<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
From the<em> Rythm</em> <em>Mastr </em>series<br /><br />Fig. 1: "Rythm Mastr: Tower of Power"<br />Fig. 2: "Rythm Mastr: Every Beat of My Heart"<br />Fig. 3: "Rythm Mastr: Bulletin!"
<p dir="ltr"><span><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span></span><span>No work in this exhibit takes up space like Kerry James Marshall’s </span><em>Rythm Mastr</em><span> 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 strip </span><span>(Art21, “Rythm Mastr”: Kerry James Marshall). These works also address multiple types of spaces. Black bodies warp space. </span><span>Black body warps space in a way a white body does not -- the choice of Jeremy Grey as the hero of </span><em><a href="http://wst198.omeka.net/items/show/2">Captain Confederacy</a></em><span> </span><span>over a black male lead and the alien lead of </span><em><a href="http://wst198.omeka.net/exhibits/show/black-bodies-black-ink/item/7">Strange Fruit</a> </em><span>are proof of that. This is psychological space, though. The interaction between blackness and physical space within a narrative is not as pronounced. </span><em>Rythm Mastr</em><span> offers insights into both types of spaces. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>The three title pages here show three different spaces in three different lights. <a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/omeka-net/34789/archive/files/6ea2904fd9af4cc889dbf3f5694509cc.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAI3ATG3OSQLO5HGKA&Expires=1515324570&Signature=XDUTIBBpKy6DS%2FalDYFovYbpNlM%3D">Fig. 1</a> shows a black figure aiming and loading a bazooka weapon at an urban water tower. Without the following panels providing context for this page, the reader is to assume this black male is conducting urban warfare on the communal water supply. For all intents and purposes, this person is conducting warfare on a source the community is dependent on -- a source the community does not control, but the bureaucracy does. Water is essential for life, but the distribution and management of such vital necessities in urban communities is relegated to the hands of a few (historically and still often white) politicians. Black people have and still do not (if Flint, Michigan’s water epidemic is any indication) live in areas where they have access or control to safe life necessities like water, organic fresh food, clean air, and so on. The water tower is not an animate threat to the black man aiming a military weapon at it, but what the tower represents -- a lack of control, racial equity, and autonomy -- is threatening.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>With <a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/omeka-net/34789/archive/files/db374e873fce45dc5854bfc81f773446.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAI3ATG3OSQLO5HGKA&Expires=1515324627&Signature=u8OT59oR2sZy%2FFGtSEFIIEjWuqw%3D">Fig. 2</a>, a more traditional American comics scene is shown: a group of black figures are in motion, from the drum player in the foreground to the swinging mass to the viewer’s left to the flying figure to the right. Once again, the scene takes place in an urban environment. This time, the viewer is not only the street, but looking upwards. We are behind the action and cannot directly see the faces of the figures. Much like with <a href="http://wst198.omeka.net/items/show/6"><span>Warhol</span></a>, we are meant to see these figures as bodies in action and to see the scene. We see debris from the ground and the central building is partially demolished, showing a figure on the inside. The scene is chaotic, filled with movement and bodies that the viewer is a part of. There is an inclusion the viewer feels here that is absent in <a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/omeka-net/34789/archive/files/1a0b0682a8946f18267b634d8c433434.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAI3ATG3OSQLO5HGKA&Expires=1515324649&Signature=XuXT6zjHkfFdKwttWRwtszZKSa0%3D">Fig. 3</a>. There, the viewer looks down from the lighting equipment of a TV news set. The black female anchor sits behind her desk, reporting, as other bodies crowd the bottom of the page. There is plenty of empty space and no movement. The lights and TV equipment dwarf the human figures. There is a great contrast between the two images. In the former, black people are in abundance, taking up space and performing actions, but out on the dark, urban streets near a less-than-pristine neighborhood. In the latter, only one black figure sits still, her body contained, and is dwarfed by the machinery and professional environment. The social capital of the space -- the dark dirty urban streets versus the white-collar newsroom -- decreases with the presence of black bodies. Conversely, black bodies respond to the prestige and lightness (see: whiteness) of the space they occupy (also seen in <a href="http://wst198.omeka.net/items/show/5"><span>Michael Ray Charles</span></a>). From these images in R<em>ythm Mastr</em>, it can be surmised that black bodies and physical space affect one another.</p>
Marshall, Kerry James
<ol><li>Art21. “‘Rythm Mastr’: Kerry Marshall James.” Art21, PBS, <a href="https://art21.org/read/kerry-james-marshall-rythm-mastr/">https://art21.org/read/kerry-james-marshall-rythm-mastr/</a>.</li>
</ol>
Fig. 1: Marshall, Kerry James. “Rythm Mastr: Tower of Power.” MoMA, Museum of Modern Art, www.moma.org/collection/works/215348?locale=en. Accessed 15 Nov 2017.
Fig. 2: Marshall, Kerry James. “Rythm Mastr: Every Beat of My Heart.” MoMA, Museum of Modern Art, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/215346?artist_id=8285&locale=en&sov_referrer=artist. Accessed 18 Dec 2017.
Fig. 3: Marshall, Kerry James. “Rythm Mastr: Bulletin!" MoMA, Museum of Modern Art, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/215347?artist_id=8285&locale=en&sov_referrer=artist. Accessed 18 Dec 2017.
1999-2000
<a href="https://comicsverse.com/author/o0rayday0o/">Rachel Davis</a>
43.1 × 57.8 cm (unfolded sheets)
Artist's Newspaper
New York City: Museum of Modern Art
<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