Mickalene Thomas "I Cant See You Without Me" 2007

“My love is a 187” is clearly a poetic statement. 187, in police code, translates to homicide / murder; it is also the title of a Samuel L. Jackson movie from the late 90s where Jackson plays a teacher in a Brooklyn high school who gets brutally stabbed in the back by a black male student whom he had failed in science. When I think of those who were both loved and murdered - Martin Luther King, John Lennon, Fred Hampton, Malcolm X, Marvin Gaye, and Tupac Shakur all come to mind. After much deliberating, I realized I was trying to penetrate a koan. e.g. Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand? Koans generally contain aspects that are inaccessible to rational understanding, yet that may be accessible through intuition.

Or is the title in fact a statement designed with the intent to fly directly in the face of black stereotypes?

All of the artists in this exhibition have received the terminal degree of an MFA at prestigious art schools, which may or may not mean that they are on the track of professorship in the world of academia. In any case, after scanning their exhibition history, they all should have the choice.

The work, in varying degrees, mines the timeline of black history and pop culture. The farthest-reaching reference came from Mark Bradford with “Alexandria,” his found and altered footage of Alexandria in north central Egypt, home to the Library of Alexandria. A seemingly unassociated altered billboard piece, “Lucky” made a connection by way of his new excavation technique. He strips and scratches the surface of the Lucky jeans advert until subtle colors and textures emerge. He cuts out the word Lucky with a blade in a random approach leaving some letters intact while sliced. He then treats the surface with white paint in the same way one would dust for fingerprints searching for clues. If anyone has ever visited a Lucky jeans chain store knows the faint smell of coconut oil and the poached rock-n-roll imagery that attempts to seduce with its retro style. Lucky wants you to believe you are rummaging through Jimi Hendrix closet. Bradford snatches back 60s rock heritage through the elegant defacement he performs on the Lucky billboard- himself/artist emerging as the style icon.

Titus Kaphar re-authors the narrative of 18th and 19th century painting through a personal editing process of adding and subtracting. In three small daguerreotypes “White Underneath”1,2,3, he carefully re-paints images of his ancestors over the original white sitters. Kaphar luminously renders verbatim large oil canvases that portray enslaved Blacks in American paintings and then cuts out compass-perfect circles with a surgical hand. Within these circles is the information with which he re-orders the story within the paintings. In “Spouse,” a dandily dressed black man sits with an elegantly dressed woman with a cutout circle for a head and her hand has been edited by a circle as well. From a distance you are left to wonder and make assumptions about the woman. If you look closely, her wrist is still intact and it is white. In “Finding Moses” the same process is applied. The only figures left in the canvas are a slave in the bottom left corner holding a basket , a gentile white woman with eyes cast down on him, and a mysterious midget attending the woman. Her bosom is squashed, uplifted, and squarely on view. Between her corsets, laces, and wigs, I’m not sure who is more uncomfortable him or her. All of the other peoples’ faces have been edited by cutout circles of different sizes. The cutouts are then applied to a wall adjacent to the painting in a seemingly random order. A psychological game emerges; one has to decipher the re-authored narrative much like the koan. What Kaphar is telling you is ambiguous enough so you can still use your imagination while suggesting that what was originally painted may have been as carefully edited as his final presentation.

Mickalene Thomas takes us to the 70s with a set design that looks like it may have been in a Blaxploitation film. Blaxploitation is a film genre that emerged in the U.S. in the early 1970s when many exploitation films were made that targeted the urban African American audience. The word itself is a portmanteau of the words "black" and "exploitation". The films starred primarily black actors, and were the first to feature soundtracks of funk and soul music. Although criticized by civil rights groups for their use of stereotypes, they addressed the great and newfound demand for Afrocentric entertainment, and were immensely popular among black audiences. The blaxploitation genre officially began in 1971 with the release of “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song.” For Thomas’ installation “Between Ourselves,” Thomas collected astute 70s props from S.F. thrift shops, which include a gaudy couchette, formica furniture and loud orange and yellow floral wallpaper that has been applied then torn away, reapplied again to be slightly vandalized with a light hand. Soul records and beaded women’s garments are strategically placed about the set mastering the classic disco den vibe. On the fake-wood paneled wall hang two photographs of Thomas’s models Six Foota and Lady Blue in situ. The fashionable towering women are all sexed- up with glass lips, soft fros, smoky eyes and more thigh than not. They do not look at you, their eyes averted and successfully look past beyond the viewers gaze. On a turquoise wall hangs “I Cant See You Without Me,” a 6’x6’ sequined and jeweled enamel painting of a generously shaped, bare- breasted Venus in a bikini brief. Thomas’s signature be-jeweled paintings nod to British artist Chris Offili’s earlier works but escape into a category all her own with her application of refined American art brut and unapologetic sexuality.

Shinique Smith offers the nearest to now moment in the time line being established in the show. Smiths’ installation “Prayer Tree” is contemporary in surface while the content is subliminal, touching on historical events. Smith crafts a morphed penmanship that looks like a cross between graffiti and Arabic characters to tag the walls surrounding dried tree branches she secured to the wall. Bits of fabric, yarn, and souvenirs are tied to the branches suggesting a pilgrimage site or perhaps a lynching. Underneath the branches are sacks of clear vinyl filled with an assortment of local S.F. clothing that are then tied and bound sculpturally. On the floor Smith employs a variation of her hieroglyphics to cut out a design in a used floral patterned carpet that sharply and graphically projects out from the base of the bound sacs like rays of the sun. All of these disparate elements communicate and suggest you have just happened upon the evidence of a modern ritual, part art, part religion. Smiths’ work is optimistic, spiritual and alternative without preaching.

As I write this in a Mission District coffee shop “T.V. On The Radio” blares, the entire album - "Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes" for the second time. Incidentally Kip Malone the lead singer, previously worked at the same coffee shop where I worked on Potrero Hill, Farley’s.