Social Works II

Rick Lowe, who founded the renowned art-based community platform Project Row Houses in Houston in the 1990s, is represented by a series of cartographic paintings, first shown in Social Works, commemorating the notorious 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, where white supremacists in Oklahoma razed the city’s prosperous Black-owned Greenwood District. Kahlil Robert Irving’s sculptures positioned on low wooden platforms pay homage to the nocturnal city as a place both of witnessing and community. Hand-pressed black ceramic tiles allude to a rich material history, emulating the rugged texture of asphalt streets littered with aggregate and discarded objects and while suggesting the night sky.

What black is this you say? (2020–21) is a series of poignant oil and watercolor paintings that artist and architect Amanda Williams produced as an identity-affirming response to the most recent tumultuous racial events in the United States. Alexandria Smith also confronts the present moment using allegory. In shaped wood panels featuring sinuous cut forms that delineate abstracted, disjointed figures, she investigates the contradictions, uncertainties, and objectifications impressed upon the Black femme body.

Photographer Tyler Mitchell, whose soulful practice slips seamlessly between autonomous art and commercial assignments, conjures intimate dreamscapes that celebrate Black family, community, and youth. Shot on location in Georgia, where he was born, Mitchell’s new series considers notions of home and leisure commonly associated with the American pastoral idyll, charged here with the ineluctable racist history of the American South. Artist and designer Grace Wales Bonner creates conceptual shrines to Black Atlantic style and history, stressing the ritualistic importance of learning about and connecting to one’s cultural roots. Manuel Mathieu’s roiling canvases record slippages, erosions, and transformations of memories of his native Haiti; eschewing overt representation, his abstracted approach illuminates the vagaries of history with acute psychological insight.

Social Works II underscores the conscious engagement of these artists with the cultural present where numerous social factors have converged to produce a heightened urgency for artists of the African diaspora to utilize space as a community-building tool and a means of creating visionary possibilities.