Black Nick Cave
Day Job: Performance artist, Sculptor
Nick Cave is a Chicago based artist who sculptures have incorporated mixed media, large scale installations, and color theory. Throughout his practice, Cave has created spaces of memorial through combining found historical objects with contemporary dialogues on gun violence and death, underscoring the anxiety of severe trauma brought on by catastrophic loss. He currently works at home in his “Fuck you, I’m art” studio complex on the Northside and describes himself not as an artist but as a messenger as his work frequently deals with spectacle and responsibility. He is best known for Soundsuits, sculptural forms based on the scale of his body, that was originally created in direct response to the police beating of Rodney King in 1991. Soundsuits camouflage the body, masking and creating a second skin that conceals race, gender and class, forcing the viewer to look without judgment. They serve as a visual embodiment of social justice that represent both brutality and empowerment.
What’s Nick doing now?
He’s doing fabulous, thanks for asking! His retrospective exhibition Nick Cave: Forothermore Is currently at The Guggenheim in New York.
Ruth E. Carter
Day Job: Costume Designer
Ruth E. Carter is a costume designer who works across genres and has brought her skills to more than 60 diverse film and television projects. Carter’s deep understanding of character, combined with her nuanced use of color and texture, has made her an essential storyteller committed to sharing the past, present, and future of Black culture. Collaborations include 14 films with Spike Lee as well as other directors including Spielberg, Lee Daniels, and Ava DuVernay. Flowers and accolades include a Career Achievement Award from the Costume Designers Guild in 2019 as well as an Academy Award for Best Costume Design for her work on Black Panther.
I mean, look at these gotdamn clothes. She better win another Oscar for Wakanda Forever!
What’s Ruth doing now?
Probably just chilling. The Academy Awards are almost upon us and she’s been nominated for Best Costume Design for Wakanda Forever. She also has an upcoming exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of Art entitled “Ruth E. Carter: Afrofuturism in Costume Design.”
Dawoud Bey
Day Job: Photographer, Educator
I first became acquainted with Bey’s work while he was a professor at an Art School in Chicago. Bey’s specialty is street photography and large format photography (poloroids) with the subjects from the different neighborhoods he lived in. His earliest work was a five year project documenting Harlem and its residents street photography style that was exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. During a residency at the Addison Gallery of American Art in 1992, Bey began photographing teenagers from all walks of life in an effort to reach across lines of presumed differences, and this new direction in his work guided Bey for the next fifteen years. His large format polaroids capturing the capturing the feeling of being young — the angst, the weight of enormous expectations, the hope for the future has been heavily copied by…less just say lesser artists. :/ In 2017 Bey changed directions again when he published the series “Night Coming Tenderly, Black;” 25 large scale photographs that reimagines the final part of the journey along the ‘Underground Railroad’ which was a system of routes, warehouses, and abolitionists that helped slaves escape from Southern States to the North. Bey photographed some of the actual sites under cover of darkness to mimic the actual circumstances the slaves were in as they fled to safety.
What’s Dawoud doing now?
He’s been collecting his flowers and accolades in the last few years. A major retrospective of his work was recently exhibited at The Whitney, and he was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame in 2021.
Kehinde Wiley
Day Job: Renaissance Man of Art, Glass, and Sculpture
Wiley’s work is what you get when you ask the question, “What would the art world be like if you took the rich tradition of Old Master portrait painting, but added Black people to the mix?” I was first introduced to his work at his retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum and I was immediately blown away by the scale, color, and majesty in his work; my favorite portrait of Wiley’s is of Michael Jackson on a horse dressed like Napoleon. Although Wiley’s portraits were initially based on photographs of young men from the streets of Harlem, Wiley began to expand to an international view, including models found in urban backdrops from around the world – including Mumbai, Senegal, Dakar and Rio de Janeiro. This immense body of work became known as, “The World Stage.”
Wiley has always been known in certain circles but his star was immediately placed on the map with his portrait of President Barack Obama for the National Portrait Gallery. Besides painting, he also works in stained glass and sculpture which makes him a true Renaissance Man.
What’s Kehinde doing now?
In 2021, Wiley’s work Go became a permanent installation at Penn Station’s concourse in New York City. This stained-glass work is inspired by the 18th century ceiling frescoes of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and depicts black break-dancers on a background of the sky with clouds.
Gail Anderson
Day Job: Graphic Designer, Author, and Educator
Like her contemporary Paula Scher, Gail Anderson is one of the few female NYC-based creatives who made a name for herself early on in the world of Graphic Design. From 1987 to early 2002, she worked at Rolling Stone magazine, serving as designer, deputy art director, and finally, as the magazine’s senior art director and her spreads with different rock stars and celebrities became something to talk about and emulate. Anderson’s work has received awards from major design organizations, including the Society of Publication Designers, the Type Directors Club, The American Institute of Graphic Arts, The Art Directors Club, Graphis, Communication Arts, and Print. In addition, it has also been included in the permanent collections of the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, the Library of Congress, and the Milton Glaser Design Archives at the School of Visual Arts.
What’s Gail doing now?
Besides being a major contributor to Imprint and Uppercase magazine Gail has co-authored yet another book with long time collaborator and graphic design author Steven Heller of the upcoming The Typographic Universe. She’s also busy teaching the new generation of graphic designers in the art of leading and kerning at SVA.
Stephen Burks
Day Job: Industrial Designer
Another Chicago Native, Stephen Burks is one of the most recognized American industrial designers of his generation. Burks believes in a pluralistic vision of design that is inclusive of all cultural perspectives. Now headquartered in Brooklyn, Man Made – his design practice – bridges the gap between authentic developing world production, industrial manufacturing, and contemporary design. I first became enamored of his work when I went to the “Are You A Hybrid” exhibition at MAD, which explores the presence, impact, and influence of the developing world on contemporary design, and celebrated artists, designers, and photographers whose influential projects have set global trends and prompted a more inclusive vision of design.
What’s Stephen doing now?
His exhibition “Shelter in Place” at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta will be closing soon. Other than that, Stephen has his own podcast where he talks about everything industrial design.
Kara Walker
Day Job: Artist, Agent Provocateur
Like Jeff Koons, part of Kara Walker’s appeal to me is she pisses off so many people just by being herself. The culture shock and resulting racism she experienced at age 13 when her family moved from the more liberal California to Georgia colored her formative years and had a great deal in influencing her later work. Walker is best known for her panoramic friezes of cut-paper silhouettes, usually black figures against a white wall, which address the history of American slavery and racism through violent and unsettling imagery and generally provokes a harsh alternative viewpoint to what is normally thought of as the romantic Antebellum era. This struck a nerve with some people, who were extremely vocal with their opinion that she uses stereotypical and (at times) offensive sexual imagery in her work, with some asking the question of who her art is for (OP’s opinion is the Antebellum period was an awful time for Black Americans in general and if someone wants to depict an unsanitized version of it that’s their business). Walker is best known for print but occasionally dips into other mediums as evidenced by her first sculpture “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant.” that was literally a giant sphinx with the head and breasts of a mammy that was 75 feet long by 35 feet high and made with 80 tons of white sugar.
Hmmmm. I guess so, good sis. Your Artpop can be anything. LOL!
What’s Kara doing now?
She’s resting up a bit after launching her exhibition A Black Hole is Everything a Star Longs to Be at the De Pont Museum in the Netherlands in 2022.
Bonus Fave Creative: Glada Kilomba
What can I say, I have lots of love for her and her work. Kilomba is a Afro-Portuguese interdisciplinary artist and writer whose works critically examine memory, trauma, gender, racism and post-colonialism.[1] She uses various formats to express herself ranging from text projections to scenic reading and performance. Like Kara Walker, early experiences with racism (this time in post-racist Portugal in the 70s and 80s) helped shape her perceptions of the world as well as her practice, and her work directly deals with who is allowed to speak, why, and the politics (sometimes intraracial) behind that. I was able to see her exhibit in Brooklyn and loved every bit of it.
I encourage everyone to check out the sources because in many cases I’ve linked directly to the artists website where you can learn more about them and their work. ONTD, who are some of your fave Black creatives? Let me know in the comments!
~Die Quellen~
+ Images provided by yours truly from the Cave, Bey, and Kilomba exhibitions
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