Fine Art

Dublin Core

Title

Fine Art

Description

"Fine Art" is a contentious term with its history of excluding media, expressions, artists, and ideologies. Personally, I am not fond of the term. However, in order to explore the representation of black males in comics, it is necessary to look at the history of black males in visual cultures. Comics do not exist in the vacuum; no art form does. Art is a dialogue between a creator or creators and some other, whether that other be a person, society, history, or something else altogether. The best way to show this continuum is to curate the selected comics for this exhibit in contrast to older artworks and art forms. The similarities and differences between these media in meaning and representation black male bodies have yielded insights.

My selection criteria (in no particular order) for this collection is as followed:
  1. Does the fine artwork offer unique insights to these questions: (a) How are these bodies represented and framed? (b) What are the intentions and effects of these bodies? (c) How can these bodies be received? (d) What are the semiotics of the black male body in this work?
  2. Each piece has its own medium.

Contributor

Collection Items

From the Rythm Mastr seriesFig. 1: "Rythm Mastr: Tower of Power"Fig. 2: "Rythm Mastr: Every Beat of My Heart"Fig. 3: "Rythm Mastr: Bulletin!"
No work in this exhibit takes up space like Kerry James Marshall’s Rythm Mastr series. These works occupy multiple spaces at the same time. This is a fine artwork (each artwork is owned by the Museum of Modern Art) whose medium is a comic newspaper…

Ice T
The artwork that offers the loudest dialogue to Warhol and the Western art canon, in general, is Kehinde Wiley’s portraits of men of color. The similarities and differences between Warhol’s Birmingham Race Riot and Wiley’s Ice T are fascinating.…

(Forever Free) Dress Your Best (from the "Forever Free" series)
With Green Lantern: Mosaic #1, the comics narrative was visually laid out beside the narrative of the advertisements. Like the medium, this comic maintains the conceit that there is a line differentiating between the artistic narrative and the…

Birmingham Race Riot
The name “Andy Warhol” is as ubiquitous in the American cultural landscape as Campbell’s soup cans are in grocery stores or Marilyn Monroe imagery on the internet. Commercializing consumer products and celebrities are how Warhol made his name and…
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