Lessons In “Black” Art
by Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor
The single most important event in our family calendar every year, aside from birthdays, was the Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities, which took place during the last week of January in Eatonville, Florida. Eatonville is famous for being the oldest all-Black municipality in the United States.
Established in 1887 by African American freedmen and freedwomen, Eatonville was a place that Black people could live and govern independently of white society. Hurston’s family relocated from Alabama to Eatonville when she was three years old and she considered it her home. She even sometimes claimed Eatonville as her birthplace and used it as the setting for several of her novels. Even though we didn’t have any kin in Eatonville, my mother, brother and I felt an inflated sense of pride making the one-hour drive from Daytona Beach every year.
The Zora Neale Hurston Festival was the first place I was introduced to ‘Black art’. Prints by Jacob Lawrence, Faith Ringgold, Romare Bearden and Ernie Barnes were sold in the form of posters, calendars and t-shirts. Between tubs of shea butter, colourful woven wicker baskets and African masks, we balanced poster tubes of artwork into the trunk of our car.
Image: Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor. Photo: Alexander Coggin
As a child staring up at the elastic expressionist figures in Lawrence’s Harriet Tubman series (1939), I imagined them tumbling off the wall and into the hallway of our home. These ecstatic beings and I could do cartwheels and jump on my bed for hours in my mind. Barnes’ iconic Sugar Shack (1971), now synonymous imagery with Marvin Gaye’s 1976 album I Want You, held court above the sofa in our living room.
My fantasies stretched from dreams of a grown-up me winding and grinding with the folks in the painting, to the dancers materialising in my living room. I didn’t have to dream for long. There were many nights in our home where life imitated art as my mother hosted family gatherings and parties that were as sweaty and ground-shaking as the sugar shack. A wall calendar of Bearden’s work claimed the bathroom. There was always something new to discover in the chromatic collages as I brushed my teeth.
Image: Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor, Performance at Chisenhale Gallery, London (2016)
“I have sustained a steady anger towards the art world, at its obdurate resistance to untangling the mass lump of Black art and cultural production.”
The worlds created by these artists felt expansive and limitless in form, materiality, subject matter and approach. And yet I felt intimately connected to each one. Even though they were all inherently Black iconography, the position from which they approached the narrative was distinct. Why had I never seen these works outside of the Zora Neale Hurston Festival? Why had I never studied these artists in Art History class? Why were these artists relegated to the category of ‘Black art’? As a child, I didn’t question this delineation between ‘Black art’ and Art with a capital A. Now I know that there is not one definitive category of ‘Black art’, just as there is no definitive ‘Black’ anything.
Image: Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor, Film Still from Muttererde (2017)
Since moving to Europe almost twelve years ago, this boundless artistic expression that I grew up with has been boxed into a one-dimensional package of monochrome Blackness. There have been countless times when I was invited into art spaces to participate in a dialogue, whether through performance, text or discourse, that had nothing to do with my practice. The invitation was based solely on my proximity to the ‘Black experience’. The other African diasporic participants and I often looked around at one another in quiet confusion about how we, from all different countries and disciplines, came to be seated together. Usually the subject matter revolved lazily around a carousel of topics including inclusion, representation and the dreaded D-word: diversity.
“I always imagined myself as the little girl flying over the city claiming everything in her sight, chest bursting with glee. This weightless feeling encapsulates my dreams for the future of art: that it can belong to us too. ”
Image: Artist Archives. Faith Ringgold at Serpentine Gallery, London (2019)
I have sustained a steady anger towards the art world, at its obdurate resistance to untangling the mass lump of Black art and cultural production. And yet, I have also leaned into the most wonderfully energising and life-giving communities of Black cultural workers from across the diaspora.
I thank the Lorde (Audre) for putting us all together despite our individualities. Sam Pollard, director of the new documentary Black Art: In the Absence of Light (2021), discusses this dichotomy: ‘It’s important to have a Black aesthetic. It’s a double-edged sword in a way. It should be there for the community, but it should also be understood that it’s something that the mainstream should be aware of.’[1]
Video: Trailer Muttererde (2017) by Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor
Moving through theatre spaces, galleries and museums throughout Europe over the past decade, I slowly feel my identities being distilled. No longer a Black queer theatre-maker, writer, filmmaker and community organiser from the American South, I am reduced to Black cultural worker. But I reject this overt simplification. I want to complicate my identity and create a new language that encompasses liminal identities. I envision a future that embraces the multiplicities of ‘Black art’. I envision a future in which exhibitions revolving solely around Black art are unnecessary because each artist’s work has been carefully considered and appreciated for its aesthetic and cerebral contribution to the canon. I envision a future where Black artists aren’t exhibited and collected to fill quotas.
Image: Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor, Lecture at Einstein Center, Berlin (2019)
While we never had any Faith Ringgold work in my childhood home, there is one image that I saw at the Zora Neale Hurston Festival that always stuck with me. Ringgold’s story quilt Tar Beach #2 (1990) depicts her family having an evening picnic on the tar roof of their Harlem apartment building. In the background, the family is flying through the New York City night sky. A line from the text on the quilt reads: ‘All I had to do was fly over it for it to be mine forever.’ I always imagined myself as the little girl flying over the city claiming everything in her sight, chest bursting with glee. This weightless feeling encapsulates my dreams for the future of art: that it can belong to us too.
Jessica Taylor is an artist, filmmaker, writer and community organizer. Her roots are in the Southern United States, born in Mississippi and bred in Florida on former Timucan land. Taylor's work manifests through performance, text, dialogue and community building for Black People and People of Color. Taylor is newly based in Oslo.
Image: Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor. Photo: Alexander Coggin