This year, exhibitions around the globe highlighted Blackness, celebrating the Black artistic vanguard and featuring established artists next to those early in their careers. From Switzerland and Cape Town to Fort Worth and Philadelphia, they walked us through the Black art-historical canon, providing context and inserting new characters into modern and contemporary art histories. By exhibiting the range and diversity of Blackness as narrative in a variety of forms, from collage to figuration to video and installation, these shows helped us understand that Blackness is not a monolith. Looking closely at Black art in this way develops scholarship and aptly recognizes the contributions of Black art to the larger canon, positioning it prominently on the world stage.
“Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage”
As the first exhibition of its kind devoted to collage, “Multiplicity” showed the complex nature of Black identity through 80 artworks by 52 intergenerational artists. Addressing historical and contemporary issues concerning Black life, the artists stepped beyond restrictive boundaries and surpassed the general notion of collage as glued paper by using a variety of media to create dynamic artworks. As is historically typical of Black survival, these artists gave new life to old materials in the most engaging ways. The exhibition featured known collagists, Wangechi Mutu and Deborah Roberts, but it also surprisingly featured collages by Kerry James Marshall and Radcliffe Bailey. These artworks continue the groundbreaking legacy of collage innovators Picasso, Braque, and Bearden. The exhibition was initially mounted at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville and traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.
—Shantay Robinson