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All of "Land of Lions" Chapter 1 is available for free to read on WEBTOON! Chapter 2 started today and there will be a mid-month update for April because of the short update today!

Reblogging to clarify —

It’s unclear in the article if Kaphar actually crumples the original painting; usually as part of his practice he produces a replica that he then crumples to create the intended effect. 

HOWEVER, this does not undermine the impact of his work. 

I’m just being a nitpicky loser to point out the unlikelihood that Yale would actually encourage/permit him to transform the artwork (”damage” in registrars’/conservators’ parlance) via crumpling. (Having spent time working in the art collection of a university for which the posting of a sticky note on the frame of a painting was considered a veritable Art Emergency, I felt obliged to clarify that outside the Studio MFA program at Yale, the actual crumpling of the actual canvas is unlikely. 

There’s also an art-historical argument to retain the original painting as-is (though not in a place of prominence and not without interpretative text/ presentation) to underscore the concept of what it is that Kaphar’s painting (which should be in the place of prominence) radically rejects; i.e. to say, this is what came before and this is what we must be sure to not return to. 

But it can also be said, the visual indicators of the blood-soaked histories and present-day of the U.S.A. mandates the re-interpretation of the artwork via the visionary work of a Black artist, just as it mandates the destruction of Confederate monuments. The university is named after Elihu Yale, the physical and metaphorical landscape of the U.S.A. is still shaped (still scarred) by the legacies of enslavement and human trafficking and genocide that Euro-Americans committed against Black Americans and Indigenous peoples. White people still get married on plantations. 

We still don’t know the name of the Black child depicted in the original painting. Kaphar’s endeavor to humanize him only does so in the present day; we cannot reach back in time to hold the baby child and spare him the horrors of enslavement nor can we undo the centuries of white supremacy that inform our mindsets today. 

So if Kaphar were to transform the original canvas, to re-focus our attention onto the life and lived experiences of the little boy, that would be good/great/powerful. But I just don’t see Yale University owning up to its legacy in this way. 

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More resources, for the interested:

Titus Kaphar’s TEDtalk, ‘Can Art Amend History?’ (open-source video)

Lisa Farrington’s African-American Art: A Visual and Cultural History (link to WorldCat, a global library catalog)

Lorraine O’Grady,  “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity” (open-source academic article)

The late, great, bell hooks (RIP) wrote articles, including “The Oppositional Gaze,” 1992, (in response to Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” from 1975, which coined the term the ‘male gaze’) that might be of interest. I’m sorry; I don’t have a link for this one.

Now THIS is art. 😍