.
“Then you’re in a larger community of people who also are isolated within their institutions.”
Daniels movingly described her chosen field of architecture as “a struggling through blankness – or, shall I say, whiteness,” which puns on the blank spaces that architects turn into physical structures and the mostly white people paid to do this work.
The Virginia-based architect Craig Barton used the design of Thomas Jefferson’s plantation at Monticello to argue that “the absence of African-American narratives is not so much by happenstance as by conscious and constructed act.”
The panelists also share the experience of having excelled in their fields, despite their relative racial isolation.
Kymberly N. Pinder teaches and chairs a department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Walker bears the blessing and burden of having been identified by The New York Times as one of the nation’s most influential curators. Bailey and Willie Cole share their own blessings and burdens as contemporary “it” artists. Fields (University of Arkansas) and Barton (University of Virginia) hail from relatively less swank academic settings, but their resumes are imposing.
All seven are veterans of elite shows or symposia dedicated to black artists or architects. As such, they keep bumping into one another. Several panelists mentioned someone else in the symposium having been included with them in a previous show or event. This was one elite gig among many for this group.
For this reason, the event – which was free, open to the public, and even came with a free lunch – allowed the local community to get a good look at a group of black artists and architects with widely established success in their fields. Sad to say, one typically has to leave St. Louis to see this many successful black artists or architects.
It was a sobering look. Succeeding in art and architecture means your vocation becomes your job. With the income and sense of accomplishment comes much tedium and competition.
As Yolande Daniels said of one design contract, “The client wanted a black architect. So, basically, I was competing against my good friends to get the job. It seems like I’m always competing against my friends to get jobs. But, we’re still good friends.”
Overall, a picture emerged: unquestionable advances for specific, talented black professionals that has not significantly changed the historical pattern of inclusion and exclusion.
Craig Barton made a vivid point in this regard. He traced the history of what had been the “colored” entrance to a segregated movie theater in Charlottesville, Va. Now, he said, “it’s a VIP entrance for special donors.”
The entrances to the show are still separate and not quite equal, though the rules of separation have changed.
Willie Cole put it another way.
“When Basquiat died, every gallery suddenly wanted one black artist,” Cole said.
“That’s ‘blackness.’”