...Faridah Folawiyo [email protected] The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure . National Portrait Gallery , London February 22 — May 19 , 2024 Copyright © 2024 by Nka Publications 2024 portraiture black figure London exhibitions REVIEW...

...Dagmawi Woubshet In his long, illustrious career, James Baldwin never wrote a full book on Africa. The figure of Africa, nonetheless, was a recurring one in his corpus—a figure that would change significantly over the course of his writing. While Baldwin’s early representations of Africa follow...

... of one body over another. Everything Matters presents a selection of Poynton’s single- and multiple-figure paintings to address the depicted postures, expressions, and possible iconographic and historical elements in each painting, along with similar details supplied by artist and viewer, all of which...

... tradition of figurative sculpture; and the work of many non-Western artists and art students he met in the United Kingdom. Nour’s artistic development portrays an artist deeply engaged with the shifting social, political, and cultural ground beneath his feet. The result has been a remarkable body...

...Anjalie Dalal-Clayton The British artist Sonia Boyce was a central figure in the British Black Arts Movement and has in recent years achieved widespread critical acclaim within the field of British art. Although she is now known for her performative and collaborative approach to art making, she...

... devastated Detroit and Newark, NJ, she painted Die expressly for the show. The wall-size canvas depicts an interracial cast of clean-cut antagonists trying to kill one another. Although the painting represented the kind of large-scale, politically motivated figuration that had been out of favor since...

... been black-and-white, he pushes the relationship between the figures and the symbols further. He also uses two figures rather than one, generating a sense of energy and depth. But some recent paintings included in this exhibition show a dramatic shift into color, an emphasis on tone rather than line...

... about the actual historical figure of Nanny, though the continued presence of the Maroon communities keeps her memories and legend alive to the Jamaican population. I argue that Cox uses her own body to give Nanny a visual presence, presenting her as a military strategist, warrior, and sexual female...

...Omar Kholeif Dr Omar Kholeif maps out the life and practice of the path-breaking British-artist, Lubaina Himid RA CBE (born, Zanzibar 1954) through a considered engagement of her multivalent creative output—in visual art, writing, and exhibition-making. A leading figure in the British Black Arts...

... that the artist’s work leverages the expressionist possibilities of identity, figuration, and history on the abstract legacies of linguistic conceptualism. A continuous examination of representation grounded in the implacably figural substrate of race, gender, sexuality, and history, Ligon’s art highlights...

... places Sinclair’s work into several machete-related contexts and considerations. While a machete is not an expansive surface on which to execute a figurative painting, Sinclair achieves a copious amount of expression in these works, creating images that range from cartographic depictions of Hispaniola...

... while incorporating Western themes implies a precontemporary creation, an egalitarian existence in a story from which the black body is painfully absent. When a work of art depicts a figure (mythical, biblical, allegorical) the narrative is identified with the help of pictorial codes. Eros would...

... the symbolic use of the body by asserting that certain bodies are emblematic of magic and mystery in the belief imposed on certain historical figures, such as Josephine Baker. The artist therefore uses Baker’s image as a leitmotif for a series entitled The Goddess Projects , where she is rendered...

..., public appearances, and colleagues and comrades, which sometimes are indistinguishable from the other, but through the portal of a radical jazz figure. As such, Stuart Hall makes himself unfamiliar, if only for the shortest moment, and in so doing he compels us to think of him on other terms, on deeply...

... reclaims the African subject in portraits that contest traditional, colonial, and contemporary histories. Ultimately, Kehinde Wiley’s dialogue with Africa complicates identity and representation, repositioning the African subject within the history of art to challenge the normalizing power of figuration...

... title, Phoebe Boswell: For Every Real Word Spoken , is taken from Audre Lorde’s essay, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” (1977). The exhibition is composed of a series of eight drawings of eight female figures, an animation, and ephemeral drawings and texts on the gallery walls...

... and distributed throughout the Francophone world), I show that popular print facilitated the emergence of global black consciousness by showcasing figures of literal mobility such as women working in sports and transportation sectors. The magazine’s format celebrated individual achievement and featured short...

..., and architecture, it involved practitioners such as Simon Okeke, Selby Mvusi, Pearl Primus, and Pancho Guedes; scholars such as Saburi O. Biobaku, Hugh Tracey, and Janheinz Jahn; and leading figures from the international art world such as Alfred H. Barr, William Buller Fagg, and Udo Kulterman, as well...

... dedicated to preserving and witnessing political and social injustice as well as critiquing apartheid-era censorship and systematic erasure of evidence. Msezane’s embodied rebuttal to colonial and patriarchal figurations of power proffers an alternative vision of the event in which new subjectivities appear...

... manipulation of multiple figural stereotypes. However, key moments in the afterlife of this image suggest that this work was mobilized to perform exactly that function of “selling Africa,” which it so insistently parodies. Copyright © 2019 by Nka Publications 2019 Samuel Fosso The Chief: He Who Sold...