n Oppositional Free Gazing Tarish Pipkins, Marcel Taylor, Cedric Umoja and Isaac Udogwu disrupt the power dynamics of American visual culture through traditional portraiture, artificial intelligence and machine learning, Afro futurist visual renderings of Black language, and narrative portraiture through puppetry.
The white gaze has long determined whose stories are seen, what artists' voices are valued. Taylor, Pipkin, Udogwu and Umoja create work that speaks directly to the Black experience from ordinary to the extraordinary. They speak directly to Black audiences in unapologetic fashion, locating their work in largely ignored cultural, historical and political experience that operates outside of a response to white supremacy.
With algorithms and machine learning as the media, Udogwu uses what scholar Nettrice Gaskins describes as “techno-vernacular creativity” Possessed of reappropriation, remixing, and improvisation. With nods to both Francis Bacon and Jacob Lawrence Udogwu centers the Black male figure seen through Black male eyes. In fact Umoja, Taylor, Pipkin and Udogwu each use these tools that form the foundation of America’s two original music forms, Jazz and Hip hop and are firmly rooted in Black cultural and creative practices.
Marcel Taylor uses an interplay of acrylic paint, transparent paper, photographic collage, remixes images of Black people living in urban centers and seeks to capture the vibrancy, joy and life found in these spaces. Taylor’s socially-critical abstract work depicts urban landscapes and portraits inspired by rampant gentrification processes occurring in his home city of Washington DC, and many other cities across the nation. These paintings conjure images of urban dynamism, commotion, pandemonium, and chaos. Tarish Pipkins continues this tradition in performance work that centers Black stories and draws the line between historic calculation and contemporary experience.
This artists conversation will be moderated by Dr. Frank C. Martin, II. Martin is a graduate of Yale University and the City University of New York, Hunter College, with additional study in contemporary art at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of South Carolina. After working for more than 12 years as an Associate Manager of Education Services for the Department of Education Services in the Uris Center of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Martin transitioned to a position as Curator of Exhibitions and Collections, at South Carolina State University's I. P. Stanback Museum & Planetarium, where Martin currently serves as Director.
Art historian, art theorist, and critic of cultural interpretation, Martin has served as an academic advisor for the PBS documentary, Shared History and as contributing critic in the fine arts for The Charleston Post and Courier, one of the South’s oldest newspapers. Appointed as a Carolina Diversity Professors Doctoral Scholar in the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina, Dr. Martin’s area of specialization is the study of axiology, concentrating in the field of aesthetics.
Martin, Pipkins, Udogwu & Umoja
September 28, 2022
6:30 PM
701 CCA Gallery
701 Whaley Street, 2nd floor
Columbia, SC 29201
