The Portland Art Museum recently held a special exhibit Constructing Identity. According to the museum display:
“This exhibition aims to create a context for ideas about identity based on a wealth of representations by African-American artists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The works on display reveal the dynamic nature, narratives, and impulses that constitute the full humanity of the African-American experience.”
According to the museum:
“In 21st-century America, questions of race and identity are being explored as never before. This exploration has prompted many artists of color to investigate what constitutes identity, community, and the idea of a so-called post-racial society.”
The 100 works in the exhibit were organized into categories: Spirit, Gender, Abstraction, Community, Faces, and The Land.
Abstraction
With regard to Abstraction, the display states:
“It has been said that abstraction is the shorthand of expression. It is the percolation of culture into forms that present the culture’s essence. Work related to the theme of Abstraction illustrates some of the ways in which African-American artists incorporate Western notions of abstraction into their work, as well as a sampling of pre- and post-colonial African aesthetics. Abstraction is seen here as a series of songs without words.”
Gender
With regard to Gender, the display states:
“The works related to the theme of Gender speak to the significance and differences among representations of African-American women. The concept of gender is central to how the subjects of these works are looked at and interpreted. African-Americans, and to a large part women in general are presented as ‘images’ rather than active ‘creators’ of self.”
Community
With regard to Community, the display states:
“African-American identity has been constructed through a process that is specific to American history. Works related to the theme of Community reveal some of the aesthetic direction that we use to define this identity. They present physical spaces, historical events, and emotional expression built on a shared foundation of African heritage.”
Faces
With regard to Faces, the display states:
“African Americans have long been judged against a set of metrics that celebrate another cultural group. Black faces have never been seen as equivalent to European classical standards of beauty. The Faces theme is presented not so much to compare and contrast ‘our beauty’ with ‘their beauty,’ but to present the characteristic and defining elements of our faces.”
Spirit
With regard to Spirit, the display states:
“For African Americans, spirit is manifest in the openness to the ecstatic potency of being. Spirit as identity within our communities exists in both measurable and intangible ways of interaction and projection.”
Land
With regard to The Land, the display states:
“The Land encompasses both nature and home. It offers a sense of place that is essential to defining one’s self, when one has no place and has been taken from one’s home. As people tasked to work the land but rarely able to own it, African Americans have maintained a special relationship with the land. The land has a central place in African-American art: the works related to this theme describe the sins and salvation of our presence in America.”