Thinking about Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s portraits of imagined black men and women feels especia
Thinking about Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s portraits of imagined black men and women feels especially relevant today, the day after Philando Castile’s murderer was acquitted of his crime. The cop who killed him was found not guilty because of the narrative of danger and fear he projected onto Castile—a racialized expectation of violence that had nothing to do with Castile himself and everything to do with the color of his skin and how it coded him within his internalized white supremacy. Though obviously the stakes are much different, the same operation is at play in how Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings are interpreted by the white mainstream—as visions of black people and not just people, as insertions of blackness into a white lineage, as politically attached to external systems rather than inwardly focused worlds unto themselves. In her lovely review of the artist’s current show in New York, novelist Zadie Smith captured perfectly the haunting magic of her paintings and the violence done to them by such racializing interpretations. “Yiadom-Boakye has inherited a narrative compulsion, which has less to do with capturing the real than with provoking, in her audience, a desire to impose a story upon an image,” Smith writes. “Central to this novelistic practice is learning how to leave sufficient space, so as to give your audience room to elaborate. Yet the keenness to ascribe to black artists some generalized aim—such as the insertion of the black figure into the white canon—renders banal their struggles with a particular canvas, and with the unique problem each art work poses.”Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Jewel, 2012 -- source link
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