MARUANI MERCIER proposes a selection of established Afro-American artists. Though varied in medium, their art is connected through powerful personal statements that battle historical and contemporary topics such as racism, identity, politics, and popular black culture.
Radcliffe Bailey (b. 1968, New Jersey) utilizes the layering of imagery, culturally resonant materials and text to explore themes of ancestry, race, migration and collective memory. His work often incorporates found materials and objects from his past into textured compositions, including traditional African sculpture, tintypes of his family members, ships, train tracks and Georgia red clay. The cultural significance and rhythmic properties of music are also important influences that can be seen throughout his oeuvre.
Individual experience serves as a departure point in Bailey’s quest to excavate the collective consciousness of African diasporas and regional American identities. Found objects and imagery explore and interweave shared histories. His practice creates links between diasporic histories and potential futures, investigating the evolution or stagnation of notions of identity.
Bailey’s work is collected, amongst others, by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Studio Museum Harlem, New York and the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, amongst others.
Lyle Ashton Harris (b. 1965, New York) works in diverse mediums to explore ideas of gender, sexuality, belonging, and various cultural narratives. He teases apart the historical objectification of the black figure in Western culture, and his photographic portraits reinterpret the legacies of iconic cultural figures and also feature individuals from his life in Ghana and the United States.
Harris is best known for his intimate and revealing self-portraits, sometimes while performing and reinterpreting the legacies of iconic figures, familiar or imagined. He teases the viewers’ perceptions and expectations, recalibrating the familiar with the extraordinary. Describing his work as “complex and beautiful,” Guggenheim Senior Curator and Associate Director Nancy Spector notes how Harris “poetically interrogates issues,” acknowledging that his ”insights and guidance have been integral to our work” at the Guggenheim.
Harris’ work has been acquired by the J.Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Tate Modern, London amongst others.
Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976, New Jersey) is a photo conceptual artist who employs language and familiar imagery to address issues that are often overlooked in our pop culture-obsessed, consumerist culture. Additionaly, he explores photography’s ability to reinforce generalizations developed around race, gender and ethnicity.
Over the past several years, Thomas’ practice has evolved to incorporate a variety of media including mirrors and retroreflective vinyl to challenge perspectives in his work, exploring 20th century protest images and often overlooked historical narratives. Many of these protest images are activated by flash photography playing with role reversal by having the viewer step into the position of image maker. Thomas asks the viewer to consider who is included in history and who is erased, revealing the complicated nature of storytelling and the bias of history.
Thomas’ work is part of public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art, amongst others.
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