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Black History Month
The Importance of Modern Black Artists in the Canon of Collective HistoryBlack History Month is not only a time of celebration but a period wherein we acknowledge the people most fundamental to the essence of our country, and a time where we reflect on how far we’ve yet to go. If it is widely accepted that artists are the purveyors of culture, then the Black artists in our communities have been elemental in setting the course of our shared collective.
Throughout the history of the African Diaspora, creatives have been purged from and intentionally buried by the canon of recorded memory. An ironic reality is Black art and culture are core to the bedrock of American society, and yet the collective experience is one of constant othering and repression. The importance of Black artists, who have started, informed, and cultivated some of the most significant shifts in our culture, not only in America but worldwide, has been grossly overlooked.
Black History Month exists far outside the celebration of just Black Americans. It dreams of a holistic, collective respect and love of Black culture in and out of the United States. It honors black innovation, art, expression and tradition globally.
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Lisa WhittingtonHarlem Forever , 2020Mixed Media on Canvas91.4 x 121.9 cmView more detailsThe mind of a renaissance woman like Lisa Whittington fundamentally requires viewers to contemplate aspects of social realism in a new, expressive way. Seemingly on a quest to devour the world, Whittington explores different avenues of thought through a variety of media. Thus, it is no surprise that her work continually pays homage to the artists, musicians, and writers on their own offbeat paths, those who have influenced her as she creates her own.
The breadth of Whittington’s work is deeply calculated and heavily coded. She seeks to present the value of documenting life, culture, history, and experience without surrendering depth, her work existing in conversation with both the past and future—particularly the posturing nature of the art world in regard to Black perspective. Her use of iconic Black figures such as James Baldwin and Nina Simone, for example, imbues works with a type of social commentary that is as critically decisive as it is enthralling.
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"I Am A Man A Man I Am", 2017. Mixed Media. 27 × 51.5 in.
It is within the bright and expressive works of Frida Kahlo, Jean Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Jacob Lawrence, Pablo Picasso, Romare Bearden and Vincent Van Gogh that Lisa Whittington’s strongest influences find residence.
Yet, it is Van Gogh’s Starry Night that first captured her young heart and ignited within her the need to paint. Beneath the “rhythmic moving skies and twinkling stars of Van Gogh's world”, a young Black artist was encouraged to create her own worlds upon a canvas. In a 2017 TEDTalk, “What Does Art Want With You?”, she reflected on the ways in which his work consumed her: "nobody had ever given the wind color until Vincent Van Gogh did that for me."
Both Van Gogh and Whittington command color in a way that transforms pain and hardshipinto an undeniable, incandescent beauty, and an expression of the vitality of life. Her work in particular finds a deep somber energy and actualizes it through vivid color; pieces like I Am A Man A Man I Am and Under A Soprano Sky use grim expressions, bright contrasting colors, and condensed compositions to instigate these feelings.
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Lisa WhittingtonAfter Saturday Night Comes Sunday , 2019Mixed Media61.0 x 50.8 cm
The early history of what would become an African American identity is found in the story of thousands of African people who were captured and sold into slavery across the New World. Lisa Whittington has a number of works that touch upon this truth, such as Another Country and This Morning, This Evening, So Soon. They offer interactive conceptual spaces wherein she explores the importance of remembrance and documentation, cultural celebration, and beauty of life.
As a Black, female artist in America, Lisa Whittington's voice exists in the context of the historical canon; her body of work is vital to the disruption of the monocultural understanding of history, while simultaneously altering our current record-keeping habits with the inclusion of multiple voices. This artist is not just a purveyor of culture, she is a new keeper of history. -
LEARN MORE ABOUT LISA WHITTINGTON
