The Migration: Cosmo Whyte's Travels Across Mediums to Occupy Physical, Mental, and Historical Spaces

Cosmo Whyte explains that in Punch Drunk Love-- a metaphoric object based installation involving shipping rope soaked in rum and a sugar bowl filled with rum-- the braid, disoriented front and back, refers to one's fluctuating identity.

Multidisciplinary artist Cosmo Whyte presented informative research that articulated interweaving roles migration and colonialism play into the raw poignancy and visceral complexity of his narrative work. Hailing from St. Andrew, Jamaica and working primarily in Atlanta, Georgia, Whyte's trials and tribulations of United States naturalization filter through creative processes of sculptural installations/objects, drawing, performance, and photography with influences ranging from historical context to popular culture. 

Whyte, a Hudgens Prize Finalist as well as grant recipient of Artadia and CUE Foundation, has conducted extensive field research, traveling to Ghana, London, and back home to Jamaica (with fresh eyes), collecting valid principles that inform his intriguing concepts. Using generational occupancy of space as metaphor, he focuses on how things easily and quickly slip into other spaces, ideas of transcendence, having diasphoric moments in negative space, meditative, trans space, referencing "ubiquitous" objects such as doilies marking value and worth.

In Promis(ed) Land (Version #3), a Jamaican travel drum explores a connection to "home" and ties to Marcus Garvey's Black Star Line, a short lived shipping corporation. In Whyte's creation, a "kitschy tarp with neon signs," has a musical component that sounds similar to church hymn hums or melodic rhythm of slave shack escapism. The music is actually a part of The Jeffersons theme song (DuBois's Movin' On Up), distorting the lyrics "finally got a piece of the pie."

His drawings also frame varied influences. Carnival in Atlanta, a summer jump off event that has been in existence since 1988, celebrates Caribbean culture and heritage with parades, costumes, music, food, etc. Specific messages that were once lost are retained in small communities, performative rituals disclosed in drawings. Simultaneously, violence comes crashing, with continuous acquitted verdicts of murdered black lives, unfiltered and unjust, slithering around an artist's vulnerable state of mind. While seeing a Chris Ofili retrospective, Whyte found a connection to tie into his work, sorting emotional turmoil through drawings of Carnival, contorting bodies like gymnastics filtered through colonialism diagrams that overlap, create growing pains.

The Harder They Come, a 1972 crime/drama film exploring Jamaican folklore set in Kingston, Jamaica, enters Whyte's works as well.

Stranger in the Village, loosely based on James Baldwin's piece about being the first black visitor in all white Switzerland, is Whtye's inspiration. He balanced a megaphone atop his head as a punchline. 

Most importantly, Whyte integrates autobiographical narrative and inherited generational tragedies. In Nkisi, one of several documented C-print photographs of a performance piece, after the death of his father, he wears his father's ties as a sculptural armature over a suit and communes with a clear, abyssal body of water as a tribunal act, a reference to African traditions of communicating with ancestors via heirlooms.

Furthermore, in Headboy and Cold Sweat, Whyte reacts to Jamaica declaring independence and at the same time, keeping the English schoolboy uniform intact. He dons the red Royal British waistcoat and trousers, sits in a hot classroom for hours, sweating, reenacting moment of hyper awareness. After walking downtown, perspiring in these clothes, he dove in Montego Bay, saturating sweaty uniform fully under water, submerging and floating with composition intending to capture colors of Pan African Flag. Heartbreakingly, is that historically in that water, ancestors had traveled in tight, inhumane vessels, some drowning intentionally, others murdered, their bones, bodies, and spirits way below Whyte's reach. Yet the connection is clear. He swam in an opened grave. And there are not enough tombstones in the world to commemorate countless unnamed deaths.

In closing, Whyte has captured significant, past moments, laying groundwork for monumental shifts to occur in a diverse practice that promises further emergence, utilizing encounter as a way of thinking about race relations in the United States versus predominantly black spaces in the world.

Amy Sherald Expresses Innermost Turmoils and Breakthroughs In Her Committed Painting Practice

Award winning artist Amy Sherald presenting a compelling autobiographical narrative.

Last Friday, PAFA's Historic Landmark Building contained a full house on deck for its Visiting Artist Program lecture, rescheduled from weeks ago. Amy Sherald spoke on her personal painting history, providing a thoughtful, humbling backstory for the many young, hungry artists present in the room. It was a treat to watch this incredibly gifted artist discuss the journey, a hard, long, prosperous journey, that eventually brought an attentive, rapt audience vital inspiration.

Little Amy (right) and her siblings.

Colorism contributed harsh experiences growing up in the problematic South for Sherald. Born and raised in Columbia, Georgia, with her fair skin and auburn hair, few with the exception of her family believed her to be black, especially horrid smaller children believed this perception. She recounted a story of a child who used the "n" word around her. And this was the late seventies, early eighties.
She then addresses being uncomfortable with being called "redbone," a term formerly described dogs with a red coat. "Redbone," a popular Donald Glover song, is said as an endearment. Meanwhile, it is a destructive adjective that her beauty, her attractiveness is privileged to having white inherited attributes, dismissing her blackness.

Science fiction marked Sherald's earlier paintings.

Sherald entered painting later than most, having been declared pre-med in college (failing biology wasn't helping), changing her major to painting a few years before graduating. She wasn't sure exactly the path to undergo and hadn't received adequate "training" or having the artist vocabulary, but knew that figuration was a keen interest. Without the skills and resources of fellow classmates, she considered herself self taught, relying solely on instincts and research sessions from frequent library visits. It was also a challenge ascribing to racial and gender politics, disappointed through limited lenses her fellow peers and instructors had expected, which became "performative identity."

During a trip to Panama, Sherald explains dissecting backgrounds, a struggle that she fought valiantly against.

After college, she took a break from painting for four years.
The shocking confession brought apart startling insight, especially seeing as now post-graduate years are depicted as a crucial time to be in that eager need to network and find supportive benefactors.
All the while, Sherald also admits to frequently visiting New York City openings to talk to gallerists in hopes of attaining a show in the past, a hoop some young artists still believe would ring true to them.
In the end, as she continued reading books, going to the movies, and seeing gallery shows, she developed relationships with collectors and advocates.

Simple You, Simple Me is a poignant response to heinous acts inflicted on black children such as Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin, murdered for existing, for fitting "a twisted narrative." It serves as a painful reminder that no justice comes to those who are black and remorselessly left for dead.

Her influences were a wide range of scientific fascination and sideshow fantasies, finding exciting, colorful pieces at Panama circuses, at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida, and in Tim Burton's dreamy tale Big Fish. However, the missing component was identity, the lack of blackness, of black people in experiences that mattered to her awakening imagination. Among her reading, she uncovered W.E.B. DuBois's compiled photographs for the 1900 Paris Exposition entitled, American Negroes. Sherald fell in love with his Georgia Negroes series, letting the "aha" moment sink. In that, she saw black dandyism-- black men and black women in suits and hats, appearing gorgeously confident and stylish at a time denying them existence, creativity. That was what she wanted to paint.
Inspired by photography, where she found images of herself leafing through her family's historic archives, formulated ideas around her penetration, curving away American perception of black pain, the effervescent knowledge that black photographers could create and own positive portrayals. In the process, her paintings became "meditations on photography," and realists such as Bo Bartlett, Kerry James Marshall, and Barkley Hendricks began to effectively shape her painting vocabulary.
The more Sherald painted, the more advanced her skills became, growing more so than what graduate school had offered her. She took a wondrous opportunity to study with great painter Odd Nerdrum in the Netherlands and continued on her trips to Panama.

Sherald was determined to change the set narrative, vowing to change how "history is limited in allowing black people their own narrative."

Sherald, an avid reader of poetry, considers her work to be "a whole poem conveying more than characteristics of the sitter." She points out John Virgil's theories on women's interior cameras, double consciousness, confronting the other (and or metaphorically speaking confronting imperialism, colonialism, slave trade) with outward gaze, freeing cellular memory.

"Identity for all us is this perceptual process. It's somewhat like constantly cleaning out and rearranging an attic. It's as much about throwing away furniture nd trinkets that no longer service as it is bringing in new ones. In that sense, it's just as important to continue defining who we are as it is to define who we are not." 

Amy Sherald gave a kind, humbling, relatable lecture for an artist who has gone on to win prestigious honors such as the Pollack-Krasner Grant, Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant, and the Bethesda Painting Award. She has shown at Studio Museum in Harlem in New York City, New York, Spelman College of the Arts in Atlanta, Georgia, and the Embassy of the United States in Dakar, Senegal. She is in collections at the Columbus Museum in her hometown, Columbus, Georgia, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery all in Washington D.C, and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
She closes with a Kerry James Marshall quote, something along the lines of "nothing has never been able to transform the world."
Yet with Sherald's work, his L.A. Times discussion on the history of representational painting is most appropriate as well:

"When you visit an art museum, you're less likely to encounter the work of a black person. When it comes to ideas about art and about beauty, the black figure is absent."  

Alongside Marshall and a slew of other phenomenal black artists dismantling contemporary art field, Sherald is changing the way viewers look at painting, inserting blackness whilst examining its absence with utilizing greyscale as her figures' flesh tone. By learning preemptive steps she took to make it this far, she is certainly an artist to root for and champion, paving ways and breaking barriers to those who never believed they ever could.

After PAFA: Sedakial Gebremedhim

Ethiopian born and Washington D.C. hailed artist, Sedakial allows his native tradition to take flight in his art.

On a Wednesday afternoon lunch hour, former Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts student Sedakial Gebremedhim discussed smooth transition from painter to sculptor and performance artist and becoming involved with Traction Company- a collective of PAFA alumni and faculty and working with the Ethiopian Community Center. 

During Gebremedhim's undergraduate year, working primarily as a painter, he had an urge to capture the “exotic,” creating colorful, lush portraits of brown skinned figures dressed in bold, patterned clothing. He then ventured far beyond two-dimensional composition, concentrating into the immediacy of performance arena, notion of exoticism retaining muted undertones. In one particular art work, drawing concepts on desires to float, he enlisted friends to help attach one hundred thirty balloons to his locs. The documented photographs, set around PAFA's Lenfast Plaza and the Philadelphia Museum of Art including the infamous Rocky steps, showcase playful humor and lighthearted candor. Locs are flying high, suspending away from his face, arguing with gravity, whereas his body is grounded yet carefree and exuberant. 

Moving Through Space, a stop motion video, dismantles the funniness founded in the balloon experiment. Partly abstract and silent, dark minimal color palette creates a rather obscure intensity, a false reality. In other explorations, he borrowed American, Asian, and European tourist videos of Africa, often concentrating on a still, a frame that interested him. He then strips that raw footage from its parenting, birthing new meaning.

In regards to Traction Company, John Greig Jr., PAFA's sculpture shop manager, asked Gebremedhim to join. No hesitation came to Gebremedhim, for the opportunity was a triumph, a blessing.

One rule of becoming a Traction Company member involved building a space- constructing a unit housed within the spacious West Philadelphia unit. That left a great challenge to become architect, construction builder, and artist simultaneously. With aide from fellow member Connie Ambrose, he was able to construct a studio within studio. Another requirement was to dedicate every Friday to Traction, being there 8-10 hours creating, maintaining, keeping communal socialization. 

In the meantime, heritage proud Gebremedhim shared a mural project that he painted alongside performing arts kids- a mural on the Ethiopian Community Center called "Future Stars." The stars are red, green, and yellow with an outlining white to make celestial pentagon pop.

Sketch drawings were an imperative part of perceiving ideas for “Dinner at Traction,” a vast, rectangular shaped compound with steel exterior and stunning pointed foam interior. Inside is a looping video. Stark, haunting sound plays, enveloping a lovely woman waiting. Suddenly, suit jacket clad Gebremedhim arrives out of thin air. For several interval minutes, they stare at each other before engaging in a shared traditional Ethiopian meal, at times feeding each other. It is revealed that the background timber is leftover from the massive truss centering the Traction Company's exhibit.

“I Ain't Got No Beef with Tofu” was a live performance held weeks ago. Inside Fisher Brooks Gallery, Gebremedhim turns the waiting sitter. He sits patiently at the black clothed table. The lovely woman seen in the installation returns, stepping inside Traction Company's exhibition, joining him for another prepared meal- this time served by an Ethiopian waitress. It was twelve minutes without talking- only eating. He then prepared a meal (cooking in the Historic Landmark Building's kitchen, viewers watched via Skype) and the audience participated, eating and sharing his Ethiopian food. 

See Sedakial Gebremedhim's art displayed alongside Traction Company's other prolific members:  Connie Ambridge, Steven Dailey, Jeffrey Dentz, Billy Dufala, Morgan Dummitt, Miguel Horn, Laura Giannini, John Greig Jr., Brendan Keen, Joshua Koffman, and Lucia Thomè for its final day on Sunday, October 11, 2015. Admission will be free.