The Brooklyn Rail

In acts of war, the first mission of an invader is to destroy a peoples’ image of itself. Like a scheming lover with aims to pillage, distract, and destroy, the first task is to study, the second to seduce, and the third to siphon from the mind, body, and spirit. This mode of conquest is perhaps the most devastating and certainly the most subtle. In our time of excessive media, the barbarism that assaults the senses is discreet. Destructions that were once imposed by physical forces and crippling laws—though both seem back in style—are now mainly dispelled through narrative. The project of empire in our automated world is not only about the subjugation of the body but also the manipulation and manufacturing of the conscious mind.

From Now: A Collection in Context, the Studio Museum’s inaugural exhibition in its new building, advances like a battalion covering large swaths of land, prepared to blitz history’s stunted standards with its flank defending a border of the sacred imagination. The curators—Connie H. Choi, Jayson Overby, Kiki Teshome, Maya Davis, Simon Ghebreyesus, Taylor Ndiaye, and Maria Wilson—have assembled not a static display but an evolving, rotating call-and-response drawn from the museum’s deep holdings. The exhibition inverts the logic of panopticism: the gaze still surveils, but through an active and emancipated lens—one that reimagines the right to look, to name, to know, and to remember without Eurocentric distortions.

This mode of unveiling begins, fittingly, with David Hammons’s Pray for America (1969), a work that feels more like a concrete reminder than a critique. The male face—discernible by its white beard—protruding from a cloaked American flag is dusky, sharp, and finely boned; the hand rises in the abhaya mudra, that gesture shared across Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, and even extreme Afrocentric traditions, signifying fearlessness. The piece sets the moral temperature for what follows: an unleashed vision of art as a sacred act—as a spiritual defense—and as a mirror in communion with the truest self, seen at last without blunted eyes.

Following the Hammons is Lorraine O’Grady’s Art Is… (1983/2009), which remains an inquiry into what it means to frame joy, dignity, and the vastness of beauty. Her gilded borders capture Harlem’s African-American Day Parade through portraits that truly merit the term “still life,” heralding the highest aspirations. What O’Grady names is the truth the art world keeps begging us to forget: Black people have long generated aesthetic logics that predate, reject, and surpass Eurocentric ideals. We cannot be contained by the stereotypes colonialism created for us, or by the flattering inversions we craft in protest; our imaginations, at their purest, have always exceeded frames.

O’Grady’s original performance was a joyful incursion, undertaken with no assurance of acceptance—a Duchampian gesture meant for the people rather than the institutions that routinely ignore them. Its brilliance lay in its refusal of analytic distance. As Marimba Ani reminds us, European frameworks approach aesthetic experience through analysis—to objectify it, to verbalize it incessantly—and much of European art still remains, to quote Aziza Gibson Hunter, the “the invisible clothing of the West”: the scaffolding of a nationalist psyche. Art Is… rejected that scaffolding. O’Grady offered the parade a moment unburdened by the Western compulsion to explain itself, a space in which Black people recognized themselves as masterpieces without mediation. Which is why the installation here—a quiet grid of evenly spaced frames—feels gently at odds with the work’s original spirit. A project that once leapt out of the frame is now coaxed back toward order, its exuberant rupture softened into documentation. The images remain luminous, but the elation—the risk, the insurgent joy of crashing a party—sits slightly subdued behind glass.

Unfolding through a dizzying sequence of thematic constellations—Body, Sound, Nature—the exhibition offers answers to questions that are viciously censored. In the section devoted to Sound, there is, beneath the silence, a change in air, a thickness that permeates the room. On one wall, Glenn Ligon’s Untitled (Speech/Crowd #3) (2000) anchors the space. To its right, a Stanley Whitney grid hums softly—blocks of ochre, rust, and cobalt breathing through thin lines. Beneath it, a drawing of color and notation turns sound into pattern, while nearby a Rapunzel-esque tangle of painted cords by Jennie C. Jones, Shhh and Electric Clef (2012), stiffens mid-vibration, its shadow trembling against the wall. To the left, a cardboard boombox sits mute, stripped to its form, and farther down a dark arched painting absorbs the light like a low note.

A sensitive viewer—someone who has listened to too much music, or perhaps just me and my love for theatricality—might hear in it a faint echo of Erykah Badu’s 2008 single “Twinkle.” The silkscreen, drenched in black oil-stick and coal dust, bleeds outward like sound distortion, its surface humming with a low frequency of memory. Badu’s lyric, “We the brightest light, born from the deepest black, children of the divine Mother Father,” seems to hang in the air around it. Ligon’s work doesn’t illustrate that line so much as embody it: darkness is not an absence but an unimpeachable radiance, as all that is and all that will be.

There is so much. There is too much.

From Barkley L. Hendricks’s Lawdy Mama (1969) to William T. Williams’s Trane (1969), to Juliana Huxtable’s vivid, lavender-licked wall of text, Untitled (Casual Power) (2015), which remains a masterclass in words, now cheapened in our daily lives, bombarded as we are by chatter unbacked by power.

Then there is Stinney (2019) by Deborah Roberts, one of my favorites. In it, a young boy wearing gray-and-black stripes, arms crossed, bears an expression at once indolent and impenetrable. His eyes reveal nothing, yet skeins of hidden selves dominate his face. Despite the weaponry of his posture, his vulnerability—despite every projection—is apparent. Is he simply spoiled? Is he on the cusp of switching from “cute, little boy” to America’s most obvious criminal? Is his innocence, his childlike light, on the verge of being erased by the sheer scale of the white space that surrounds him? Or will he abandon reality altogether, and, like the small figurine in Fred Wilson’s Atlas (1995), decide to place the world in his palm? That figurine, wearing a crisp waiter’s jacket and forest-green trousers, holds a blue globe pricked with hundreds of black pins. One might see a servant resisting a trope from within the system—or, as someone murmured breezing past me, “Oh, he looks like he’s wearing Pharrell’s Vuitton.” Both readings hold, staging subservience and sovereignty at once, balancing the world as burden and inheritance.

For fifty-seven years, the Studio Museum in Harlem has offered both an education and a remedy for what scholar and pioneer of Pan-African and Africana studies John Henrik Clarke once called “the imprisonment of a people to image.” After a seven-year pause and a militantly grand reopening, the Studio Museum’s power lies neither in brick or glass, nor even in the lauded 300 million dollar price tag, but in vision itself. Still, one wonders why, after more than twenty years installed at the entrance of the building, Hammons’s African-American Flag does not hang higher? Why does the the nation’s most lucid mirror remain, even here, half-obscured by the golden arches of fast-food commerce? Yet if the exhibition is any indication, I suspect that thirty years from now, after McDonald’s and its flag have been bought, sold, and mythologized, the Studio Museum will remain—pre-eminent, unbent, and steadfast against the winds of change.