How typically do you consider music when viewing a visible paintings — a portray, {photograph}, or collage mounted and framed? Scholar Nikki A. Greene’s new e-book, Grime, Glitter, and Glass: The Physique and the Sonic in Modern Black Artwork, explores this juxtaposition, placing the visible into dialog with the aural and the tactile.
Fittingly, the e-book’s construction follows the 5 major parts of a track’s composition: “Prelude,” “Verse One,” “Verse Two,” “Verse Three,” and “Coda.” Greene focuses every verse on a single artist — Renée Stout, Radcliffe Bailey, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons, respectively — and dissects particular works when it comes to musicality and sonic resonance as a lot as visible aesthetic.
Whereas the main target appears slender, every verse doesn’t relaxation with only one artist. As an alternative, it ambitiously presents the artist’s specific regional context of Black artwork, music, and folks at massive. To be able to delve into Stout, for instance, Greene frames the realities of the USA mid-Atlantic all through the twentieth century. For Bailey, the American South; for Campos-Pons, Cuba and Caribbean diasporic relations to the US. Thus every chapter blends mini-artist biographies with a socio-political historic account, mapping out a lush and generative creative household tree. When writing about Stout, Greene references Betye Saar. A lot of Campos-Pons’s chapter is devoted to Carrie Mae Weems. Bailey’s chapter is dotted with connections to Romare Bearden, David Hammons, Todd Grey, and director Barry Jenkins amongst others.
Radcliffe Bailey, “Transbluesency” (1999), acrylic, {photograph}, Plexiglas, oil stick, collage, resin, and glitter on wooden, 80 x 80 x 7 inches (~203.2 x 203.2 x 17.8 cm) (© The Property of Radcliffe Bailey; picture courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)
After which, after all, there’s the music. Full with an accompanying playlist, Greene maps sonic have an effect on by relating creative intention to musical artists, figuring out musical influences for visible work, and highlighting precise music inside work and performances.
In “Verse One,” Greene compares Stout’s use of the bodily type and the provocation of Black female sexuality in sculpture to that of funk and rock pioneer Betty Davis. For each artists, she attracts out the methods wherein defiance is commonly marked by stigma and society’s delayed understanding. “Verse Two” sees a extra abstracted effort to discover Bailey’s mixed-media work inside the twin actuality of Black excellence and anti-Black violence demonstrated by the South, the place the late artist was based mostly. Greene first particulars the music video for hip-hop group Arrested Improvement’s “Tennessee” (1992) wherein Bailey seems, drawing a line to jazz greats Miles Davis (invoking his aforementioned ex-wife Betty) and Solar Ra. “Verse Two” feels barely unwieldy and disjointed, maybe as a consequence of Greene’s effort to stipulate the burden of Black masculinity and shine with which these artists wrestle.
Extra efficiently, Campos-Pons’s “Verse Three” tackles the Western lack of recognition of Black validity: in contributions to artwork, within the energy and reward of Black ladies, in Cuba’s battle for autonomy, and extra. Greene brings in saxophonist Neil Leonard’s closely researched compositions for Campos-Pons’s work, such because the efficiency piece Recognized (2016), connecting the dots with late Afro-Cuban singer Celia Cruz’s distinctive use of sugar — ¡Azucar! — as a declare of female, Black, and Afro-Caribbean energy.
For all its feats, this e-book is finally a scholarly work and sometimes veers into tutorial language. The coda, specifically, is a probably too-dense show of social theories and observations from Greene.
However whereas the model calls for some extra effort from the reader, it additionally implies that the quite a few Black names within the e-book — of each visible and musical artists — at the moment are endlessly revealed and etched into the document of more and more interdisciplinary approaches to artistic fields. Solar Ra’s Afrofuturistic jazz does work together with Romare Bearden’s collage model, which in flip impacts Bailey’s glittering “Pullman” coronary heart. Exploring the sonic grime by way of funk, glitter by way of shine, and glass by way of colonial histories of Black modern artwork by means of these chosen artists, Greene provides a novel part to Black American cultural critique.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons speaks to individuals in “Procession of Angels for Radical Love and Unity” in Harlem Park on September 7. (photograph by Argenis Apolinario, courtesy the artist and Madison Sq. Park Conservancy)
Set up view of María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s “Spoken Softly with Mama” (1998) in Behold on the Brooklyn Museum in November 2023 (photograph Lakshmi Rivera Amin/Hyperallergic)
Radcliffe Bailey, “Echo” (2011), {photograph} on metal, glass, Georgia clay, and seashell, 48 1/2 x 49 x 9 inches (~123.2 x 124.5 x 22.9 cm) (© The Property of Radcliffe Bailey; picture courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)
María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s conceptual sketch for “Procession of Angels for Radical Love and Unity” (picture courtesy the artist and Madison Sq. Park Conservancy)
Grime, Glitter, and Glass: The Physique and the Sonic in Modern Black Artwork (2024) by Nikki A. Greene is revealed by Duke College Press and is out there on-line and thru unbiased booksellers.
