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.

Some of the artists I looked into I was introduced to in the Making Africa exhibition at the High Museum last year. Other have just stuck with me through time, and some I encountered in my research of the artists that I knew. At first I was really interested in the Ikire Jones brand and the use of black bodies in classical scenes, in particular the idea of wearable art. Casey helped me tremendously with finding a book on WorldCat and ILLing a book entitled Dandy Lion by Shantrelle P. Lewis. Although looking into black dandyism was interesting, it was not what I was looking for. I liked the concept presented through black dandyism, of using elements that are historically Western in nature and mixing it with an Afrocentric motif or narrative. The idea of subverting an image or using a style deliberately to inserting the black body and narrative into the mainstream narrative through the use of certain medium and aesthetic.

During my research process, I mostly bookmarked pages with information on them that I found relevant and started a bookmark folder for them. When I started reading Dandy Lion, I relied mostly on notes that I will probably transcribe into my word document of ideas. I also inserted images into my word document or saved them in Google images and Artstor. My research style is a bit more interesting. I tend to do a brain dump in the beginning of to just get some sense of where my interests are and where to begin looking. Truthfully, I have not really figured out what elevates one idea over the other. It seems that the ideas that made me ask questions or linked to another field of thought stood out and promoted more research. The intertwining of race, representation, and art became a big one for me. Then it became a game of narrowing it down, which I am still in the process of.

List of possible artists to explore:

Kara Walker

Firelei Báez

Ikire Jones (Wale Oyejide )

Omar Diop

Rashaad Newsome

Kehinde Wiley

I know that I tend to think in sporadic bursts that prompt me to rapidly scribble down ideas on paper or online before they disappear. My research becomes more methodical once I have found something I wanted to explore and I am asking specific questions. That can become one of my weaknesses and strengths. The strength is generating ideas and making connections between subjects and academic fields whereas the  weakness comes from trying jumping from idea to idea. I jump from one idea to another, and sometimes I forget where I was going with the original idea.