The Studio Museum | 144 W. 125th St.

To reach the original and permanent location of the Studio Museum (144 West 125th Street), cross W. 125th St. and then continue heading east halfway down the block. Visit the museum if it's open. However, beware that this location is undergoing major construction through 2021. Their temporary space can be visited at 429 W. 127th St. Go to studiomuseum.org for more details.

By Leticia Robles-Moreno

The Studio Museum in Harlem is the nexus for artists of African descent from around the world and artwork inspired and influenced by Black culture. Between 2019 and 2021, the museum is getting a $175 million facelift and will host a temporary space on nearby West 127th Street.* The Studio Museum’s Artist-in-Residence program, which gives the “Studio” to the Studio Museum’s name, was one of the Museum’s founding initiatives. The program has supported more than one hundred emerging artists of African or Latino descent, many of whom have gone on to establish renowned careers. Their work encompasses aesthetic and political issues such as Black identity, cultural heritage and clashes, gender and sexuality, among other topics. The material that they employ in their art – objects, paintings, or the bare body – invokes the materiality of their social concerns. One way to grasp the relevance of the Studio Museum to art, culture, and politics today is to hear from some of its most distinguished alumni:

• Chakaia Booker has been working with rubber tires since the early 1990s. The black tires symbolize the strength of Black identity while colorful nuances are meant to evoke the complexities of race. According to Booker, "salvaging such defiant beauty from scraps of resilient black, rubber [provides] a compelling metaphor of African American survival in the modern world."
• Julie Mehretu tackles broader sociopolitical issues. According to her, “Before the Bush Administration and September 11, there was this underlying feeling that the world was progressing in a particular way, and different cities were developing and morphing into this kind of unified pseudo-capitalist dream... That false perspective and weird hope... was crushed in the last few years. The way the U.S. has responded, especially with the war in Iraq, has put the world into a different place. Right now it just feels like this big knot of all these different tendencies. It’s coming out in my drawings a lot; they look like these nests or gnarled webs. Space is deflated and conflated. I’m still trying to understand it myself.” One of her largest works is a wall of the Goldman Sachs office in lower Manhattan.
• In Wangechi Mutu’s view, “Females carry the marks, language and nuances of their culture more than the male. Anything that is desired or despised is always placed on the female body.” Drawing from the aesthetics of traditional African crafts, Mutu engages in her own form of storytelling; her works document the contemporary myth-making of endangered cultural heritage.
• David Hammons blurs notions of public and private spaces as well as the value of commodities. He says: “I like doing stuff better on the street because the art becomes just one of the objects that's in the path of your everyday existence. It's what you move through, and it doesn't have any seniority over anything else. Those pieces were all about making sure that the Black viewer had a reflection of himself in the work. White viewers have to look at someone else's culture in those pieces and see very little of themselves in it.”

Black poet laureate Claudia Rankine chose his sculpture, Fresh Hell, as the cover for her book, Citizen, long before Trayvon Martin's death made the hoodie a national symbol for African American men's defamatory stereotyping.

Rankine's prose poetry also incorporates Mutu's art. Here's an emblematic quote from her book:

Not long ago you are in a room where someone asks the philosopher Judith Butler what makes language hurtful. You can feel everyone lean in. Our very being exposes us to the address of another, she answers. We suffer from the condition of being addressable. Our emotional openness, she adds, is carried by our addressability. Language navigates this.

For so long you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a person. After considering Butler's remarks, you begin to understand yourself as rendered hypervisible in the face of such language acts. Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present. Your alertness, your openness, and your desire to engage actually demand your presence, your looking up, your talking back, and, as insane as it is, saying please.

For the most updated list of names of Black youths who have been killed with impunity, flip to the back pages of the latest edition of Citizen at your local bookstore. Graywolf Press updates the list of victims in the epliogue of each new edition.

*Editorial addition made by Nicole Marie Gervasio in August 2019.