nu- informal indicating an updated or modern version of something
Currently, the way the narrative of art history is framed, the privileged body is a white body. And because that’s the Italian Renaissance body, the Western European body, that’s where the tradition of art history as we understand it, comes from. That’s what we understand to be the ideals of beauty, ideals of grace, ideals of form, all those things.
And so, a part of what I’m doing is making work that functions in those same capacities, but that centralizes the Black figure. So that’s in the paintings I make, and in a lot of the photography I do, the artist we curate” is that blackness is non-negotiable in those works. It’s also unequivocal — they are black — that’s the thing that I mean for people to identify immediately. They are black to demonstrate that blackness can have complexity. Depth. Richness.”