Post-Post-Black

Hank Willis Thomas and Mickalene Thomas

The New Black Heavies

Hank Willis Thomas and Mickalene Thomas have crossed paths more than a few times. Both gained attention among emerging artists, at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2006. Both have solo shows in spring 2009. Their names alone are sure to link them in search engines and alphabetical listings.

That year in Harlem, their work stood at opposite ends of the museum. One used painting to play against and pay homage to perhaps the most respected African American artist, Romare Bearden. The other used new media to appear almost artless. One showed a woman at ease in a bright interior. The other showed young men in action, on a playground at night. While the woman artist's work has grown glossier still over time, the male artist sends even more mixed messages.

That group exhibition insisted on the diversity of black identity, art, and experience, and both artists have an uneasy relationship to that theme. They focus as much on gender as race—their gender. They both update African American art for street fashion, and they both show off—and (speaking of post-post) a postscript picks up Mickalene Thomas letting her guard down. She also curated "The New Black Heavies," and the show's title is only partly ironic. If the Studio Museum helped popularize "post-black" art, they could stand for a post-post-black art. Are heavies the new black?

I yam what I yam

Hank Willis Thomas can sure think on his feet. As usual, he races through enough sources, styles, and media for half a dozen artists, as if trying them on for size. As usual, too, he takes care to leave himself out of the picture. He could be denying an identity imposed by others or riffing on it. He could be a shape shifter—or just another young artist with a sudden reputation and a short attention span. Whichever I choose, he might well agree.

Obviously the choices have special relevance for black identity. At the Studio Museum in "Frequency," Thomas's stop-action video had the tensile movements of a street fight. And its playground confrontation ended with a death. The artist's career has had the same combination of raw materials and speed, even if it has not yet settled on something as memorable. Perhaps the ideal artist, like Joan Miró in the 1930s, refuses to settle for anything, especially authenticity. When I look back at Thomas one day, will things become as clear?

I Am a Man sums it up twenty times over in black and white. Not for him the stark sobriety that Glenn Ligon brought to the same title. The text takes off from the sign carried by striking sanitation workers in 1968. Martin Luther King, Jr., came in support to Memphis, where he delivered "I've been to the mountaintop" one day before his death. Thomas in fact appeared in "After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy," a show at the High Museum of artists born after that date. Here he runs through the text as question (Am I a man?), exhortation (Be a man), and even the boast of a stammering Old Testament god (I am I am)—before ending somewhere between assertion and resignation (I am amen).

Not that anyone will read the Liquitext on canvas from left to right. Other works mime much the same rapid-eye movements in neon. The elements of Pitch Blackness off Whiteness, for one, blink on and off in capital letters and in unpredictable combinations. At the other extreme, Thomas casts transitory or unsettled accounts in stone. He has incised both The Slate Is Clean and Everything Must Go in polished granite. They rest in the center of the floor, like stumbling blocks or tombstones.

These things flirt with identity, like Rashid Johnson, but also with the meaningless. As far as I can see, an appropriated photo of Little Richard is meaningless. At other times, the artist insists a little too obviously on the message. Paired photos of women picking cotton come with the legend It Didn't Jest Grow by Itse'f. A view of the open sea, framed by the cutout of an Absolut vodka bottle, risks both at once. The Middle Passage stares down luxury consumers, like those who hang around with Chelsea galleries and emerging artists.

In the side gallery, John Bankston definitely stays on message. He just has not quite finished filling it in. He paints happy figures in a landscape, with the white spaces of coloring books. The figures seem to belong in the nineteenth century, and so do the stiff realism and the garden utopia. Are they Africans or newly arriving slaves, and how deeply does the irony of their good cheer cut? Perhaps the white spaces need some color by numbers.

Heavyweights

It took a long time to get from "Black Male," the Whitney's notorious 1994 show, to a black president. Does that leave a black woman to play the heavy? As it turns out, "The Brand New Heavies" look quite familiar and not even all that heavy. Deal with it.

Jessica Ann Peavy, Lauren Kelley, and Deana Lawson invoke the usual choices—big mamas and invisible daughters, bitches and Barbie dolls, nuts and sluts. Peavy backs her star with the word BITCH, in hot pink on red. Kelley follows a black Barbie on stop-action video. Yet both actors have to look after themselves, without getting up on a pedestal or down in your face. Peavy's may well be bitching, but the soundtrack muffles her words. Kelley's Bay Area librarian has a long day ahead, through a risky male encounter and a troubled sleep.

The videos approach diaries, as with Sophie Calle, but they withhold audible confession. Mickalene Thomas, the curator, compares Peavy to Chantal Akerman. Both use pauses to arrest the progress of vulnerable lives, perhaps their own. Peavy's A Conversation Piece has two channels, intermittently sharing an image. A wall-sized video grid follows another tough woman through a day of obligations and pleasures, and who is to say how one counts cooking, smoking, alcohol, and sex? She stirs her food with a cigarette.

They can look after themselves, but within some serious constraints. That "bitch" is in close up, with huge hoop earrings, but her body is bound in yellow police tape labeled caution. Kelley's heroine has to do a lot of listening—to young men almost as constrained as she by a preposterous stack of books, their own predatory instincts, or her nightmares of revenge. Lawson's photographs come closer still to powerless heavies. Her black women may look surly, but also bruised, battered, and small—dwarfed by the space of a room and a sofa. Her Advertisement looks more like fashion shot, but spots mar the photo's surface.

In just three shows, the gallery has gone for photos that manipulate outsider stereotypes. Aaron Hobson a month before had too many men in cowboy hats and cars, although a yuppie somehow ended up with his tie loose in the East River. Maybe white men think they get to carry on.

Nearly fifteen years after "Black Male," black masculinity still gets more attention than it might well wish—and not just with Hank Willis Thomas. Kehinde Wiley and Barkley L. Hendricks, who appeared in "Black Male," have had the last two shows at the Studio Museum. Audrey Flack had to transform herself into Marilyn Monroe for "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution." Lorna Simpson has shown women playing house, but as history, as fugitive slaves. This time, black women do get a life. They just do not let on for sure whether to call it funny, sad, or defiantly vulgar.

Doubting Thomas

I may have had conflicting feelings about Hank Willis Thomas and "The New Black Heavies." Yet they have plenty in common—and not just Thomas's selecting the art. Both stubbornly pursue African American stereotypes, often to the point of stereotyping themselves, and yet both make it hard to pin down black artists. Left to her own devices, the curator of the "heavies" embraces stereotypes with a very different kind of determination. She just wants to strut her stuff.

Mickalene Thomas has put black women on the couch before Deana Lawson—and not just in Freudian terms. In the Studio Museum's second show of emerging artists under Thelma Golden, she gave an interior out of Romare Bearden a glitzy surface and a pornographic twist. She refuses Bearden's Cubist aspirations, but also updates his jazz riffs for new pop-culture inflections. She is also feminizing them. That glitter comes not from any old beads but from rhinestones. And a woman on her couch loves every minute of it.

All of a sudden, that woman is everywhere. While curating, Thomas also had pride of place along with such old white heavies as Tracey Emin and Marilyn Minter in "The Glamour Project." In the back room, Brigitte Lacombe exhibited photographs of each contributor, making the artist part of the beauty myth, too. (They all looked pretty good.) At the Brooklyn Museum, on the way to Hernan Bas, another of her rhinestone and acrylics leads off contemporary art. She has gone in no time from emerging artist to contrarian to new museum acquisition to star.

If that narrative sounds like recent collecting at its worst, it continues in Chelsea in a solo act. She multiplies her portraits, but her subjects have become more and more detached from the flatness of the collage interior. Apparently, they want to claim the razzle-dazzle as their own. Often the woman has the thrusting hips, three-quarter profile, and glance toward the sky of a pop star. Think of the infamous Obama portrait but in drag and putting on weight. Yet another wall adapts Andy Warhol head shots more closely still.

Her allegiances have shifted from Bearden to Warhol and Oprah. You can almost hear her shouting, "You go girl." This time, the back room continues the show with video and photographs. They show her portrait sitters and the work in the making. Rather than documentary, they serve as afternoon TV. Gallery-goers must supply the live audience.

Somehow, on her way from Harlem and the Lower East Side, Thomas has ditched irony altogether along with doubts about race relations in America. "The New Black Heavies" may shrink into a couch, stir food with a cigarette, or wake with fantasies of sex and revenge. Either way, they have to live with the scorn of others and their own nightmares. So, for that matter did Warhol or bad girls in past art. No one has yet offered Artemisia Gentileschi a spot on Oprah. Maybe if she wore rhinestones.

Postscript: all that glitters

Has Thomas gone too far? That may sound like asking whether NASA has gone too far into space or installations use too much electricity, but NASA is facing budget cutbacks. (And come to think of it, Dan Flavin passed on incandescent bulbs long ago.) Thomas can draw on anything from Edouard Manet to the Harlem Renaissance to afternoon TV—and remind you why people find them sexy. She can mix painting, photography, collage, and glitter. She can make nudity a fashion statement or a political one.

Still, for her return to the Lower East Side two years later she seeks something more intimate. The intimacy comes from small collages, pasted with little if any reworking. It comes from the un-self-conscious shapes of cut paper, neither polished nor jagged. It comes from large Polaroids, which combine the invention's history as an amateur's first camera with a dark luster that in a digital age recalls albumin prints more than instant photography. It comes from her sitters, including her own mother. At once confessional and improvised, she hints at the thought process behind all her work.

Then again, Thomas has always insisted on intimacy. From the viewer's perspective, it may just happen to mean forced intimacy. For her wall-sized commission last year for MoMA PS1, she drew on Manet's Déjeuner sur l'Herbe, which forced a sexually charged history of western painting on Paris. She then added stage lighting in the background, a door right through it, and a perfectly accurate subtitle with its own dark-city history, Les Trois Femmes Noires. A larger woman, with still more glitz, was reclining last I looked along an escalator wall at the Modern. Does her latest merely bring that intimacy home?

Not all at once. Hung salon style, one can think of her collage groupings as her largest work yet. (And just try to use "the Salon" and "intimate" in the same sentence.) Its permutations suggest shifting disguises as much as revelation. Indeed, its appropriations lean to those who already quote others, like nudes by Gustave Courbet or a Pietà by Balthus—both of whom hint at lesbian sex or female eroticism. Manet's revision of Giorgione in Renaissance Venice turns up at least four times all by itself.

They hold a surprising intimacy all the same. Sagging breasts refuse to announce a loss of beauty. Collages invent interiors as bright windows onto a personal world. Overlapping picture frames may hold pictures at four or five times the distance, or they may burrow that much deeper within. Even the Polaroids, posing a nude in series with overlapping fabric, look like collage while insisting on the sitter's central place and identity. The show's very title, "More Than Everything," hints simultaneously at an escape from particulars and, as the song goes, "I love you."

The scale and media also acknowledge a major influence all along, while helping to define the differences. Romare Bearden turned late to collage, and Thomas picks up the clarity of his glue and paper. Still, she prefers landscape and interiors to his street scenes, pop rhythms to his jazz, and sunlit color to his black and blue. One can see the show as taking stock, before whatever comes next—and as a huge relief after too many murals, too many reclining nudes, and too much gold dust. Whatever comes next, it seems to say, she will always be more brassy than confrontational. Through decorative arts and personal remembrance, Thomas makes thought and desire visible.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Hank Willis Thomas ran at Jack Shainman through March 14, 2009, "The Brand New Heavies" at Collette Blanchard through March 8, following Aaron Hobson through January 19, and Mickalene Thomas at Lehmann Maupin through May 2, following "The Glamour Project" through March 21. Thomas's next show there ran through October 29, 2011. Both Thomases also contributed to "The Bearden Project" in 2011.