Post-Black Is The New Black Series

Laser Cut / Etched Acrylic, Laser Etched Acrylic, Glue

My Englyph series of works features text that is reconfigured in my Englyph writing system. For the New Scope Art Fair New York, 2014, I have created works from my series titled, "Post-Black Is The New Black." The title of the series, as well as the text that forms the artworks, is derived from an excerpt of the introduction to the catalogue for the 2001 exhibition, "Freestyle," at the Studio Museum in Harlem, written by Thelma Golden. In the essay, Ms. Golden discusses the trend she discerned in recent art by persons of African descent: an art that she describes as "Post-Black." I translated the following quote from her essay into Englyph:

"So, at the end of the 90s, Glenn and I began, more and more, to see evidence of art and ideas that could only be labeled (both ironically and seriously) in this way--post-black. Glenn was better at identifying the traces and instances of it than I was, but the moment he said it, I knew exactly what he meant. It was a clarifying term that that had ideological and chronological dimensions and repercussions. It was characterized by artists who were adamant about not being labeled as "black" artists, though their work was steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness. In the beginning, there were only a few marked instances of such an outlook, but at the end of the 1990s, it seemed that post-black had fully entered the art world's consciousness. Post-black was the new black."1

1. Thelma Golden, "Post" in Freestyle exhibition catalog, (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2001).

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