The post-black: Freestyle

The Freestyle exhibition at The Studio Museum in Harlem , also known as the post-black exhibition, presented 28 balck artists who were adament about not being labeled as black artists, unlike their predecessore. In her introduction to the Freestyle catalogue, curator Thelma Golden, states" the art of the 1990's stands between that multicultural moment and now, a link to that past and present, one of the great legacies of that period in the early 90's was that many artists emerged empowered. That generation, the beneficiaries of many and the heirs of a few includes artists such as Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, Lorna Simpson, among others. This generation reinvented the debate on culture and identity in contemporary art. They set the platform for this new post-black existenxce in contemporary art." Unlike previous black artists, whose work only engaged notions of blackness, this new crop of artists created works which were still highly steeped in redefinig complex notions of blackness, simultaneously engaging issues and ideas such as culture, religion, gender, sexuality, feminism, the body popular culture, political, social and economic history.

For me, the importance of the Freestyle exhibition was in its overwhelming sense of individuality. Unlike many previous exhibitions that attempted to create a universal unity, such as the Family of Man Show, Freestyle embraced diversity, suggesting that it is our individual experiences that create a more complete sense of the human experience.

I found the reading, "The Ironies of Diversity, or the Disappearing Black Artist, " by Dawoud Bey interesting in comparison to an earlier reading, " Why have there been no great women artists," by Linda Nochlin. In his writing Bey exposes the very real fact that even though there seems to be a an acceptance of diversity as a cultural and social fact f life, there is still a narrow conceptual space for black artists. In the same way that Nochlin faults the institution for not allowing female artists to take their place within the art cannon, Bey faults the institution for its lack of acknowledgment of Black artists. Within and outside of the art world, no matter how open minded or "multicultural" we believe to be there is still a very real fact that people are judged on their skin color and sexual orientation.