<em>(Forever Free) Dress Your Best </em>(from the "Forever Free" series)
<p dir="ltr"><span>With </span><em><a href="http://wst198.omeka.net/items/show/1">Green Lantern: Mosaic #1</a></em><span>, 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 commercial narrative. The two narratives share a cover, but you do not visually see Hamner’s John Stewart playing basketball with the basketball advertisement, or see the rocket from the rocket advertisement fly with John Stewart. There is a distinction. This distinction does not exist in Michael Ray Charles’s </span><span>(Forever Free) Dress Your Best</span><span>. In this work from his series, the art is an advertisement. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>Charles has a minstrel character modeling a shirt for sale. We know this is a white actor in blackface not only from the red hair, but the minstrel “uniform” he is attired in black skin, white gloves, and large lips. This is a white man performing as a black man to sell whatever “dress[ing] your best” is. What is that concept? Perhaps it is the whiteness of the shirt being sold, or maybe it is the covering of flesh being advertised as best. Or, just as likely, it is what the minstrel character is not doing that is being sold as best.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>The minstrel character is staring forward at the viewer as he is in mid-action putting on a white shirt. His smile and gaze is a frozen mask of the minstrel, but his actions are not. He is not moving in exaggerated motions or making odd faces. There is no outrageous posture or dance moves. The character is performing blackness visually without acting black. The audience knows this is not a Black man, but the ad is selling what is not Blackness -- control, respectability, whiteness. Hence why there needs to be a white actor playing a Black person, it would not visually be transmitted that whiteness is being sold to a Black man.That is what dressing your best is (and has been, given the aged appearance of the artwork). Your best is your whiteness.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>This art piece provides a useful commentary on the black body by showing what Blackness has historically (and perhaps presently) means: not white. Charles notes that his advertisement art </span><span>“ is just as much white as they are black”; the same could be said about all discussions of whiteness or blackness (Art 21). When we distinguish between these two races, whether in fine art like this or in comics’ white and black figures like in </span><em><a href="http://wst198.omeka.net/exhibits/show/black-bodies-black-ink/item/2">Captain Confederacy #4</a></em><span>, we are highlighting more similarities than differences. </span></p>
<span id="docs-internal-guid-17ed6d5f-6d60-df9f-fa5c-ff3eefc76941"><span>So who is a Black male? In visual arts, every human is a representation. A representation claims not to be what it shows but an image of it. Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe is not claiming to be Marilyn Monroe. But Charles notes that concepts like whiteness and blackness are “re-appropriated and re-presented” (</span><span>ibid</span><span>). To Charles, the concept of blackness is what is shows -- blackness. It is not represented as being what it is not but is what it is. Perhaps this is where the tension and discomfort of works representing minstrel figures or </span><a href="http://wst198.omeka.net/exhibits/show/black-bodies-black-ink/strange-fruit"><span>Black male figures adorned in Confederate flags</span></a><span> come from. The figures will always be representations, but the concepts and history behind them are presentations. They are always present.</span></span>
Charles, Michael Ray
<ol><li>Art21. “Advertising and Art: Michael Ray Charles.” <em>Art21</em>, PBS, <a href="art21.org/read/michael-ray-charles-advertising-and-art/">art21.org/read/michael-ray-charles-advertising-and-art/</a>.</li>
</ol>
Charles, Michael Ray. "<em>Forever Free Dress Your Best by Michael Ray Charles on artnet.</em>" Tony Shafrazi Gallery, artnet. h<a href="Charles,%20Michael%20Ray.%20">ttp://www.artnet.com/artists/michael-ray-charles/forever-free-dress-your-best-a-Yo-DWl7n3Sz_42DkjvawDA2</a>. Accessed 15 Nov 2017.
1999
<a href="https://comicsverse.com/author/o0rayday0o/">Rachel Davis</a>
182.9 x 152.4 cm
Acrylic Latex, Stain & Copper Penny on Canvas
New York City: Tony Shafrazi Gallery
<em>Birmingham Race Riot</em>
<p dir="ltr"><span>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 legend. Warhol’s name is not usually associated with the Civil Rights Movement or any form of identity politics activism. And yet, Warhol associated himself with the fight for American racial equality through this artwork.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span></span><span>This silkscreen, made in 1964, is manipulated by Warhol from a 1963 newspaper photograph documenting the Birmingham Civil Rights movement (Hofstra University Museum). Warhol’s use of another artist’s image without giving credit for the purpose of his own art is appropriation. However, given this artwork’s subjects -- a black human figure being attacked by two dogs -- the question arises of whether there is more than one type of appropriation occurring.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span></span><span>This image is being removed from the context provided by the newspaper and made to stand alone. The image is removed from time and space, requiring the viewer to see the image for what it is -- a human figure being attacked as other human figures standby. This act of violence, regardless of race or political views, could possibly be condemned as universally bad, if not for two features. Firstly, we cannot see the attacked human figure’s face, and therefore his humanity. Secondly, Warhol’s process of transforming a black-and-white newspaper-print photograph into a silk screen has blackened all of the print, rendering most of the figures with black skin to be just black skin and no faces (look to the figures in the background). Warhol has made the black bodies just that -- no longer black Americans or black humans, but black figures. These people, who at the time of Warhol showing this work were experiencing the battle between Jim Crow and Civil Rights, are made inhuman. These people are made art without their consent via Warhol’s appropriation of their body.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Warhol appropriated, but to what ends? What was his intention with this work? Was Warhol hoping to immortalize a moment of socio-political change or require the privileged urban gallery viewer north of the Mason-Dixon line to see oppression in black-and-white? Is this a commentary on how mass media such as newspapers were also commercial products producing and reproducing humans as media fodder? Or was Warhol producing Warhol -- the brand that created Gold Marilyn Monroe (1962) and Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962) -- at the expense of objectifying and selling off of black bodies (Museum of Modern Art)? At the end of the day, does Warhol’s intentions in 1964 truly matter? Given who he branded himself then, who his work was shown and sold to, and how he is known now, then <a href="http://wst198.omeka.net/items/show/5">Michael Ray Charles</a>’ words regarding his own reception of his work may apply to this Warhol print:</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>But for the most part, collectively, I would say that blackness continues to hover around this comfort zone of entertainment—providers of entertainment. You know, I think those areas are pretty comfortable for whites to see blacks in (qtd. in Art21).</span></p>
Warhol, Andy
<ol><li>Hofstra University Museum. Museum label for Andy Warhol, <em>Birmingham Race Riot</em>. Hempstead, NY. 18 Dec 2017. </li>
<li>Museum of Modern Art. “Andy Warhol | MoMA.” <em>The Museum of Modern Art</em>, <a href="http://www.moma.org/artists/6246">www.moma.org/artists/6246</a>. </li>
<li>Art21. “Advertising and Art: Michael Ray Charles.” <em>Art21</em>, PBS, <a href="art21.org/read/michael-ray-charles-advertising-and-art/">art21.org/read/michael-ray-charles-advertising-and-art/</a>.</li>
</ol>
Kristen Rudy, Collections Manager, Hofstra University Museum. 15 Nov 2017.
1964
<a href="https://comicsverse.com/author/o0rayday0o/">Rachel Davis</a>
50.8 x 61.0 cm
Screenprint on paper
Hempstead: Hofstra University Museum
<em>Ice T</em>
<p dir="ltr"><span>The artwork that offers the loudest dialogue to </span><a href="http://wst198.omeka.net/items/show/6"><span>Warhol</span></a><span> and the Western art canon, in general, is Kehinde Wiley’s portraits of men of color. The similarities and differences between Warhol’s <em>Birmingham Race Riot</em> and Wiley’s <span style="text-decoration:underline;">Ice T</span> are fascinating. Warhol appropriated a newspaper photograph documenting the Civil Rights Movement. Wiley appropriates the icons, colors, and medium of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s 1806 </span><em><a href="http://www.musee-armee.fr/en/collections/museum-treasures/object.html?tx_mdaobjects_object%5Baction%5D=show&tx_mdaobjects_object%5Bcontroller%5D=Object&tx_mdaobjects_object%5BidContentPortfolio%5D=537&tx_mdaobjects_object%5Bobject%5D=551&cHash=d5b34980f2912c609d32c6e45f75d5d7">Napoleon I on His Imperial Throne</a></em><span>. Warhol took the photograph out of its newspaper context to make it into a piece of art -- a Warhol piece of art. Wiley adds context by replacing Napoleon Bonaparte with American gangster rapper Ice T, creating a new meaning using an established Western image of the royal white male ruler. Warhol’s work was for the elite art world. Wiley’s <em>Ice T</em> belongs to the National Portrait Gallery -- it belongs to the American people. Ice T is an American artwork in the mold of the American Dream. What is the American Dream but the promise of the self-made man regardless of birth lineage? And which man has made more of himself from the humblest of beginnings than the African-American? Unlike Shetterly and Stone in </span><em><a href="http://wst198.omeka.net/items/show/2">Captain Confederacy</a></em><span>, Wiley puts the Black man as the nation’s victorious symbol.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span></span><span>This painting is, like </span><a href="http://wst198.omeka.net/exhibits/show/black-bodies-black-ink/forever-free-dress-your-best"><span>Michael Ray Charles</span></a><span>’s work, is visually striking. It is meant to stir emotion and have the viewer question history with its use of a Black man in casual attire (cap, black sneakers, black sweatpants). Two noteworthy differences between this painting and the Ingres one is the positioning of the subject’s heads and the placement of the ermine hood. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>Napoleon looks straightforward at the viewer (Musée de l'Armée). His head is as level as his gaze upon the viewer. Ice T’s head, however, is tilted upwards, the brim of his cap casting a shadow across his forehead. We the viewer are looked down upon by him -- why? Is Ice T’s head tilt another symbol like the throne and scepters of his superiority over the reader? Or is he wary of the viewer? A Black man growing up in a racist society ascend to a throne. What did Ice T have to endure, what sacrifices and sins did he commit, to make it to that hallowed seat? What sacrifices and sins did the Black men who did not make it to the throne endure? Whether tilted in superiority or defense, Ice T does not gaze directly at t, e viewer unlike Napoleon, making it easier for the viewer to gaze upon him without the fear of “being caught.”</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span></span><span>Secondly, Napoleon wears the royal ermine, his “head emerging from a body drowned in an imposing costume, [the attire] effectively sets it apart from the [then] usual depictions of the emperor” (Musée de l'Armée). Ice T’s ermine is splayed across the throne he sits, leaving his bare, muscled arms visible as it holds the same scepters Napoleon does. Ice T does not envelope himself in the traditional attire of divine, empirical power. Instead, he wears the clothes of any American: comfy, affordable, and accessible. Yet his attire is black, like his flesh. His arms, like </span><a href="http://wst198.omeka.net/exhibits/show/black-bodies-black-ink/green-lantern-mosaic--1"><span>John Stewart</span></a><span>’s and the alien in </span><em><a href="http://wst198.omeka.net/exhibits/show/black-bodies-black-ink/strange-fruit">Strange Fruit</a></em><span><em>,</em> are his power. Once again, the Black man’s power is made physical -- he is made physical. Wiley’s Studio states that his works blur “the boundaries between traditional and contemporary modes of representation and the critical portrayal of masculinity and physicality as it pertains to the view of black and brown young men” (Kehinde Wiley Studio). Is that occurring here, where once again the Black man’s physicality is on display as his power? </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span></span><span>There are neither singular nor simple answers to these questions. The lack of a singular and simple answer for a work about black masculinity is a triumph. Again like Warhol, Wiley’s work succeeds in provoking questions, and with a history of reducing black men to the same stereotypes and roles, provoking questions is a form of resisting racist and sexist representations.</span></p>
<div><span> </span></div>
Wiley, Kehinde
<ol><li dir="ltr">
<p dir="ltr"><span>Musée de l'Armée. “Napoleon I on the Throne or His Majesty the Emperor of the French on His Throne by Ingres.” </span><span>Musée De L'Armée</span><span>, 10 Dec. 2012, </span><a href="http://www.musee-armee.fr/en/collections/museum-treasures/object.html?tx_mdaobjects_object%5Baction%5D=show&tx_mdaobjects_object%5Bcontroller%5D=Object&tx_mdaobjects_object%5BidContentPortfolio%5D=537&tx_mdaobjects_object%5Bobject%5D=551&cHash=d5b34980f2912c609d32c6e45f75d5d7"><span>www.musee-armee.fr/en/collections/museum-treasures/object.html?tx_mdaobjects_object%5Baction%5D=show&tx_mdaobjects_object%5Bcontroller%5D=Object&tx_mdaobjects_object%5BidContentPortfolio%5D=537&tx_mdaobjects_object%5Bobject%5D=551&cHash=d5b34980f2912c609d32c6e45f75d5d7</span></a><span>.</span></p>
</li>
<li dir="ltr">
<p dir="ltr"><span></span>Kehinde Wiley Studio. “KEHINDE WILEY STUDIO: Brooklyn, NY.” Kehinde Wiley Studio, <a href="kehindewiley.com/about/">kehindewiley.com/about/</a>.</p>
</li>
</ol>
Wiley, Kehinde. "<em>Ice T</em>." Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture, National Portrait Gallery. <a href="http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/recognize/paintings.html">http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/recognize/paintings.html</a>. Accessed 15 Nov 2017.
2005
<a href="https://comicsverse.com/author/o0rayday0o/">Rachel Davis</a>
243.8 x 182.9 cm
Oil on canvas
Washington D.C.: National Portrait Gallery
<em>Strange Fruit</em>
<p dir="ltr">Out of all of the items in this exhibit, <em>Strange Fruit </em>has the most body diversity. The main black male humans of the comic are Sonny and Mr. McCoy. As seen in <a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/omeka-net/34789/archive/files/bda9add0992f89dd5cb9a4efc7f9625a.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAI3ATG3OSQLO5HGKA&Expires=1515323486&Signature=wJd%2BhiAlRHUf9ig9OmlHG8L6yb4%3D">Fig. 4</a>, Sonny is lean but with some muscle definition, as befitting a physical laborer on a plantation farm. His hair is free and goes in many directions and his beard is full. His clothes are too large for him, as seen from the blue shirt spilling over from his pants and how he pulls at his trousers and excess fabric stretches across his leg. Mr. McCoy, the Northern engineer sent to Chatterlee from D.C. to help save the town, is noticeably different from Sonny.<a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/omeka-net/34789/archive/files/f77644a8cf9a3ca3e474fd08a1371cdd.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAI3ATG3OSQLO5HGKA&Expires=1515323687&Signature=ql9RdQBspMq5VIXqmcj1i3JkHQU%3D"> </a><span><a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/omeka-net/34789/archive/files/f77644a8cf9a3ca3e474fd08a1371cdd.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAI3ATG3OSQLO5HGKA&Expires=1515323687&Signature=ql9RdQBspMq5VIXqmcj1i3JkHQU%3D">Fig. 6</a> </span>shows him to be shorter, rounder in body, with neck fat. He wears glasses, a visual shorthand signifying his higher intelligence to that of the other recurring characters who lack glasses and the knowledge to save the town from the flood. Furthermore, his pencil moustache and formal attire of a bow-tie, white shirt, plaid brown suit, and hat, put him in stark contrast to Sonny and most of the residents of poor Chatterlee.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>In comics, body diversity speaks to psychological diversity. Sonny is the rough-and-tough rebelling sharecropper with dreams of fighting Jim Crow and white people, and McCoy is the Northern, educated black man among uneducated, bigoted Southerners, offer a variety of possibilities for who a can be a Black man. Most of the items in this exhibit present a black male for all black males. </span><em>Strange Fruit </em><span>gives the reader two black men to show a multitude of black male expressions. Two black men do this -- and </span><span>only </span><span>two black men. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr">The central black male figure of this comic -- its main character and the strange fruit of the title -- is not a black male. He is an alien who reads as a black male to the Jim Crow characters and the comic reader. And the only way the alien can be read as Black is from his physical appearance. The character never learns a human language -- only the physics and mathematical equations necessary for him to save Chatterlee (see <a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/omeka-net/34789/archive/files/d5cb601655afeb514a7177569340b9a9.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAI3ATG3OSQLO5HGKA&Expires=1515323811&Signature=8hJdeLzrFHjZU8BoxTb9belfZVE%3D">Fig. 5</a> and <a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/omeka-net/34789/archive/files/f77644a8cf9a3ca3e474fd08a1371cdd.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAI3ATG3OSQLO5HGKA&Expires=1515323862&Signature=3zZ7vEnML4bDr0W143mp9Gc9xoo%3D"><span>Fig. 6</span></a>). We know not what he calls himself or what he wants beside a few scattered flashbacks that equate the guns of Chatterlee to space guns. We know not who he is or how he sees himself. Only how others see him (see <em><a href="http://wst198.omeka.net/items/show/1">Green Lantern: Mosaic</a></em>). And what they see is a black body of colossal proportions. His body is always made to appear large to other characters and sometimes the dimensions of the comic, as seen in <a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/omeka-net/34789/archive/files/ccfdc5457d477b47e35049dc36c71133.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAI3ATG3OSQLO5HGKA&Expires=1515323896&Signature=DsECgDMb%2BDxn968DQBBtr498pBA%3D"><span>Fig. 3</span></a> when the alien’s body surpasses the confines of the panels and gutters. The alien takes up space, whether dominating a skyline with his muscled torso and veiny arms as in <span><a href="https://wst198.omeka.net/items/show/7">Fig. 4</a> </span>or with his long legs reaching the edge of the bound page as in <a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/omeka-net/34789/archive/files/d5cb601655afeb514a7177569340b9a9.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAI3ATG3OSQLO5HGKA&Expires=1515323966&Signature=Lpl2YfXYXT2yOZ0NDo1FkPVIP10%3D"><span>Fig. 5</span>. </a></p>
<span id="docs-internal-guid-434cc422-73fc-181a-e9d7-6e16c79a8bf8"><span>The alien is a black body. That is its purpose; Jones has said that “The appearance of The Colossus [</span><span>sic.</span><span>] acts as [</span><span>sic.</span><span>] a mirror on their [the other characters’] motives” (qtd. in Dietsch). The authorial intent was to have the alien’s black body be a metaphor, yet Jones and Waid ended up relying on visual stereotypes that make the black body inhuman to the reader. One cannot relate to the alien because one does not know who or what the alien is. He is only his appearance -- an appearance that is stereotypical -- the unintelligible black muscular man. Sonny, as the Nat Turner uncouth with a heart of gold, and McCoy, the portly intellectual of diminutive stature and authority, are equally stereotypical. Even a non-character perpetuate visual stereotypes, as seen in the </span><a href="https://ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/antiblack/picaninny/homepage.htm"><span>picaninny</span></a><span> character in </span><a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/omeka-net/34789/archive/files/d08ff08f68422217b6843629ca68f8b7.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAI3ATG3OSQLO5HGKA&Expires=1515324005&Signature=4WYXDi0vX2V3Couy7C8sRhOpLjE%3D"><span>Fig. 2</span></a><span>. Jones and Waid use various types of visual and narrative stereotypes of black bodies in a story about black oppression. The black bodies are diverse but the type of diversity is reductive rather than inclusive. </span><em>Strange Fruit </em><span>serves as a reminder that quantity and breadth of bodies does not equate to qualitative and deep representations of oppressed identities. </span></span>
Writer: Jones, J.G. and Mark Waid.
Penciler and Inker: Jones, J.G.
<ol><li><span id="docs-internal-guid-434cc422-73fd-c7ab-d421-4c49014bb130"><span>Dietsch, TJ. “EXCLUSIVE: Jones & Waid on Examining Racism, Cultural Legacy in 'Strange Fruit'.” </span><span>CBR</span><span>, Valnet Inc., 24 Feb. 2015, </span><a href="http://www.cbr.com/exclusive-jones-waid-on-examining-racism-cultural-legacy-in-strange-fruit/"><span>www.cbr.com/exclusive-jones-waid-on-examining-racism-cultural-legacy-in-strange-fruit/</span></a><span>. </span></span></li>
</ol>
Author (15 Dec 2017)
9 May 2017
<a href="https://comicsverse.com/author/o0rayday0o/"><span>Rachel Davis</span></a>
18.3 x 1.5 x 28.4 cm
(Exterior) Ink, plastic, cardboard; (Interior) Ink on paper
Los Angeles: BOOM! Studios.