Making the Case for the ‘Post-Black’ School of Art

“Freestyle,” a survey of works by 28 emerging African American artists, opened to rave reviews last May at the Studio Museum in Harlem. New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl deemed it “a fine, fresh exhibition,” largely free of “political correctness and theory-think,” and praised curator Thelma Golden as “a superb judge of quality.”

Peter Plagens of Newsweek applauded the artists’ “collective passion and grit,” and said the show “puts the museum on the map not only as a place to see some good contemporary art, but as an institution that might help lead it away from its current fascination with the adolescent side of pop culture.”

In the New York Times, critic Holland Cotter viewed “Freestyle” as an important new look at “the notion of what ‘black art’ means in a country, a neighborhood, even an art world where racial balances are shifting.” In terms of museum surveys of new art, it was the spring season’s “showcase to see.”

Amid the kudos, the show also set off a buzz about “post-black” art, a term Golden coined in the exhibition catalog. She posed it as “a clarifying term” for the work of “artists who were adamant about not being labeled as ‘black’ artists, though their work was steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness.”

Los Angeles art aficionados now have a chance to judge the exhibition for themselves. “Freestyle” opened Friday at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, where director Elsa Longhauser is looking forward to “a very resonant show” that she hopes “will really galvanize the artistic community, the collecting community and the art-going public.”

The eclectic show encompasses everything from paintings composed of unorthodox materials--including Mark S. Bradford’s panels of permanent-wave endpapers and Kori Newkirk’s landscapes of plastic beads and artificial hair-to video installations by Rico Gatson and Sanford Biggers. National in scope, “Freestyle” includes four artists who live and work in Southern California, four who were born here and seven who were educated at local art schools, she noted.

Longhauser said she welcomed an opportunity to work with Golden, a high-profile, 34-year-old curator who became deputy director for exhibitions and programs at the Studio Museum in January 2000 after a decade at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Perhaps best known for “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art,” a controversial examination of provocative stereotypes that appeared at the UCLA Hammer Museum in 1995, Golden is “an amazingly gifted person who does not shy away from difficult issues,” Longhauser said.

Calendar caught up with Golden at her office in New York, where she talked about the conception and evolution of “Freestyle.”

Question: What was on your mind when you began to organize the show? Did you have specific goals?

Answer: When I came to the Studio Museum, [director] Lowery Sims gave me a big charge but a blank slate. She had a vision of the museum being at early middle age. The issues of growing up and getting professionalized were behind us, so we could stretch out and begin to create a foundation for the next 30 years. That includes an endowment, expansion, any number of things, but also redefining the role the museum could play.

When this museum was founded, it took on the role of institutions four times its size. It saw itself as the primary publisher of work on African American artists and the organizer of major retrospectives, which weren’t being done in the mainstream museums. I wanted to pull back from that a bit because now we are in a moment when the Jacob Lawrence show is traveling the country and will open at the Whitney in a couple of weeks; the Romare Bearden show is being done by the National Gallery and will travel the country. That’s the scale of what those shows should be, but what could we do? It seemed to me that we could present new work by new artists.

My mind was already on a big group show because when I left the Whitney I was working on the [2000] biennial. I was in that mode of taking the pulse, talking to lots of people, seeing artists in different cities, spending a lot of time in the art schools. Some of the artists were already in my mind, not for “Freestyle,” but their work had stayed with me. I wanted to do the show early in my tenure here to create a new energy for this institution, and I thought this would be the best way to do it.

But the show also came out of personal issues. I have been associated with a group of artists since we were very young and they are having retrospectives now. I’m involved in those kinds of shows but seeing another generation in art schools. I wanted to know them in the way I had known that generation of artists in the ‘90s. I love all my almost-40-year-olds, but I wanted to go back a little bit.

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Q: There has been a lot of talk about the term “post-black.” Can you expand on that?

A: I never imagine anyone reads any of these catalogs. The fact that everyone picked up on it is beyond me. Some people see it as a cavalier attempt to move away from something, which it isn’t at all. It is serious, trying to mark a moment, but at a time when equal rights are still not recognized for many people. Post-black really came out of conversations with [artist] Glenn Ligon about the ridiculous ways the art world categorizes things--the way press releases about work by black artists are written, the way words get put together, the way museum directors giving toasts to black artists say things that have nothing to do with the work and get wrapped up in this notion of authentic blackness.

We also talked about all these young artists we saw who didn’t live through multiculturalism and didn’t have all the angst we had about it. They didn’t even feel apologetic about making work that didn’t have to do with black culture. At the same time, we realized that globalism has changed the dialogue and opened up African identity. Black artists were no longer these people in the United States working out of a history that began with slavery. Post-black was a shorthand term we used to refer to all that.

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Q: Some critics like “Freestyle” because it focuses on art rather than politics. Was that your intent?

A: The reviews make me a little nervous because these guys have written about everything I’ve done before and hated it; I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. But the fact that multiculturalism is so digested that people can look at the show and say it is about art is gratifying. “Freestyle” was always about art; that’s what made me do it. These kids are all making really good work. I think that has to do with the opening up of art schools; the presence of so many young black people in art schools now has made it possible for me to do a show of 28 artists.

I am not willing to say these are the best 28 black artists in this country. I didn’t see everyone. But they are working at a very high level. That was important, but it is with every show I do.

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Q: Given all that, are the issues these artists are dealing with fundamentally different?

A: Not in the least. How they are dealing with them--more in aesthetic terms--may be a little different. I didn’t imagine I was going to have a show that is so full of paintings. Their work is different from that of the generation before them, but nothing about it really surprised me.

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Q: In the catalog you say the exhibition is “an attempt to look at this exciting moment with eyes wide open for what is to come.” Do you have any insight into what that might be?

A: I see this development as being entirely positive. Many of the artists in the show are already having single-artist shows in New York or their work is being looked at for other group exhibitions. Some of those who don’t live in New York are now being represented by galleries in their hometowns by people who never looked at them before. Some of their works are being acquired by their home museums. What I see is what I hoped: a first step. They will all have big retrospectives in five years. I hope they will invite me to their dinners and we will remember way back to the “Freestyle” moment.

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“Freestyle,” Santa Monica Museum of Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica. Sept. 28-Nov. 18. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; Sundays, noon-5 p.m. Free. (310) 586-6488.