Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Hammons, and Black Cherokee

COUNTER-STRATEGIES AND SELF-CURATION: JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT, DAVID HAMMONS, AND BLACK CHEROKEE

CHLOÉ PULIDO

Professor Catherine Newman Howe, Advisor Professor C. Ondine Chavoya, Advisor

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Art History

WILLIAMS COLLEGE

Williamstown, Massachusetts

May 23, 2016

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements… 1

Introduction… 2

It All Depends on Who You Are on What Street… 5

But Nothing Was for Sale… 19

They Want Me to Be Dull, Don’t Want Me to Use What’s in My Skull… 24

Conclusion… 34

Notes… 36

Works Cited… 40

Illustrations… 43

This thesis is dedicated to Otis Houston, Jr., AKA Black Cherokee

Acknowledgements

This thesis would not have been possible without the help of my brilliant thesis classmates. I will be forever grateful for the help and careful attention they gave to me and my project during this process, and, more importantly, for the much-needed friendship and support over the past several months. I also owe the success of this project to Professors C. Ondine Chavoya and Catherine Newman Howe, who each routinely flattered me with their investment in my work, and impressed me with the wealth of knowledge they generously offered to me during this process. Their willingness to support my project, and the genuine enthusiasm and aptitude with which they have done so, has meant so much to me, and has been a truly special part of my Williams experience. I would also like to thank the incredible educators I have had the privilege of working with over the course of my education. From the wonderful arts educators at my New York City public schools who nurtured in me a love of and appreciation for art— Carlos Nuñez, William Jung, Andrew Stehle, and most of all, Carolanna Parlato—to the exceptional Williams professors who have enriched my academic experience beyond words, whether they are aware of it or not—Michael Lewis, Guy Hedreen, Kasumi Yamamoto, Jinhwa Chang, Gail Newman, Margaux Cowden, Christian Thorne, and Eva Grudin—I am so grateful for the role they have all played in my intellectual development and formative school years. Lastly, I could not have successfully completed my Williams education without the love and support of my family. Thank you to my grandparents, Roz and Bob Fields, for always being proud of me even when I felt I didn’t deserve it. Thank you to my sister, Emma Pulido, for showing me the importance of being brave. And thank you infinitely to my mother, Shari Fields, who taught me everything I know, who gave me everything I have, and without whom I would be nothing.

“I hope the exit is joyful, and I hope never to return.” – Frida Kahlo

Introduction

In November 2015, the New York Times ran an article titled, “Black Artists and the March Into the Museum,”1 which described the unfortunately familiar plight of the black American artist: “spotty acquisitions, undernourished scholarship and token exhibitions.”2 The article makes apparent both United States art institutions’ historic underrepresentation of black artists, and the disregard of the people who run these institutions for black artists and the work that they do. Only recently have the canon of

U.S. museums begun to work towards acquiring the work of black artists for their permanent collections – “not [as] a special initiative, or a fad, but [as] a fundamental part of museums’ missions.”3 However, the underrepresentation (or total failure to represent) of black and nonwhite artists, without whom any history of American art is grossly incomplete, persists. This in turn alienates and inevitably excludes nonwhite people from the art audience.

Artist Daniel Buren’s influential essay, “Function of the Museum” (1970), provides a helpful conceptual portrait of the significations of the modern (Western) art museum, which are necessary to lay out before moving forward with my analysis of the artist-art institution relationship. Buren describes the museum as performing in three essential capacities: aesthetic (“the centre in which the action takes place and the single

(topographical and cultural) viewpoint for the work”); economic (“The Museum gives a sales value to what it exhibits, has privileged/selected”); and mystical (“The

Museum/Gallery instantly promotes to ‘Art’ status whatever it exhibits with conviction”).4 In short, the institution of the museum is one that has considerable authority, both in the economic and cultural realities of places where they exist, and in

the cultural imaginations of those who have ever encountered one. Accordingly, the museum “becomes the single viewpoint (cultural and visual) from which works can be considered.”5

Under such circumstances, one can understand why David Hammons, one of the few very successful black American artists working today, would be repelled by the prospect of participating in this structure even if the people in control of it deem his work aesthetically, conceptually, and commercially viable. Jean-Michel Basquiat, an artist who would have been a generation younger than Hammons, also enjoyed a level of success and celebrity in the 1980s that was largely unprecedented for a black American. Although

Basquiat’s painting career was short (c.1979-1988), and he died at the age of twenty- seven of a heroin overdose, his celebrity persists today—a celebrity that paradoxically seems both hard-won and inevitable for the enigmatic, untrained ‘genius child.’

Hammons and Basquiat each embody their own particular relationship to their position within the larger structure of art institutions. Although the contemporary art world is predicated on the viewpoint that institutional recognition—via gallery representation, auction prices, and market demand—bolster the legitimacy of one’s work, Hammons’ resistance to involvement with museums, galleries, and the contemporary art market, and

Basquiat’s fascination with them, raise important questions about the implications of commodifying one’s labor and capitalizing on one’s image.

Any New Yorker who drives along the F.D.R. Drive on Manhattan’s east side will know to keep an eye out for two things: Keith Haring’s 1986 Crack is Wack mural

(Fig. 1), and Black Cherokee (Fig. 2). Black Cherokee, an artist whose real name is Otis

Houston, Jr., began his roadside installations and performances in 1997, and has since

become a New York City institution. It is helpful to trace Houston’s work to the legacies of Hammons and Basquiat. Like David Hammons, Houston has chosen to site his often performative installation pieces, with intention, in Harlem, on the side of the highway where hundreds of passersby can see what he’s doing each day. While the site-specificity and collection of culturally coded materials as his chosen medium ring of Hammons’ own program, the enigmatic and self-promoting (Fig. 3) messages he scrawls on bed sheets and pieces of cardboard have an undeniable Basquiatian quality about them. Like both Hammons and Basquiat, Houston’s works address themes that, when framed by the identities with which he clearly identifies, are given added layers of significance. All three of these artists have had to navigate being outsiders in the New York art scene, and have consequently developed strategies – perhaps more appropriately called counter- strategies – in order to achieve what they wanted within a framework wherein artists of color are inherently disadvantaged.

In thinking specifically about Hammons and Basquiat, it is critical to consider the sociopolitical environs in which their careers developed. It goes without saying that the art world was (and still is) overwhelmingly, and almost exclusively, the domain of white males. Based on something as immutable as their race and appearance, these artists are thus rendered outsiders. The insider/outsider dichotomy as it applies to art can refer to artists working in or outside of big cities as well as to “a sociological opposition between legitimate (or dominant) positions in the artistic field,” as in the case of Hammons’ and

Basquiat’s race, to “cognitive (or mental) structuring of what is inside or outside the boundary definition of art as opposed to non-art, of who is or is not an artist,” and to the

“mere physical opposition between art shown inside or outside the walls of museums and

galleries.”6 Taking this description into account, it becomes more complicated to place these artists along this spectrum because we see that in this framework, Basquiat and

Hammons (and Houston) all display varying degrees of relative insider- and-outsiderness.

As artists, living and working in New York City automatically puts them in a privileged position. Even living in the United States (and, furthermore, the West) could be seen as elements of art world insiderness. The point, “who is or is not an artist,” is typically, and most quantifiably, an issue of formal training. Hammons received formal training at both the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles and the Chouinard Art Institute, which is now Cal

Arts.7 Basquiat received none. This factor plays a particularly interesting role in each of their identities as artists: while Hammons devotes himself to subverting the conventions of the art world that he was presumably taught to value in art school, Basquiat actively, almost desperately, strove to insert himself into that world that he knew did not exist for people like him.

It All Depends on Who You Are on What Street8

Miwon Kwon, a curator and art historian whose work deals extensively with site- specific art, writes, “More than just the museum, the site comes to encompass a relay of several interrelated but different spaces and economies, including the studio, gallery, museum, art criticism, art history, the art market, that together constitute a system of practices that is not separable from but open to social, economic, and political pressures.”9 Although Kwon identifies a shift from physical site specificity to more discursive site specificity over the last several decades, physical, place-specific sitings are more relevant to this paper. In this paper, what I consider to be the site implied by a

given work of art is not limited to unconventional or subversive locations, as in the case of Hammons’ Higher Goals (1983 and 1986) or Bliz-aard Ball Sale (1983). The siting of artworks in institutional spaces carries significant meaning as well. Kwon writes,

The modern gallery/museum space, for instance, with its stark white walls, artificial lighting (no windows), controlled climate, and pristine architectonics, was perceived not solely in terms of basic dimensions and proportion but as an institutional disguise, a normative exhibition convention serving an ideological function, a function that serves to further the “institution’s idealist imperative of rendering itself and its hierarchization of values ‘objective,’ ‘disinterested,’ and ‘true.’”10 In a discussion of Daniel Buren’s writings on the museum as “cultural framework,”11 Kwon extends his argument beyond just the museum and applies it to any and all potential sitings of a work of art, saying, “to be ‘specific’ to such a site…is to decode and/or recode the institutional conventions so as to expose their hidden yet motivated operations – to reveal the ways in which institutions mold art’s meaning to modulate its cultural and economic value.”12

Conversely, a work of art that carries with it the inherent expectation of being hung in a gallery or added to a dealer’s collection is complicit in, and dependent on, those modulations. And, of course, those “institutional conventions” have very specific racial indications: Greg Tate, cultural critic and essayist, writes

No area of modern intellectual life has been more resistant to recognizing and authorizing people of color than the world of the ‘serious’ visual arts. To this day it remains a bastion of white supremacy, a sconce of the wealthy whose high-walled barricades are matched only by Wall Street and the White House and whose exclusionary practices are enforced 24-7-365.13

In a 1986 interview with art historian Kellie Jones,14 David Hammons declared, “I can’t stand art actually. I’ve never, ever liked art, ever.”15 When Jones challenged the artist on his startlingly anti-art statement, Hammons described his art practice as something that was an ineluctable calling, a sort of inborn social obligation to create.

Still, Hammons was forthcoming with Jones about the frustrations he and his peers endured: “When I was in California, artists would work for years and never have a show,” he said. “We used to cuss people out: people who bought our work, dealers, etc., because that part of being an artist was always a joke to us.”16 Hammons’ position calls into question why being able to show one’s art in a conventional gallery space – having access to that representation – is something should legitimize or sanction one’s choice to identify as an artist. Of course, the art world is predicated on the assumption that this is, in fact, the case. One way in which Hammons expressed his wariness of the art establishment was his preference for public art works in New York City, which subvert the notion that art is meant for a particular audience in a particular kind of setting. Higher

Goals (Fig. 5) is just one work among many that is representative of this attitude. His interview with Kellie Jones is rare in both its depth and sheer length, and thus proves to be an invaluable resource that is worth quoting again at length:

I do my street art mainly to keep rooted in that, ‘who I am.’ Because the only thing that’s really going on is in the street; that’s where something is really happening. It isn’t happening in these galleries. Lately I’ve been trying to meet a new kind of people in this city and not the art scene… The art audience is the worst audience in the world. It’s overly educated, it’s conservative, it’s out to criticize not to understand, and it never has any fun. Why should I spend my time playing to that audience?17

Bringing his works into the path of the public, Hammons’ art objects are brought to equal ground with other everyday sights that color the city life experience, thereby challenging perceptions of what an art object is and where it should appear. This also brings the experience of art viewing out of the “too shiny and too neat”18 gallery space and into the paths of people who may not otherwise find themselves feeling welcome to enter a gallery or museum. In other words, people on the some of the furthest geographic and demographic margins of the New York art scene: low-income people of color. The

significance of this siting, then, has just as much to do with the work’s public nature as it does with its actual chosen location. Higher Goals in its first iteration was installed on

Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem (1983), and then later developed further and installed in Cadman Park in Downtown Brooklyn (1986). Both of these neighborhoods are historically black, and located outside of the locus of the city’s art world activity.

Higher Goals is an installation of five larger-than-life basketball hoops that are covered in sheaths of bottle caps, which he collected directly from the community as he worked on the poles. The poles have the imposing, totemic quality of Aksumite stelae and the intricate patterning of Tutsi basket-weaving or Fulani textiles (Figs. 6-8): they are securely and irrefutably non-Western in aesthetic. Adding to this sense is the graphic patterning of the bottle caps on some of the poles, and the similarity of the caps on the sheaths of others to cowry shells, which, as writer David L. Smith describes, “have a complex history of associations” with and within the arts of Africa.19 Therefore, not only is Hammons bringing monumental works of art into these communities, but he is also employing a nonwestern visual language that serves to overturn the residents’ internalized preconceptions of what constitutes legitimate—Eurocentric—art that white supremacist histories advance.

In the case of Higher Goals, the site-specificity of the work and the associations evoked by its subject call attention to stereotypes that Hammons sees not only white society projecting onto the black community, but also the black community projecting onto itself. However, it wouldn’t be accurate to argue that Hammons is indicting those communities in which he sited Higher Goals; rather, he’s condemning the workings of structural racism that operate in the community to limit the choices – perceived and

actual – of its young people. Commenting on the work and its intended young, black audience, Hammons said, “Basketball has become a problem in the black community because kids aren’t getting an education. They’re pawns in someone else’s game.”20 This last remark quite aptly describes the role within the high art apparatus that Hammons and his work actively aim to resist. The basketball motif, which Hammons reincarnated through a wide variety of works across mediums, “bring[s] art to the streets and the street to the gallery.”21 In this sense, works such as Higher Goals are sited both literally and thematically, so that wherever they may appear, they cannot be stripped of the ethos with which Hammons conceived of them. The effect of Higher Goals’ chosen locations in

Harlem and Downtown Brooklyn is one that both elevates familiar themes and culturally coded objects to the status of art, but also signals to the audience that art is for everyone, and that its current status as existing only for the erudite is a construct that can be dismantled.

In an essay by prominent critic Lucy Lippard, she describes the ambivalent relationship between ‘alternative’ artists and art institutions: “The indirect perks such as names dropped in the right places or press coverage leading to expanded bibliographies can make museum shows irresistible even to artists who mistrust the institutions, since there are few rewards for those not so blessed.”22 Like Hammons, Jean-Michel Basquiat was quite aware of this, but rather than reject this mechanism, he sought to become a part of it. To that end, Basquiat made choices regarding where his early works would be located. In 1978, seventeen-year-old Basquiat was featured in a Village Voice article about the SAMO graffiti that he and friend Al Diaz had been scrawling all over lower

Manhattan.23 There, “new celebrities arose from the downtown mix of music,

performance, and painting that intoxicated New York media and enriched both popular culture and art.”24 Writing ambiguous messages on the streets of particular downtown neighborhoods was very much motivated by Basquiat’s agenda to gain access to this celebrity, and to become a painter in the downtown galleries despite his lack of training – something he is known to have had ‘anxiety’ about.25 Fab Five Freddy26 of the late 1970s

Brooklyn graffiti crew The Fabulous Five reminisces,

SAMO was originally a group of a few friends, but Jean was the most aggressive and clever with it, strategically placing his tag and the thought-provoking statements that often accompanied it on many well-traveled streets in Soho and the East and West Village. The art world was sure that SAMO was a white Conceptual artist because a teenage black kid certainly couldn’t be that smart… Our mission, which we discussed often, was finding a way to crack open the giant doors of popular culture and the art world.27

The earlier messages left by SAMO (Fig. 9) express a certain sense of teen angst, but a special brand of it that, significantly, would prefigure Basquiat’s self-professed desire to become known as an “intellectual black figure” on the art scene.28 The Village Voice article gives an example of one such message left on prestigious Stuyvesant High School:

“SAMO© AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO BOOSH-WAH YOUTH IMPERSONATING

‘60S PROTOTYPES.”29 Despite the genuine interest that art world figures started to take in the person responsible for these messages (who, and probably to their delight, was just a kid), having achieved his goal, Basquiat thought it necessary to abandon his persona as a ‘graffiti artist’ to be legitimized as a ‘real’ artist: he intuited that a change of site was necessary for this legitimacy. It must have validated Basquiat to a significant degree to read an early review of him in a 1981 show at P.S. 1 that noted the remarkableness of the

“educated quality of Basquiat's line and the stateliness of his compositions, both of which bespeak a formal training that, in fact, he never had.”30

The site that is presupposed by Basquiat’s Jawbone of an Ass (1982; Fig. 10), whose title, interestingly, makes reference to an Old Testament story,31 is a gallery, a museum, or a collector’s home. Though these are all conventional, or expected, locations for a large work that an artist has labored over, this does not diminish their significance when thinking specifically about Basquiat. A hallmark of early works like this one is their heavy featuring of text: lists, slogans, names, poems. The words function as pictorial elements, which invites the viewer to either interpret them as shapes and images, or as words and messages with semantic meaning. Importantly, interspersed among these words are ones with racialized associations, whether vague or overt. In Jawbone of an

Ass, the words at the top of the composition make reference to the ancient civilizations of

Egypt, Rome, and Greece. Towards the bottom, the words “emancipation proc” and

“creole” are legibly painted (or drawn, or written). Partway hidden under a swath of white paint are the words “Lincoln, A” and “slaves.” The letters that make up these words may also be read as marks made for their forms and values, so these race-referent words and phrases are able to blend in inconspicuously with the rest of the pictorial elements. The (likely white) viewer in the gallery or museum is allowed to pick them out or ignore them, depending on their desired experience. However, Jawbone is also an instance in which the error in reading into his works any sort of preoccupation with

African heritage becomes clear. To do so would be to force Basquiat into the box of an artist with a singular sense of identity and one source of artistic inspiration, which we have already seen is not the case. Also, it would deny the incredible wealth of knowledge that he amassed starting in his childhood, from studying Gray’s Anatomy, to museum trips with his mother and his voracious reading habit.32 Consider another work from the

same period, an Untitled of 1982-83 (Fig. 11), which a Brooklyn Museum catalog interprets rather unimaginatively: “The artist’s choice of working primarily in black and white makes a pointed comment on his experience of being black in a dominant white culture.”33 If Jawbone alluded, partially, to what could be read as an abridged racialized history of America, then that certainly gets swallowed up in the broad history of the world that Untitled recounts: the summer palace of the Manchu Emperor, Robespierre,

William Hanna, piragua, the Death of General Wolfe, baseball, Cairo. It can’t be denied that many choice words in these compositions hold meanings that are relevant to discourses on race and race-related issues. However, the way in which Basquiat chooses to combine and depict (or not depict) these words reflects his ambivalent relationship with art discourses and their often reductive readings of race, and his subsequent wariness of being known simply as a ‘Black Artist.’

The politics implicit in the artists’ choice of site is underscored, if not enhanced, by both the media of their works and the references that those media implicitly make.

Hammons, as mentioned previously, employed a markedly Africanist aesthetic.

Prominent scholar of African art Robert Farris Thompson’s Flash of the Spirit is a comprehensive and diverse look into the ways in which “the rise, development, and achievement of Yoruba, Kongo, Fon, Mande, and Ejagham art and philosophy fused with new elements overseas, shaping and defining the black Atlantic visual tradition.”34

Hammons is Midwestern by birth and a New Yorker by choice, but a large and important part of his oeuvre is deeply rooted in visual analogies to this tradition. Most compelling is what seems to me to be an interpretation of the Yoruba concept of àshe – a word without a direct translation that Thompson describes as “spiritual command, the power-to-make-

things-happen” that is “crucially important” in all corners of Yoruba life – in Hammons’ work.35 This strongly recalls the quality of ‘potency’ that scholars like Kellie Jones and

Greg Tate identify in the materials he uses, especially given the further definition: “àshe may also be present in a drop of semen or a drop of blood.”36 In the interview with Kellie

Jones, Hammons himself notes that the hair of black people that he uses in certain of his works contain a certain power and potency: “You’ve got tons of peoples’ spirits in your hands when you work with that stuff. The same with wine bottles. A black person’s lips have touched each one of those bottles, so you have to be very, very careful.”37 The same can be said of the bottle caps that Hammons collected from the communities in which he constructed Higher Goals.

I should not neglect to acknowledge my own initial reservations about turning to a book written by a Euroamerican man for insight into the arts of the various African cultures I cite in my discussion of Higher Goals. Although Thompson is widely considered an authority on African arts, it’s a decision I had to critically examine given the nature and concerns of my own project. Additionally, I was wary of appearing as though I had arbitrarily selected this book from a shelf where it lay besides other comparable ones, and flipped through it until I found something that satisfied my inquiry.

In fact, both Basquiat and Hammons did read this book and were both familiar with and affected by its contents. Still, I am grateful to Greg Tate for his essay in which he discusses Thompson’s merits and contributions within the fields of African and diaspora art, specifically with regard to Flash of the Spirit. He recognizes that many black people, and rightfully so, are uncomfortable with the space Thompson occupies: writing, to critical acclaim, about art that resulted from generations of black people being severed

from their heritage via the Middle Passage. “Regardless,” Tate writes, “I have to give it up to Thompson on three counts: his perspective is Afrocentric rather than Western academic; it’s more informed by genuine reverence and enthusiasm than by the savage arrogance we’ve come to expect as the Anglo-Saxon norm when pondering Africa; and he knows too much to be ignored. Period.”38 In Thompson’s book, to which Hammons refers in the interview with Jones, and which Basquiat kept in his studio,

Thompson has excised such vandal obscenities as ‘tribalism,’ ‘fetishism,’ and ‘black superstitions’ from his lexicon, and replaced them with discussions of neighboring civilizations, cosmograms, and Black Atlantic philosophy. He refers to African civilizations by regional ethnic names rather than those imposed by imperialist borderlines… Thompson figures into this web as a mediator between world views, celebrating African ideas in an evocative and provocative Western tongue.39

In his generation of art history scholars, necessarily white and male, Thompson and his scholarship truly stand alone, which is why I feel secure in my consultation of Flash of the Spirit.

Returning to my earlier comments about a site that is implied in a work of art being a conventional gallery or museum space, and how the medium used and the work itself carry certain ideological significations, it is necessary to consider Basquiat’s specific employment of the medium of paint. Hammons’ purposeful evocation of black lineage is not replicated in Basquiat’s paintings. Despite that, as Thompson notes in his essay for the Whitney exhibition catalog, there exists the tendency of scholars to draw comparisons between Haitian sacred art (or their limited understanding of it) and

“voodoo,” and Basquiat’s work, when, in fact, the Petro table-altars, vodun flags, and ritual ground paintings find virtually no visual analogies in the paintings of that artist.40

Interestingly, in his interview with Kellie Jones, Hammons actually cited Thompson’s passage on the Haitian table altars as having inspired his use of bottles and bottle caps.41

Rather, Basquiat’s predilection for painting has other significations of its own. In 1989,

Greg Tate wrote in his iconic essay “Nobody Loves a Genius Child: Jean Michel

Basquiat, Flyboy in the Buttermilk,”

Clearly Basquiat’s conception of making it in the Western art world transcended those of the train-writers [graffiti artists]. To Basquiat, making it did not just mean getting a gallery exhibition, a dealer, or even collecting big bank off his work. Making it to him means going down in history, ranked beside the Great White Fathers of Western painting in the eyes of major critics, museum curators, and art historians who ultimately determine such things.42

Indeed, the medium of painting does enjoy an indisputable hegemony over other media, and, additionally, its heritage is securely Euroamerican: “Like most things in our culture that hold the power to confer cultural authority, privilege, and aristocratic access…the heroic tradition of painting is a white-man’s club. You don’t have to be one to get into it, you just need one to escort you through the doors.”43 Here, Tate notes that Basquiat’s medium of choice carries with it a certain hegemonic status, achieved over many centuries of Western art history. It’s true that the abstract expressionistic quality of his paintings markedly disassociate them with naturalistic oil paintings of many European traditions, but at the same time, this aligns his work with another tradition that was as much a “white-man’s club” as any. It is interesting that Basquiat seems to have perceived artistic success as a binary of legitimate versus illegitimate, and street versus gallery space. This is no clearer demonstrated than by his total termination of his SAMO brand when important art-world people acknowledged that he could paint.

Otis Houston, Jr.’s work also makes important use of site specificity, and, moreover, engages with these same complex themes of institutional legitimacy, artists’ autonomy, and audience. Houston creates tableaux on the side of the F.D.R. Drive in

Harlem that are sometimes amusing, sometimes quite serious, but are always fascinating

and thought-provoking, for the enjoyment (or edification, or provocation) of the passing cars. His ambition to become an artist was borne out of his experience attending art classes while in prison for drug-related charges on two separate occasions.44 Houston was the subject of a short film, Black Cherokee, which was screened at the DOC NYC film festival in 2012 (as well as at the Ashland Independent Film Festival in Oregon in 2013), which allows an intimate view of Houston’s work to people who may never find themselves in New York, let alone in a car on the F.D.R. Drive. The film, which is available for download online, also provides a look into his job as a custodian at a gym, and his home life, where he takes care of his father who has Alzheimer’s (Fig. 12). In the film’s opening scene, Houston stands balancing a slice of watermelon on his head.

Whether he’s pantomiming with a paintbrush, orating to the cars, or frozen in a single curious pose, the passing drivers yell out to him (Figs. 13 & 14). “Otis, my man!” Often he’ll engage with them, shouting back a greeting; he is in no way the image of the aloof, detached artist. Many of his installations, which are different nearly every day, are straightforwardly humorous and quite whimsical. However, other installations and performance pieces are certainly politically inflected, like one shown in the film wherein he paces anxiously behind a chain link fence with red tape over his mouth (Fig. 15). Both overt and subtle references like this one to politics, history, and race in Houston’s works themselves combine with the actual bodily, and racialized, presence of the artist to make the artist’s various degrees of outsider status deeply felt. In one scene from Black

Cherokee, he sits with his family in their living room, where they express exasperation at his commitment to his unconventional artistic activities. He counters, “How do you be a

successful artist? You be a successful artist by having customers. Location, location, location… By the highway, I got in the New Yorker magazine! Talk of the town.”45

In an amateur YouTube video in which a fan of Houston’s approached him as he was set up on the side of the highway, he recites an original poem for the woman and her son, who are both black as well:

They want me to be dull, don’t want me to use what’s in my skull. They want to see me with a broom, don’t want to see me in a computer room. They want to see me lookin’ funny, don’t want to see me with a hand full of money. They want to see me as a freak, don’t want to see me stand up and speak. They want to see me dirty-ass and beat, don’t want to see me spotless, and with a Ph.D. They want to see me bend, don’t want to see me act like I know I can win. They want to see me break, don’t want to see me act like I’m the best that they make,

all while balancing a slice of watermelon on his head and knee.46 Although the “they” in

Houston’s poem clearly signifies people who work to secure the oppression of people of color, and especially poor people of color, the artist still leaves this “they” ambiguous and focuses his message on resilience, transcendence, and self-betterment. While Houston’s roadside location made possible these people’s firsthand interaction with the artist and his work, Houston’s willingness to let the woman film the interaction and put it online signifies the expansive, accessible, and entirely contemporary location of cyberspace.

It is clear that Houston doesn’t fit the conventional description of artist-by- profession. For this reason, although Houston’s works are recognizably and distinctly his, it can be difficult to situate them conceptually. However, Houston’s work may find an apt analogy in the work of artist William Pope.L. Both artists can be classified as performance artists, and both utilize public spaces in New York – namely, the streets – to enact their performances. In both cases, however, the “performances” are not so simply defined as such, as both artists combine elements of performance, text, object, image, installation, and intervention to varying degrees in any given work. Transgressing

categorical expectations, specifically those made of black men, is a consistent consideration of Pope.L’s practice, whatever form it may take.47 Pope.L describes his performances as ways to encounter people and to “explore communication concepts.”48

Similarly, Houston’s practice achieves similar goals, even if the extent to which this is intentional is difficult to gauge. Art historian Kristine Stiles has described Pope.L’s performance pieces as “belong[ing] to the mental, social, and political theater of the absurd.”49 To take one of many examples, his eRacism “crawls” from the 1970s through the early 2000s, wherein he would crawl around in various sites around the city, drew lots of confused attention from pedestrians, one of whom once told him to get off the ground and stop “degrading the image of black people.”50 Likewise, several articles covering

Houston’s activities make a point of mentioning that onlookers often mistake the artist for a mentally ill homeless person. Perhaps this is due to the element of absurdity also present in Houston’s works, which makes them difficult to make sense of amidst all the self-serious art we are told is legitimate by New York’s galleries and museums. In an interview in with celebrated curator Lowery Stokes Sims in 2001, Pope.L said something about this absurdity that enriches a reading of Houston’s work: in order to deal with the challenge of living in the limbo of the “privilege and presence” they have as males, and the “subordination and lack” they face as black people, some black men in his life have

“contributed some very telling counter-strategies, for example the building of things, the telling of jokes and poetry…the ethos of hard work no matter what you might have been doing the night before.”51

But Nothing Was for Sale

In his interview with Kellie Jones, Hammons spoke candidly about his distrust and dislike of art institutions, an increasingly influential one of which is the art market.

Considering how the obstacles faced by Hammons and his black peers in 1970s America did not somehow cease to exist once the threshold of a gallery’s doors was crossed, one can understand why he wasn’t eager to contribute the products of his physical and mental labor – his art works – to an institutional structure that is complacent in the reproduction of American racism in how it disadvantages artists – and potential art audiences – of color. Although the contemporary art world seems to take as axiomatic that auction prices and market demand indicate the legitimacy of an artist’s work, Hammons’ resistance to involve himself in the contemporary art market, Basquiat’s fascination with it, and

Houston’s virtual indifference towards it, raise important questions about the implications of self-commodification, capitalizing on one’s image, and attempting to self-curate as a strategy to retain autonomy over this commodification.

Hammons’ preference for public, site-specific works is actually quite interrelated with his indictments of the art market and commodification of the work of artists whose existences are otherwise devalued by those who operate the institutions responsible for displaying and selling art. Bliz-aard Ball Sale (1983; Fig. 16) was an interactive, public work that expresses these feelings quite plainly. For Ball Sale, Hammons set up a display of artfully arranged snowballs amongst the street vendors in Cooper Square in the East

Village. At first glance, the snowball sale is whimsical and humorous, asking people to pay money for something that will surely disappear in a matter of minutes. However, the siting of this performance in Cooper Square was quite deliberate, due to its proximity to

the prestigious art school, Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and the emergent trendy gallery scene downtown. Hammons thus called attention to the complexity of the practice of marking art works for sale, as well as to the disproportionate value assigned to whiteness in the art world: the whiteness of its stark, spiritless galleries, and of its white artists, both past and present. David L. Smith calls the work an “extreme example” of Hammons’ “anti-collector preoccupation.”52

It is interesting, if not ironic, that the themes that dominate Ball Sale are commodification, commerce, and object ownership, because in the 1970s, Hammons was interested in developing a conceptual art that wasn’t ‘salable’: “These things were brown paper bags with hair, barbecue bones, and grease thrown on them. But nothing was for sale.”53 Hammons, who would come to be notorious for his aversion to gallery representation, participation in group shows, and interviews even, stopped making body prints when he saw how commercially successful they were.54 He seemed to have grown frustrated, perhaps even disappointed, that the people who he showed his work to upon arriving in New York in 1974 couldn’t seem understand his work without there being the prospect of them being able to purchase it, or, perhaps even more troublingly, profit off it. In Ball Sale, Hammons made his statement by knowing he could make a buck off the art audience’s pretention.

Money and commercial success and its relation to an artist’s status are issues that both Hammons and Basquiat clearly thought a lot about. For Basquiat, this manifested in a personal determination to have his artistic prolificacy rewarded with wealth. However, just as his race, youth, lack of formal training, and origins in so-called graffiti all served as grounds upon which to question Basquiat’s artistic legitimacy, paradoxically, so too

was his interest in material profit. While it was known that gallery representation and sale prices were now major considerations in measuring artistic success, art critics contemporary to Basquiat think that commercial success and avant-gardist practice could exist, fundamentally, in a single body of work.55 Because of this, those who authored the art literature at the time were quick to dismiss Basquiat, who was keenly aware of the necessity of playing by this particular rule of artistic validation vis-à-vis market clout.

This awareness undeniably played a role in him coming to be considered the first black contemporary artist to gain international fame, but this fame was at the cost of Basquiat being subjected to the ideological push-and-pull that the various art institutions subjected him to.56 This then must have been a source of cognitive dissonance and frustration for the artist, which is manifested in his use of certain subjects, symbols, and techniques.

Black American psychiatrists William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs write in their influential book Black Rage (1968), “As boys approach adulthood, masculinity becomes more and more bound up with money making.”57 This analysis adds another layer to

Basquiat’s mission, demonstrating that in this particular instance, it is neither productive nor responsible to overlook the implications of race in Basquiat’s relationship with money and wealth.

A New York Times Magazine cover story from 1985 called “New Art, New

Money,”58 featured Basquiat as an art star whose newfound wealth and social capital were perhaps more fascinating that the art he was producing itself. In fact, when his paintings were at all mentioned in this article (for the first time in its sixth paragraph), they were more often than not being noted for how much they sold for, or whose private collections they were now a part of. Albeit unbeknownst to Cathleen McGuigan, who

wrote the article, Basquiat would only live three years past its publication. For that reason, that McGuigan seems primarily concerned with sale prices and his celebrity is frustrating. Notably, she refers to Basquiat’s paintings simply as “Basquiats,” which has certainly influenced the language that is commonly used to describe the artist and the work he produced, and, moreover, has had a profound effect on the way in which the artist has posthumously acquired a near-mythic status. Not only does this status mean that

Basquiat-as-brand has been able to endure for decades past his death, which is in and of itself noteworthy, but it raises questions about the extent to which Basquiat had—and has—any sort of autonomy over his image and its commodification.

The way in which McGuigan’s cover story paints a picture of Basquiat and his social scene makes clear that scene’s preoccupation with money, and inability to separate it from an artist’s potential for institutional recognition: speaking about the first purchase he made from Basquiat, art historian and pioneering Metropolitan Museum curator Henry

Geldzahler59 said, “‘I decided to overpay. I offered $2,000 for it. I knew he was authentic and I wanted to say, ‘Welcome to the real world.’”60 The article also makes clear that because of the emergent and rapidly growing global market for contemporary art, whoever was able to harness Basquiat’s raw artistic energy into prolificacy would therefore achieve a lucrative position within this mechanism. Writes McGuigan,

Basquiat's sometimes-stormy rise and struggle with the art establishment provide a look at how the artists' names and their works are marketed in the art world today. His successful career demonstrates the competitiveness among dealers for artists; dealers' pricing and marketing techniques; their control of supply and demand and the importance of the European market for today's American scene.61

Annina Nosei, who became Basquiat’s gallery representative in 1981, “was said to be selling canvases by Basquiat at a brisk pace—so brisk, some observers joked, that the

paint was barely dry… Critic Suzi Gablik called [his studio in Nosei’s gallery]

'something like a hothouse for forced growth.’”62

In Flyboy in the Buttermilk, Greg Tate references what he terms a “review” of

Basquiat’s death in The New Republic, written by critic Robert Hughes. The 1988 article, published not even four months after Basquiat’s death, is so insolent that, taken out of context, one might disregard it as typical ultra-conservative white establishment fodder, but, in fact, the magazine is at least nominally liberal. Hughes writes that Basquiat’s “was a tale of small, untrained talent caught in the buzz saw of artworld promotion, absurdly overrated by dealers, collectors, and, no doubt to their future embarrassment, by critics.”

He rationalized that “this was partly because Basquiat was black. The otherwise monochrome Late American Art Industry felt a need to refresh itself with a touch of the

‘primitive.’” However, as tasteless as Hughes’ article is, he also exposes what seems more and more like some sort of museum-industrial complex for what it is: he notes that a posthumous Basquiat retrospective at the Whitney seems imminent, given the museum’s “helpless commitment to the trendy and the number of its financial supporters who have been left holding Basquiats whose price needs to be sustained by that ‘proper retrospective.’ Then the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles could do it too, because its trustees own lots of Basquiats as well.”

For Basquiat, the demand for his paintings meant he was finally being recognized as a worthy contender in the competitive art world in which his race marked him as an outsider. However, seeming contingency of such feelings of validations on those sorts of material concerns clearly came at the price of surrendering his autonomy over how often he produced work, when and for whom he had to part with it, and maybe even what he

was actually choosing to paint. Moreover, that his commercial success was necessarily shared by the dealers and gallerists who represented him, in other words, people who otherwise participated in the racist practices of the art institution, raises important questions about the implications of profiting off the product of a black body’s labor, and limiting the degree of autonomy with which that labor is carried out.

Houston’s income comes not from artist residencies or gallery sales, but from working as a custodian at a gym and shoveling snow for the City in the winter. However, that isn’t to say that the prospect of making money off his art is a non-entity in Houston’s practice. A New Yorker magazine article about Houston describes an interaction in which someone offered to buy a work of his off the street. Houston told his fan that his displays were not for sale, but that he could take it for free. In the end, he accepted “a few crumpled bills” and said that it was all part of “the experience.”63 Interestingly, in this account, he didn’t specify which, or whose, experience this exchange was a part of – did he mean the experience of a bona fide artist? Perhaps it was just a product of one day’s creative output, but Houston even made himself a business card (Fig. 1), which is interesting considering he doesn’t seem to be too concerned with business transactions of the conventional capitalist type. This can be read as an instance of Houston eschewing hegemonic modes of existing legitimately in America in favor of commanding control over his own production.

They Want Me to Be Dull, Don’t Want Me to Use What’s in My Skull

On February 1, 2016, a panel discussion took place at Harlem’s Schomburg

Center for Research in Black Culture called “Basquiat and Contemporary Queer Art.”64

The participants were scholar and Basquiat expert Jordana Moore Saggese, Metropolitan 24

Museum online community producer Kimberly Drew, dancer Andre Singleton, performer

Juliana Huxtable, and scholar David Clinton Wills, all of whom are black, and all of whom invoked the writings of black Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (whose seminal Black Skin, White Masks was first published in English in 1967) when describing their understanding of Basquiat’s work. Here it is important to underscore the distinction between having one’s experience as a racialized body in a white supremacist society bear on the product of one’s artistic practice, and the production itself being intentionally descriptive of identity politics or the artist’s experience as a black person. Basquiat may easily be thought of as belonging to the first category, and so taking a closer look at how

Fanon’s writing on black experiences may inform readings of the artist’s work is both helpful and important.

During the discussion at the Schomburg Center, Drew observed that too often are black artists denied subjectivity in the interpretation of their work, and black people denied subjectivity when speaking about the work of those artists. This is yet another manifestation of how art spaces, both actual and abstract, uphold the primacy of white subjectivities and signal that art institutions of all kinds prioritize white voices. And, in fact, a Fanonian concept that struck a chord with the panelists was how self-creation is made difficult when oneself is defined through the gaze of someone else: “I am a slave not to the ‘idea’ others have of me, but to my appearance… The white gaze, the only valid one, is already dissecting me. I am fixed. Once their microtomes are sharpened, the

Whites objectively cut sections of my reality.”65 This is also important in thinking about how the image of Basquiat, the mythology of the black genius66 has made a market for

Basquiat as brand: what Drew described as the commodification of a life about which its consumers know very little.

In the introduction of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon writes, “Some Blacks want to prove at all costs to the Whites the wealth of the black man’s intellect and equal intelligence.”67 Because of this, “A black man behaves differently with a white man than he does with another black man. There is no doubt whatsoever that this fissiparousness is a direct consequence of the colonial undertaking.”68 I identify as neither black nor male, so in writing this paper I found it necessary to turn to two other black psychiatrists in order to better understand the implications of living at the intersection of those two identities, specifically in the American context. William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs, who I mentioned earlier, explore in Black Rage the multitude of ways in which the oppression of black Americans causes psychological suffering. Their work presents accounts of numerous black patients and relates their experiences as black Americans to the anxiety, depression, and other psychological hardships they face. Cobbs and Grier write extensively in their book about black masculinity and its psychological nuances, including the “heavy psychological burden”69 wrought by anti-black racism. They write,

“Granting the limitation of stereotypes, we should nevertheless like to sketch a paradigmatic black man.”70 By this they mean what white people consider to be a nice, nonthreatening black man. “The more closely allied to the white man, the more complete the picture becomes.” This, they argue, is a disposition adopted out of necessity. That is,

“The pattern begins in childhood when they mother may actually say: ‘You must be this way because this is the only way you will get along with Mr. Charlie.’”71 In other words, the only way they may hope to move somewhat safely and successfully through a

profoundly anti-black society. This sheds some light on biographer Phoebe Hoban’s description of the Basquiat’s social scene: “He had few black friends, even fewer black peers… Basquiat was more in touch with white than with black culture.”72 Although claiming that the artist identified primarily with white culture is questionable, and is entirely different than suggesting that his work was largely a reaction to his overwhelmingly white environs, we can still understand how this this likely had implications for his psyche, and subsequently, his artwork.

Basquiat’s unexpected, drug-related death at the age of twenty-seven has endowed him with a sort of immortality, since others’ accounts of and stories about him have become integral to the development of his posthumous celebrity and almost mythological allure. It is not uncommon to read about his acquaintances recollecting,

“Basquiat was intent upon being a mainstream artist. He didn’t want to be a black artist.”73 This is especially complicated to parse because it makes for easy recourse to the assumption that the artist was fostering feelings of self-hatred in relation to his blackness.

To attempt to gain more perspective on why Basquiat might have been concerned about achieving a racially neutral image, the November 2015 New York Times article is again relevant. The late Norman Lewis shared this sentiment, being quoted as saying that he looked forward to when people would no longer take his race into consideration when evaluating his art.74 However, a more complete reading of the article reveals that the reason for this sentiment is quite important. When an artist’s race is given primacy over their work itself, this leads to “token exhibitions”75 in which a museum, one whose permanent collection likely represents a dearth of work by black artists, only seeks to include those artists in exhibitions centered solely on (white) narratives of racial

experience. It is not difficult to imagine how invalidating and upsetting this tendency is for black artists themselves. In an interview with Phoebe Hoban, the then-director of the

Studio Museum of Harlem Kinshasha Conwill said of Basquiat, “Race will remain into the foreseeable future a major, and usually unfortunate, issue. The fact is, it was anomalous to be an African-American and get that kind of attention for his art. Other people did exploit his race and try to make him an exotic figure.”76 This brings into question whether it was Basquiat’s behavior – the way he chose to navigate the white art spaces once he was able to enter them – and the way it was understood in conjunction with this ‘exotic’ identity ascribed to him by others that brought him as much success as he enjoyed.

Basquiat himself often insisted that he did not want to be known as a ‘Black

Artist.’ On this point, a harsh criticism might come from artist Adrian Piper, who feels that black male artists who work to align themselves with the white arbiters of the art world do so at the expense of women artists of color, and “compound their reflexive repression by the Euroethnic mainstream, by dividing themselves from another, and negating themselves and their historical tradition for the sake of the payoffs that the game promises.”77 However, when “‘maximal professional success’ …is defined by admission into a circumscribed set of art institutions – museums, galleries, collections, and art publications – that constitute the Euroethnic mainstream,”78 it would not be entirely justified to hold only Basquiat at fault for this. All this is not to say that considering that aspect of his identity isn’t an important angle from which to approach his works, since the critics and gallerists who championed him (often the only black person in their social setting) often saw it as bearing on the formal qualities of his work. Therefore, unlike

Hammons, whose racial identity is a consciously integral part of the objects he makes,

Basquiat’s identity was, in a way, impressed upon him by the art world players he was surrounded by for the entirety of his tragically brief career.79 Even if it weren’t for the numerous interviews in which Basquiat identifies his personal inspirations, which range from Leonardo to the drawings of children,80 it is readily apparent from many of his works that his influences are decidedly Western: rather than an affinity for Haitian

“voodoo”81 or a drive to “purposely self-alienate,”82 the forceful mark-making and employment of cultural symbols that are hallmarks of his oeuvre ring of Franz Kline,

Andy Warhol, and the photomontagists of the German Dada tradition.

In the case of David Hammons, the rare interview he gives often sees him speaking candidly about his identity politics and their relevance to his relationship with art institutions. For this reason his revelatory interview with Kellie Jones is again important.83 When Jones asks about his use of black people’s hair as a material in many of his works, he said, “Those pieces were about making sure the black viewer had a reflection of himself in the work. White viewers have to look at someone else’s culture in those pieces and see very little of themselves in it.”84

The artist’s name that Houston has chosen for himself, Black Cherokee, is a name that suggests twofold an ancestry persistently brutalized by centuries of racist American policies and people. However, when I asked him why he chose to call himself this, he replied, “because I am Black and Cherokee Indian so Black Cherokee that’s me

PEACE.”85 This unmistakable awareness of his racial identity and its implications (so much so that he has chosen to frame his art work around this identity, if only by way of that metaphoric signature), combined with the straightforwardness, or perhaps casualness,

with which he approaches this identity, sets him apart from both Hammons and Basquiat.

However, while his answer to my question could be interpreted that way, upon some further consideration, the answer has layers of significance. One layer would be the matter-of-fact proffering of this identity to his public audience – take it or leave it.

Another might be an expression of ambivalence about whether “Black Cherokee” functions as a compound noun, or whether “Black” is the adjective. One performance with a spoken word element has the artist referring to himself as a “black, black

Cherokee,” but with undeniable pride: “You see a real, real man; you see a black, black

Cherokee.”86 In fact, these two identities can certainly coexist compatibly in the same body. bell hooks has written about the solidarity between indigenous Americans and early black Americans, and the existence of racially black American Indians. She writes that “shared sensibility” and “shared vision…is the bond that most intimately connected the two groups. Shared sensibility made other more pragmatic bondings (marriage, joining together to struggle against white enemies, the sharing of medicinal knowledge, etc.) possible.”87 Houston’s identification as black and Cherokee, or as a Black Cherokee, is at the forefront of his artistic practice, as his chosen sobriquet indicates, but the way in which he expresses this in his work is completely his own.

Part of Houston’s appeal for New Yorkers is the clear sense that what the roadside audience is seeing is the artist’s pure creative expression, which, in the contemporary cultural milieu, is refreshing. In other words, it is readily perceptible the extent to which

Houston’s work reflects the pure, unadulterated contents of his artistic imagination, and this, I think, is largely a result of Houston’s awareness of the radical notion of owning one’s own freedom: Grier and Cobbs write, “The ultimate power is the freedom to

understand and alter one’s life. It is this power, both individually and collectively, which has been denied the black man.”88 In the Black Cherokee documentary, Houston reads aloud to from a book called The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your

Inner Creative Battles:

The artist is grounded in freedom. He is not afraid of it. He is lucky. He takes on an assignment that will barrel him into uncharted waters, compel him to explore unconscious parts of himself. Am I really an artist? Chances are, you are. The real one is scared to death.89

In Houston’s case, the notion of freedom by means of artistic expression is particularly interesting: Houston was incarcerated two separate times for dealing drugs, a total of about nine years. In the period between his two imprisonments, he was shot twice.90 This raises questions about the extent to which Houston internalized the implications of his incarceration and the significance of his personal experience in prison.

However, his interest in freedom also compels me to think about artistry itself, and why pure desire to express oneself freely seems less of a valid analysis of an art work than others.

Houston recently began making use of Facebook, where his profile picture is a smart phone photo of himself with his spot on the F.D.R. Drive in the background (Fig.

17), and where he often posts photographs accompanied by short poems. One blurry sepia tone photograph posted on January 30, 2016 shows Houston in a silk Chinese suit and beret, posing with one leg up, and a bicycle C-lock lying at his feet (Fig. 18). The caption reads,

Go Go Go Grandpa. Ok little Otis (little Butch) No one can put a style on me. I change all the time. I even keep a little ahead.

Absolutely irreplaceable.

Healthy, Virile, and Happy.

Free Man is free.91

Another, wherein Houston stands with his two arms raised as if orating, in a dashiki behind a table of fruit with an American flag sticking out of it (Fig. 19) is captioned,

Conformity is one of the greatest enemies of creativity. Creativity begins in the mind at a very young age. Against all odds #62 still standing and know what to do. I'm just a warrior,a fighter by nature.

Forgotten citizens of the richest country in the World.

(WHY) ?

Black Cherokee92

While Houston’s Facebook posts don’t reach as wide an audience as his roadside installations, the extremely contemporary practice of curating his own online image affords him a significant degree of autonomy. However, because Houston is such an unconventional artist in the context of the contemporary art world, it can even be said that not being tied to an art institution, like a single gallery or dealer, also affords him the freedom to create where, when, and what happens to be inspired in him on any given day.

In addition to freedom, self-improvement (“practice, practice, practice today makes you better, better, better tomorrow”93), reading, and civic awareness (Figs. 20 &

21), a theme that recurs in Houston’s work is health and fitness (Fig. 22). In one scene from Black Cherokee, Houston dons boxing gloves and jogs from South Street Seaport to

Wall Street, howling spiritedly and announcing to his observers, “Can’t do that smoking no cigarettes and drinking no beer! You got to do right to be right!” When he reaches

Federal Hall, which sits perpendicular to the Stock Exchange, he gets up on the steps and announces, “Hard work and exercise make a healthy heart. I said, what’s hard about losing people money [laughs]? … I don’t use no drugs, and I don’t drink. I use my head,

and I know how to think” (Figs. 23-25). Houston came to Harlem from Greenville, South

Carolina in 1969, at which point he began selling cocaine, and using it as well. As he explains to the camera in the film, “then I got arrested, and went to jail. And I learned even more, ’cause I could read, think, and spell. Now I can tell you, and from experience

I know, that the hustler street life is not the way to go. I’m a great artist, and I want the world to know, I could have been even better, if I didn’t mess with that blow.”94 This emphasis on health is especially interesting in how it subverts the expectations and stereotypes our society projects onto poor communities of color, many of which, like poor health and drug abuse, are products of generations of strategically racist policies and activities of white governments in these communities. British black art historian Kobena

Mercer has written that black men are “over-represented in statistics on homicide and suicide, misrepresented in the media as the personification of [alcohol], drugs, disease, and crime… Black masculinity is not merely a social identity in crisis. It is also a key site of ideological representation, a site upon which the nation’s crisis comes to be dramatized, demonized, and dealt with.”95 Education, health, brotherly love: these are all arguably subversive themes for a black American artist who, as a formerly incarcerated person, certainly experienced racially motivated injustices in his lifetime. While on the surface, Houston’s enthusiasm for an active lifestyle and healthy choices seems wholesome, and perhaps politically neutral, one cannot help but recall black scholar and feminist Audre Lorde’s revolutionary quote: “Physically. Psychically. Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”96 In other words, when people of color are continually devalued by our society, whether by institutionalized measures and policies, or just by virtue of the racism that our society

nurtures in its people, caring for and loving oneself is courageous, subversive, and deeply profound.

Conclusion

From serving as the inspiration for Rihanna’s latest album art (Fig. 26), to getting name-dropped in the lyrics of Jay Z and Kanye West,97 Basquiat continues to serve as both a pop culture reference point and an icon of uncommon talent and glamorous wealth. Contemporary culture-makers invoke both Basquiat’s name and image to cultivate a certain self-characterization as unusually brilliant, misguidedly misunderstood by the establishment, and just plain cool.

Hammons, as my reader may be eager to point out, currently enjoys a considerable degree of art world success.98 However, this paper explores how and why

Hammons developed strategies to retain artistic autonomy on his terms, in spite of various institutional forces attempting to influence and perhaps co-opt the success he was creating for himself. This, I like to think, has made his present-day success all the more meaningful.

As Houston continues to create his art in a rapidly gentrifying city that is growing more hostile to its historically significant communities of color, he in turn continues to embody the immediacy of confronting the sorts of questions that were addressed in this paper. I recently got in touch with the artist to ask him about the role that artmaking plays in his life. He responded, “Art is important to me because I’ll be just another Joe Blow if

I don’t let it show. The people say I am an artist I say I am just being me. Can’t nobody beat me being me…PEACE.”99 When I thanked him for his response, and, more importantly, for enriching my own experience growing up in New York City, he told me, 34

“Hey it is nice to be important but it is more important to be nice. Thank you for being nice to me. Art is not easy. Art can be dangerous to your health. PEACE.”100

Houston, Hammons, and Basquiat are all three very distinct artists, but artists who bear certain important similarities to each other through their works’ locations throughout

New York City, their ways of relating to fame and wealth, and the counter strategies that they developed in navigating their status as outsiders in the New York art establishment.

Hammons and Basquiat were, and continue to be, important art historical figures in the city, and it is productive to interpret Houston’s work with this in mind. However,

Houston’s background is so radically different from the other two artists’—he didn’t attend a ‘real’ art school like Hammons, he didn’t grow up middle-class in the city like

Basquiat, and unlike both of them, has never—or at least not yet—been shown in a gallery or museum. Nonetheless, Houston is, by now, a New York City establishment who has caught the attention of many people in this city that often feels impossibly large to aspiring artists. Whether his fans are fond of those passing moments of New York eccentricity, or they have a deeper, more probing interest that comes from a place of intellectual curiosity, I think it is significant that Houston has managed to devote himself so fully to his art despite the lack of conventional institutional recognition. That Houston persisted with his art because of years of encouragement from his fellow New Yorkers speaks volumes about the potential of our community to uphold an extra-institutional arts culture for a more equitable representation of the “outsiders” to whom the city’s culture, visual and otherwise, owes so much.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ! Notes

1. Randy Kennedy, “Black Artists and the March Into the Museum,” New York Times, November 28, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/arts/design/black-artists-and-the-march-into-the- museum.html?_r=0 2. Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, quoted in Kennedy, “Black Artists and the March Into the Museum.” 4. Daniel Buren, “Function of the Museum,” in Theories of Contemporary Art, ed. Richard Hertz (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1985), 189. 5. Ibid., 190. 6 Nathalie Heinich, “Outsider Art and Insider Artists: Gauging Public Reactions to Contemporary Public Art,” in Outsider Art: Contesting Boundaries in Contemporary Culture, ed. Vera L. Zolberg et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 118. 7. Kellie Jones, “The Structure of Myth and the Potency of Magic,” in David Hammons: Rousing the Rubble (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 16.! 8. See Figure 4. 9. Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 14. 10. Miwon Kwon, “One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” October, Vol. 80 (Spring 1997): 88. 11. Ibid., 87. 12. Ibid., 88. 13. Greg Tate, “Nobody Loves a Genius Child: Jean Michel Basquiat, Flyboy in the Buttermilk,” in Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America, p. 231-244 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 234. 14. Jones, the daughter of writers Amiri Baraka and Hettie Jones, is an expert in art of the African diaspora, Latin American art, museums, and contemporary art, according to her faculty page on Columbia University’s website. She is also considered to be one of the first black female curators. 15. Kellie Jones, “Interview with David Hammons,” in Eyeminded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 248. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., 254-255. 18. Ibid., 251. 11. David L. Smith, “David Hammons: Spade Worker,” in Yardbird Suite, Hammons 93, ed. Deborah Menacer Rothschild (Williamstown, MA: Williams College Museum of Art, 1994), 14. 20. Quoted in Smith, “David Hammons: Spade Worker,” 12. Emphasis is mine. 21. Ibid. 22. Lucy R. Lippard, “Biting the Hand: Artists and Museums in New York since 1969,” in Alternative Art New York, edited by Julie Ault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 80. 23. Philip Faflick, “SAMO© Graffiti: BOOSH-WAH or CIA?,” The Village Voice (December 11, 1978). 24. Alan Moore and Jim Cornwell, “Local History: The Art of Battle for Bohemia in New York,” in Alternative Art New York, ed. Julie Ault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 321. 25. Jordana Moore Saggese, Reading Basquiat: Ambivalence in American Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 108.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 26. Fab Five Freddy is a legendary, iconic, and pioneering rapper and artist, was a frequent guest on TV Party, and was a fixture on the downtown New York City graffiti-bombing scene. 27. Jeffrey Deitch, et al., eds., Art in the Streets (New York: Skira Rizzoli Publications, Inc., 2015), 96. 28. Basquiat’s former band mate Michael Holman quoted in Taka Kawachi, ed., King for a Decade: Jean-Michel Basquiat (Kyoto: Korinsha Press & Co, Ltd., 1997), 11. 29. Faflick, “SAMO© Graffiti”; “Boosh-wah” is slang for “bourgeois.” 30. Vivien Raynor quoted in Cathleen McGuigan, “New Art, New Money,” The New York Times Magazine (February 10, 1985). 31. The story, in the Book of Judges, recounts Samon’s killing of the Philistines with the “jawbone of an ass.” 32. Thompson, “Royalty, Heroism, and the Streets,” 29. 33. Dieter Buchhart and Tricia Laughlin Bloom, eds., Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks (New York: The Brooklyn Museum of Art, 2015), 110. 34. Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Vintage, 1984), xiv. 35. Ibid., 5, 9. 36. Ibid., 6. 37. Jones, “Interview with David Hammons,” 250-251. 38. Greg Tate, “Guerilla Scholar on the Loose: Robert Farris Thompson Gets Down,” in Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 179. 39. Ibid. 40. See Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, 179-191. 41. Jones, “Interview with David Hammons,” 258. 42. Tate, “Nobody Loves a Genius Child,” 237. 43. Greg Tate, “Black Like B,” in Jean-Michel Basquiat, ed. Richard Marshall (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992), 56. 44. Brian Urstadt, “The F.D.R. Drive Guy,” The New Yorker (July 23, 2001). 45. Black Cherokee, directed by Sam Cullman and Benjamin Rosen (2012), 0:4:15,23. 46. Darcel Turner, “Darcel Turner interviews Otis Houston Jr. aka BLACK CHEROKEE FDR Drive Artist,” YouTube video, 8:22, posted October 2012. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuLxicDONys] 47. Mark H.C. Bessire, ed., William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 22. 48. Ibid., 64. 49. Kristine Stiles, “Thunderbird Immolation: Burning Racism,” in William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America, edited by Mark H.C. Bessire (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 40. 50. Martha Wilson, “Limited Warranty,” in William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America, edited by Mark H.C. Bessire (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 45. 51. Lowery Stokes Sims, “Interview with William Pope.L,” in William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America, edited by Mark H.C. Bessire (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 62. 52. Smith, “David Hammons: Spade Worker,” 16. 53. Jones, “Interview with David Hammons,” 250. 54. Andrew Russeth, “Looking at Seeing: David Hammons and the Politics of Visibility,” ARTnews (February 17, 2015). 55. Saggese, Reading Basquiat, 2. 56. Phoebe Hoban, Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 11.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 57. William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs, Black Rage (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1968), 60. 58. Cathleen McGuigan, “New Art, New Money,” The New York Times Magazine (February 10, 1985). 59. As far as the author is aware, the linguistic joke contained by Geldzahler’s name, especially together with this quote from him, is a pure coincidence. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid. 63. Urstadt, “The F.D.R. Drive Guy.” 64. The talk can be watched here: http://livestream.com/schomburgcenter/events/4710738 65. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 95. 66. Dr. David Clinton Wills, speaking at the Schomburg Center on February 1, 2016, recited Langston Hughes’ Genius Child to open the panel discussion, and described Basquiat’s having intellect and talent as a racialized body as something that added to his allure for white audiences. 67. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, xiv. 68. Ibid., 1. 69. Grier and Cobbs, 71. 70. Ibid., 66. 71. Ibid. 72. Hoban, Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art, 12. 73. Basquiat’s friend, painter Arden Scott, quoted in Hoban, Basquiat, 13. 74. Kennedy, “Black Artists and the March Into the Museum.” 75. Ibid. 76. Quoted in Hoban, Basquiat, 13-14. 77. Adrian Piper, “The Triple Negation of Colored Women Artists,” in Next Generation: Southern Black Aesthetic, eds. Devinis Szakacs and Vicki Kopf (Winston-Salem, NC: South- Eastern Center for Contemporary Art, 1990), 63. 78. Piper, “The Triple Negation of Colored Women Artists,” 61. 79. This is an unfortunate phenomenon about which Piper has said, “The focus on the person rather than the art is particularly troublesome, first, because it turns the artist into little more than a cryptic, exotic object that provides the occasion for Euroethnic self-analysis. I am, after all, not ‘other’ to myself.” Piper, “The Triple Negation of Colored Women Artists,” 60. 80. Henry Geldzahler, “From the Subways to Soho” (interview with Jean-Michel Basquiat), Interview magazine, January 1983. 81. Robert Farris Thompson, “Royalty, Heroism, and the Streets: The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat,” in Jean-Michel Basquiat, ed. Richard Marshall (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992), 29. 82. Laurie A. Rodrigues, “SAMO as an Escape Clause: Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Engagement with a Commodified American Africanism,” Journal of American Studies (2010): 16. 83. Kellie Jones, “Interview with David Hammons,” in Eyeminded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 84. Jones, “Interview with David Hammons,” 252. 85. Correspondence via Facebook on December 14, 2015. 86.!Black Cherokee, 0:12:29;06.! 87. bell hooks, “Revolutionary ‘Renegades’: Native Americans, African Americans, and Black Indians,” Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 182. 88. Grier and Cobbs, Black Rage, 60.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 89. Otis Houston, Jr. (Black Cherokee) at 13:00, Sam Cullman and Benjamin Rosen, directors, Black Cherokee, 2012, reading from Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles (Black Irish Books, 2002). 90. Urstadt, “The F.D.R. Drive Guy.” 91. Otis Houston, Jr.’s Facebook page, posted January 30, 2016, [https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=538943212946511&set=a.437348993105934.10737 41829.100004925100498&type=3&theater] 92. Otis Houston, Jr.’s Facebook page, posted January 30, 2016, [https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=538941719613327&set=a.437348993105934.10737 41829.100004925100498&type=3&theater] 93. Houston speaking in Black Cherokee, 0:10:24;22. 94. Black Cherokee, 0:15:11;20. 95. Kobena Mercer, “Engendered Species: Danny Tisdale and Keith Piper,” Artforum 30 (Summer 1992): 75.! 96. Audre Lorde, “Epilogue” in A Burst of Light: Essays by Audre Lorde (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1988), 131. 97. Jay Z in “Picasso Baby” raps, “It ain’t hard to tell, I’m the new Jean-Michel/Surrounded by Warhols, my whole team ball,” and, “Yellow Basquiat in my kitchen corner/Go ahead, lean on that shit Blue, you own it now.” Kanye West in “That’s My Bitch” raps, “She says I care more about them basquions/Basquiats, she learning a new word, it’s yacht.” 98. Victoria L. Valentine, “David Hammons Among 10 Most Expensive Living American Artists,” Culture Type, April 28, 2014. 99. Correspondence with Otis Houston, Jr. via Facebook, April 21, 2016. 100. Ibid. !

Works Cited

Black Cherokee. Film. Directed by Sam Cullman and Benjamin Rosen. New York: Yellow Cake Films, 2012.

Bessire, Mark H.C., editor. William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.

Buchhart, Dieter and Tricia Laughlin Bloom, editors. Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks. New York: The Brooklyn Museum of Art, 2015.

Buren, Daniel, “Function of the Museum.” In Theories of Contemporary Art, edited by Richard Hertz, 189-192. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1985.

Deitch, Jeffrey, Roger Gastman, and Aaron Rose, editors. Art in the Streets. New York: Skira Rizzoli Publications, Inc., 2015.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008.

Geldzahler, Henry, “From the Subways to Soho” (interview with Jean-Michel Basquiat). Interview magazine, January 1983.

Grier, William H. and Price M. Cobbs, Black Rage. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1968.

Heinich, Nathalie, “Outsider Art and Insider Artists: Gauging Public Reactions to Contemporary Public Art.” In Outsider Art: Contesting Boundaries in Contemporary Culture, edited by Vera L. Zolberg and Joni Mayà Cherbo, 118- 131. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Hoban, Phoebe. Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art. New York: Penguin Books, 1999. hooks, bell, “Revolutionary ‘Renegades’: Native Americans, African Americans, and Black Indians.” In Black Looks: Race and Representation, 179-195. Boston: South End Press, 1992.

Jones, Kellie, “Interview with David Hammons.” In Eyeminded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art, 247-263. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

Jones, Kellie, “The Structure of Myth and the Potency of Magic.” In David Hammons: Rousing the Rubble, 15-27. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

40 ! !

Kawachi, Taka, editor. King for a Decade: Jean-Michel Basquiat. Kyoto: Korinsha Press & Co, Ltd., 1997.

Kennedy, Randy. “Black Artists and the March into the Museum.” New York Times, November 28, 2015. Web.

Kwon, Miwon. One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.

Lippard, Lucy R., “Biting the Hand: Artists and Museums in New York since 1969.” In Alternative Art New York, edited by Julie Ault, 79-121. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Lorde, Audre. A Burst of Light: Essays by Audre Lorde. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1988.

McGuigan, Cathleen, “New Art, New Money.” New York Times Magazine, February 10, 1985.

Mercer, Kobena. “Engendered Species: Danny Tisdale and Keith Piper.” Artforum 30 (Summer 1992).

Moore, Alan and Jim Cornwell, “Local History: The Art of Battle for Bohemia in New York.” In Alternative Art New York, edited by Julie Ault, 321, 367. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Piper, Adrian, “The Triple Negation of Colored Women Artists.” In Next Generation: Southern Black Aesthetic, edited by Devinis Szakacs and Vicki Kopf. Winston- Salem, NC: South-Eastern Center for Contemporary Art, 1990.

Rodrigues, Laurie A., “SAMO as an Escape Clause: Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Engagement with a Commodified American Africanism.” Journal of American Studies (2010): 1-17.

Russeth, Andrew. “Looking at Seeing: David Hammons and the Politics of Visibility.” ARTnews, February 17, 2015.

Saggese, Jordana Moore. Reading Basquiat: Ambivalence in American Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.

Smith, David L., “David Hammons: Spade Worker.” In Yardbird Suite, Hammons 93, edited by Deborah Menacer Rothschild, 8-19. Williamstown, MA: Williams College Museum of Art, 1994.

Tate, Greg, “Black Like B.” In Jean-Michel Basquiat, edited by Richard Marshall, 56-60. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992).

41 ! !

Tate, Greg, “Guerilla Scholar on the Loose: Robert Farris Thompson Gets Down.” In Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America, 178-184. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992.

Tate, Greg, “Nobody Loves a Genius Child: Jean Michel Basquiat, Flyboy in the Buttermilk.” In Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America, 231- 244. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992.

Thompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Vintage, 1984.

Thompson, Robert Farris, “Royalty, Heroism, and the Streets: The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat.” In Jean-Michel Basquiat, edited by Richard Marshall, 28-44. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992.

Turner, Darcel. “Darcel Turner interviews Otis Houston Jr. aka BLACK CHEROKEE FDR Drive Artist.” YouTube video, 8:22. Posted October 2012.

Urstadt, Brian, “The F.D.R. Drive Guy.” The New Yorker, July 23, 2001. Web.

Valentine, Victoria L., “David Hammons Among 10 Most Expensive Living American Artists.” Culture Type, April 28, 2014. Web.

42 ! ! !

Figure 1 Keith Haring Crack is Wack 1986 Photo: nycgovparks.org

43 ! Figure 2 Black Cherokee Photo: truenorthinc.com

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Figure 3 Still from Black Cherokee, directed by Sam Cullman and Benjamin Rosen (2012)

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Figure 4 Jean-Michel Basquiat Page from Untitled Notebook 1 1980-1981 Reproduced from Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks (New York: The Brooklyn Museum of Art, 2015), 103. !

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Figure 5 David Hammons Higher Goals 1986 Basketball poles and bottle caps 20’ to 30’ (Photograph provided by Pinkney Herbert and Jennifer Secor for the Public Art Fund) 47 ! ! !

Figure 6 Obelisk of Axum (Aksumite peoples) ca. 3rd or 4th century BCE Granite 79 ft. (24 m.) Axum, Ethiopia

48 ! ! !

Figure 7 Lidded Basket (Tutsi peoples) Early to mid-20th century Cane 2 15/16 in x 2 1/2 in. (7.4 x 6.4 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Figure 8 Interior Hanging (Fulani peoples) 51 in. x 120 in. (129.5 x 304.8 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York ca. 19th century Cotton, wool, natural dye

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Figure 9 SAMO Graffiti Photo: Henry Flynt Source: momaps1.org

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Figure 10 Jean-Michel Basquiat Jawbone of an Ass 1982 Acrylic, oil, and paper collage on canvas on wood support 60 1/16 x 84 1/16 in. Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat !

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Figure 11 Jean-Michel Basquiat Untitled 1982-83 Oilstick, colored pencil, crayon, and gouache on paper mounted on canvas 96 x 126 in. Collection of Fred Hoffman ! !

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Figure 12 Still from Black Cherokee, Ben Cullman and Benjamin Rosen !

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Figures 13 and 14 Photos: Grace Villamil for Periscope Reproduced from Peter Madsen, “Roadside Theater: Telling the Tale of Otis Houston, Jr.,” Periscope, December12, 2012. 54 ! ! !

Figure 15 Still from Black Cherokee, Ben Cullman and Benjamin Rosen ! !

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Figure16 David Hammons Bliz-aard Ball Sale 1983 Photo: Dawoud Bey ! 56 ! ! !

Figure 17 Source: Otis Houston, Jr.’s personal Facebook page. Posted April 21, 2015 !

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Figure 18 Source: Otis Houston, Jr.’s personal Facebook page. Posted January 30, 2016 !

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Figure 19 Source: Otis Houston, Jr.’s personal Facebook page. Posted January 30, 2016

59 ! ! ! Figure 20 Source: Otis Houston, Jr.’s personal Facebook page. Posted April 4, 2016. Its caption reads, “There is always something new to learn.” !

Figure 21 Still from Black Cherokee, Ben Cullman and Benjamin Rosen !

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Figure 22 Still from Black Cherokee, Ben Cullman and Benjamin Rosen !

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Figures 23, 24, and 25 Stills from Black Cherokee, Ben Cullman and Benjamin Rosen

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Figure 26 Promotional Image for R8/Anti (2016) Source: Rihanna’s Official Facebook Page facebook.com/rihanna

63 !