Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle. Detail of Drawings of 100 missing African American women, installed in the exhibition Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle: The Evanesced at the California African American Museum, March 2 - June 25, 2017.
The Black Index Curated by Bridget R. Cooks, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Art History at the University of California at Irvine Organized by the Hunter College Art Galleries Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery Thursday Oct. 1 – Sunday, November 29, 2020 (tentative dates)
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION Through their artworks, the artists featured in The Black Index––Dennis Delgado, Alicia Henry, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Titus Kaphar, Whitfield Lovell, and Lava Thomas––counter the assumptions of photography as the most accurate and transparent form for providing information about Black subjects. The Black Index is a strategy to contest the overwhelming number of photographs of Black people as victims of violent crimes that are circulated with such regularity and volume that they no longer refer to the persons they depict. Instead, the photographs become non-events that mark the monotonous, unremarkable, and numbing condition of the normality of Blackness as death. The Black Index creates new synapses, perceptive inroads into conceiving Black death as loss—loss to be mourned and remembered. It argues the loss of something that existed in the full complexity of form and spirit that is not
presented in the daily march of photographs of Black death. These artists’ approaches question and transform the reliance on photography as the source for visual objectivity and understanding.
The Black Index posits that these artists’ visual approaches accomplish three things: they make viewers aware of their own expectations of a portrait; they interrupt traditional epistemologies of portraiture through unexpected and unconventional presentations; and they present the Black body through a conceptual lens that acknowledges the legacy of Black containment that is always already present in viewing strategies. The tactics employed by Delgado, Henry, Hinkle, Kaphar, Lovell, and Thomas suggest understandings of Blackness and the racial terms of our neo-liberal condition that are alternatives to legal and popular interpretations. Their art offers a paradigmatic shift within Black visual culture.
ABOUT THE CURATOR Dr. Bridget R. Cooks fills a joint appointment in the Department of African American Studies and the Department of Art History. Cooks's research focuses on African American art and culture, Black visual culture, museum criticism, film, feminist theory and post-colonial theory. In 2002 she earned her doctorate degree in the Visual and Cultural Studies Program at the University of Rochester. She has received a number of awards, grants, and fellowships for her work, including the prestigious James A. Porter & David C. Driskell Book Award in African American Art History for her book Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (Massachusetts, 2011), and the Henry Luce Dissertation Fellowship in American Art. She is currently completing a second book, Norman Rockwell: The Civil Rights Paintings. Cooks has also curated several exhibitions of African American art including The Art of Richard Mayhew at the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, 2009-2010; Grafton Tyler Brown: Exploring California at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, 2018; and Ernie Barnes: A Retrospective at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles, 2019.
ABOUT THE PUBLICATION An illustrated full color publication will be produced for The Black Index. The catalogue will include the following:
Institutional Foreword/acknowledgements (500 words): Howard Singerman, the Phyllis and Joseph Caroff Chair of the Department of Art and Art History
Introduction (1500-2000 words): Sarah Watson, Chief Curator of the Hunter College Art Galleries
Catalogue Essay (10,000 words): Bridget R. Cooks, Curator of The Black Index and Associate Professor of African American Studies and Art History at the University of California at Irvine
Social Justice/Prison Reform Essay (3000-3500 words): CalvinJohn Smiley, Assistant Professor, Sociology at Hunter College-City University of New York.
Biographies/ artist entries for Dennis Delgado, Alicia Henry, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Titus Kaphar, Whitfield Lovell, and Lava Thomas (1000 word each): Written by one Hunter College MA graduate student and one University of California, Irvine graduate student.
ABOUT THE HUNTER COLLEGE ART GALLERIES The Hunter College Art Galleries, under the auspices of the Department of Art and Art History, have been a vital aspect of the New York cultural landscape since their inception over a quarter of a century ago. The galleries provide a space for critical engagement with art and pedagogy, bringing together historical scholarship, contemporary artistic practice, and experimental methodology. The galleries are committed to producing exhibitions, events, and scholarship in dialogue with the intellectual discourse generated by the faculty and students at Hunter and serve as an integral extension of the department’s academic programs.