“I wanted to depict a future for black and queer people that was bright, but also addressed the struggles that we go through now and would need to through to get to that future, but in a way that wasn’t just depressing.” Radical Optimism: Positive Futures in Black Art is a new digital exhibition from curator Samuel Fletcher that explores how three black artists depict black, female, and queer subjects in uplifting positions. They invert canonical representations. They broadcast joy and comfort. They wash their canvases with color.
Iona Rozeal Brown creates modern takes on ukiyo-e artwork that center black women, often in poses and compositions that refer to older works. She reenvisions long standing canons, affirming positive representations and augmenting where they lack. A powerful warrior woman remains a warrior woman, but is now, too, a young black girl, a warrior in a new context, bringing new representation.
Mickalene Thomas said, “The gaze of my work is, unapologetically, a black woman’s gaze loving other black women.” As an artist, she frequently returns to specific subjects, be they family, friends, or merely acquaintances. She frames beauty, treating subject as muse as she paints black women into constructed environments that empower and enhance their beauty. The artist’s loving gaze is returned by a reclining woman, comfortable in an eclectic living room.
Noah Lawrence-Holder creates digital illustrations. Through their art, they envision bright, visualistic landscapes featuring black and queer figures that dominate their environnents. They place their queer and black subjects in poisitions of power, in futures where liberation is a reality. Tall black figures march through the new bloom of spring, proudly strutting as the snow melts around them.
“I wanted to create a world in which we were liberated and, you know, free to show up fully as ourselves. But also, I kind of wanted to do something for myself with this. So, I wanted to have this high fantasy influence in it. Because that’s been like, something that I’ve been looking at lately, these classically fantasy artists, and the thing about that kind of art is that black people are never in it, you know, it’s like a world in which we don’t exist. So I wanted to take up space in that kind of realm and inject myself into this space that I didn’t belong in.” says Noah Lawrence-Holder. This is a perspective that is realized through the works in this exhibition. Explicit and implicit references to canonical works are engaged with, picked apart and reconstructed as they are reclaimed. These reclamations are joyful, inspiring, and hopeful, and this comes through in the vivid colors and lurid patterns that construct their worlds. These artists realize radically positive futures by wringing out the old and ringing in the new.
