The more I worked on the Kara Walker talk over Resurrection with Patrons (2017), the more I became interested in the idea of looking closer to actually see. In Resurrection and with the majority of Walker’s work, the viewer has to come closer and look beyond the first perceived notion of aesthetics in order to truly see what is occurring in the piece. But, I was also interested in the work of Rashaad Newsome and how the mixing black culture with a Baroque aesthetic in a way that forces you to look beyond the surface. My research style mostly consisted of going down a rabbit hole of Google. I would google Rashaad Newsome or other artists that I already had in mind and see the people that they were linked with. I let the artist guide me to other artists with similar interests or tastes. And sometimes I was looking for something specific and would Google “radical black artists” or “representation of blackness in art”, but ultimately letting the people act as a guide played to my advantage and opened me up to more artists.
So I started with those two (Walker and Newsome) and went on from there adding Firelei Baez, Omar Diop, Kehinde Wiley, Carrie Mae Weems, Ikire Jones, Amy Sherald, and a whole lot more in an effort to capture that idea of closer looking and layered meaning. Of course, when you start off with an idea it takes a turn for another idea. Conveying a message in visuals in difficult because I may know what I want to get at, ultimately the art itself controls the direction, and that was a big takeaway for me. Having to move and add and subtract from the images became a maddening process, and to be completely honest I am not 100% happy with my Pecha Kucha but it does at least capture this idea of representation of blackness that underlined my initial research.
I found Google Keep a great way to keep track of the websites I was visiting and keeping my information together rather than just bookmarking it. Creating a collage of photographs an ideas on a Doc also kept my information together and provided a visual into what I was interested in, some of those images made the cut and some didn’t.
