TIS03: Black Alchemy: if this one thing is true

also comes as part of a 12 book box set, TIS03

Black Alchemy: if this one thing is true (2020) addresses my thoughts on modern-day conversations around identity, marginality, abstraction, aesthetics, and ontology. I take direct inspiration from fellow artists' words, historical events, and my family archive to create this body of work. As so in past and ongoing iterations of Black Alchemy (2014 - present), my goal is to use Black Alchemy's lens to explore what "black art" is and what a black artist is, concerning the black experience's representation. It also addresses the discourse of photography, and re-questioning social and racial justice, while engaging abstraction as a tool to shift questions of identity within an established, often monolithic historical narrative.  

Bibliography:

1. Frank Bowling: It’s Not Enough to Say ‘Black Is Beautiful’ (1971, ArtNews)
2. W.E.B Dubois: Of Our Spiritual Strivings (1903, The Souls of Black Folk)
3. Charles Millis: White Being Black Being, Metaphysics of Race (2003, Kerry James Marshall: One True Thing Meditations on Black Aesthetics, MCA-Chicago)
4. Adrian Piper: "The Joy of Marginality" (1990, IKON)
5. Hilarie M. Sheets: The Changing Complex Profile of Black Abstract Painters (2014, ArtNews)
6. Martha Wilson: William Pope L. (1996, BOMB Magazine)