When I decided to make this video for my TikTok Black Artist Series I went through the usual process: collect photos of works, start a note of information on the artist, and then conduct my research. I went to UCLA’s online library and typed in “Earnie Barnes”. Nothing. I tried “Earnest Barnes”. Nothing. I tried “Earnie Barnes artist/art”. Nothing. The shock I felt was palpable. How is it possible this artist I had been seeing my entire life had no place in art history or even a mention in a published book in the entirety of the library?

The same applied to JSTOR. The importance of creating historical archives from Black American history has never been more glaring. Earnie Barnes, an artist that most Black Americans grew up seeing in their homes, on TV, on their records, isn’t even searchable in a university library. In 2009 the California African American Museum held a retrospective exhibition of his body of work curated by Vida L. Brown and Briget R. Cooks. Cooks commented, “he is not a part of art history. Barnes is not someone in any art history book that I own or have seen, but he has influenced thousands of people through the popular vehicles he accessed through his work.”

We grew up with Earnie Barnes in our homes. For most of my childhood a print of one his poker paintings hung in my living room. It still hangs in my grandmother’s home. The Sugar Shack (1976) is one of the most recognizable paintings by a Black American artist in existence. Ryan Coogler even referenced the painting for his mega-hit movie Sinners. This same work, Sugar Shack, was featured on the cover of Marvin Gaye’s album I Want You as well as in the sitcom Good Times.

The best I could do was find an autobiography referenced in his Wikipedia article: From Pads to Palette by Earnie Barnes. So let me take some time to give background on Earnie Barnes.

Born in Durham, North Carolina in 1938 at the height of Jim Crow he was encouraged to listen to classical music and study the art books around her work place as she worked for a prominent attorney in Durham. He spent much of his childhood familiarizing himself with the masters of fine art and sketching to avoid bullying from his classmates. Though he was well versed on fine art at a young age, he was not allowed in museums due to segregation.

In high school he would become a football star and graduate with a total of 26 athletic scholarships before attending HBCU North Carolina Central University. At 18, while taking an art class, he visited the newly desegregated North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh and asked a docent where he could find work by Black artists. The docent replied, “your people don’t express themselves that way.” This would stay in Barnes’ mind for years to come. Once he graduate from college he went on to play professional football for The Colts (he was let go during training camp), Titans of New York, Chargers, Broncos, and finally the Roughriders in Canada before he fractured his right foot effectively ending his athletic career.

He was regularly fined for sketching during practices, and his teammates on the Broncos nicknamed him “Big Rembrandt”. When he went to seek employment as the official artist for the American Football League, he was introduced to Jets owner Sonny Werblin. He would sign Barnes on as a player and have him paint instead, telling him his contribution to art was much more important than to football. Barnes speaks of his college art professor Ed Wilson as a profound and life changing influence on his work, and Wilson would tell him to use his athletic experience to give detail to what the body felt like in movement. What it felt like, what it expressed in that movement. This can be seen prolifically throughout his work.

Barnes work is defined by long, lithe limbs on his figures. The body is consistently shown in motion with different postures of the human body shown off. He stuck to neutral tones, leaning into browns, reds, and blues. A signature of his is closed eyes, and he often showed figures from the back as he accentuated the movement of their body. His themes stuck to Black culture: basketball playing with a makeshift hoop in the community, parenting, pool games, poker games, the importance of Black education, double dutch, dancing, fashion, even hip hop. Barnes portrayed Black life in a beautiful and movement filled way. His figures always in motion and relationship with each other.

Barnes commented on his use of closed eyes in his work,

“It was 1971 when I conceived the idea of The Beauty of the Ghetto as an exhibition. And I showed it to some people who were Black to get a reaction. And from one person it was very negative. And when I began to express my points view to this professional man he resisted the notion. And as a result of his comments and his attitude I began to see, observe, how blind we have, perhaps, initiated feelings in that light. We don’t see into the depth of our interconnection. The gifts, the strength, and potential within other human beings. We stop at the color quite often. So one of the things we have to be aware of us who are in order to have capacity to like others. But when you cannot visualize the offerings of another human being you’re obviously not looking at the human being with open eyes. We look upon each other and decide immediately: This person is Black, so he must be…this person lives in poverty, so he must be…”

Barnes also spoke on his usage of distressed wood frames for his works as an homage to his deceased father. Weeks before his first solo exhibition in 1966, he would go back to his family home in Durham where his father had suffered a stroke and would pass days later. He noticed that white picket fence surrounding their home that his father usually tended to was lacking that same care.

“I placed a painting agains the fence and stood away and had a look. I was startled at the marriage between the old wood fence and the painting. It was perfect. In tribute, Daddy’s fence would hug all my paintings in a prestigious New York gallery. That would have made him smile.”

In 2022, his iconic work Sugar Shack would sell for a record $15.3 million dollars to a Black collector after being estimated to sell for $150,000. That there is no money in Black art is a fallacy, and there has to be room for Black art that is not just representational, but also existing in other mediums.

Though Barnes received much attention during this lifetime for his work, his absence within art history speaks volumes for the archival holes existing to Black art history. Steven Nelson often comments on the lack of methodology for Black history, the lack of Black art history professors, and the lack of Black art theory. As a Black American art historian myself it is emphatically displayed to me through many American art history classes that Black American art is considered not important enough to have a place next to its white counterparts in history books. I hope to be a part of the art historians changing that narrative. Barnes deserves his place in art history, and I hope this small contribution to his legacy reaches someone, somewhere.

Earnest Barnes passed in 2009.

Bibliography:

From Pads to Palette, Earnie Barnes, 1995.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/12/arts/design/ernie-barnes-sugar-shack-monet-leutze.html

https://www.insidehook.com/culture/ernie-barnes-sugar-shack-sold-13-million

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernie_Barnes

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/lifestyle-news/kareem-abdul-jabbar-how-athlete-artist-ernie-barnes-captured-black-cultures-communal-dignity-1209376/

David Hammons worked to create documentation of how to it feels to exist as a Black American socially though his works Black Boy’s Window (1968) and The Door (1969). These works make apparent the doors that stand between Black people and opportunity. Christina Sharpe, an art historian specializing in Black identity, illustrates the ways Black life and death are wrapped up, produced, and determined by the afterlife of slavery in the search for this opportunity. Hammons’ long time friend and collaborator, Dawoud Bey uses photography to explore the historically violent implications of Black American identity through his works 9.15.63 (2013) and Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017), photographic series about the path taken by four fourteen-year-old Black girls who lost their lives in the Sixteenth Street Church Bombing and the quiet path taken by runaway slaves in Cleveland, Ohio. Tina Campt explains the use of Bey’s photography to encapsulate not just Black tragedy, but the importance of communal spaces and practices in Black American culture.

A dark screenprint of a young Black boy is pressed upon a repurposed wooden window. This window is complete with imprisoning grilles and a dirty rolling shade. This same image is used on the window panel of a door with the words: Admissions Office. Both apart of David Hammons’ Body Print Series of the late 1960s, the artist focused on the exclusion of Black Americans in multiple facets. The exclusion from their own ancestors, the exclusion from freedom, and the exclusion from opportunity. Focusing on exclusion from higher education, The Door uses the influence of Yves Klein and other Los Angeles artists to play with anthropometry and create a body print by greasing himself and other subjects before pressing the body to the canvas. Hammons then covers the surface of the canvas in graphite powder to solidify the resulting image. This was a practice that appeared to separate him from his counterparts during this time. According to Hammons, his art was focused on the reclamation of symbols concurrent to the Black identity. These body prints leave an individualized mark allowing personhood to exist for the figure without knowing who the figure is. Oftentimes Black figures in art history are stereotypical, and the characteristics applied and perpetuated through their imagery can paint a picture of insignificance. We almost never know the figures, they remain nameless through time, unimportant, and typically only used in contrast to the white angelic figure they are presented next to. Hammons decides to use this anonymity as means of exploring the effects of systemic rejection on the Black body, while still interrogating the lack of Black recognition in art history.

Christina Sharpe’s parents moved to the suburbs for opportunity. Movement for opportunity is common throughout the Black Diaspora, as with The Great Migration, but never a definitive. It is oftentimes an empty promise. What opportunity means is at the whims of systemic oppression, and not the whims of the Black people searching for it. Racism, exclusion, and circumstance remain the same if not in a more violently silent way in perceived spaces of opportunity. Sharpe refers to her family having a lived experience in the wake of the unfinished project of emancipation. The Trans-Atlantic slave trade is inextricably tied to the Black existence, and as Sharpe poignantly says “the disaster and the writing of a disaster are never present, and yet are always present”. The autobiographical example is integral to representing the image of the Black because it engages in an important and nuanced social and historical process. The exploration of identity generations of Black Americans have experienced shows an incredible amount of self realization. Their ability to establish a definitive culture with nothing to work with while ceremoniously reconciling with violent racism shows immense cultural resilience and meditation.

An eleven minute split screen projection: on the left, a beauty shop. On the right, a sonic blue sky covered in green trees facing upward. On the left, hair products for perms. On the right, the tops of triangular house roofs against the blue sky and green trees facing upward. On the left, tools from a barbershop. On the right, again a blue scenic sky with green trees facing upward. On the left, a lunch counter. On the right, more sky and trees. This is where the journey comes to an end. The last scene: on the left, drawings on a close line hanging in a classroom. On the right, a brick building with a sign in the shape of a cross reading, 16th Street Baptist Church again from an upward perspective. This is Dawoud Bey’s imagined pathway three young Alabama girls took every week, and as the title suggests this is the devastating day they would stop taking that journey. On September 15, 1963 their church in Birmingham, Alabama was bombed in a hate crime. Bey simulates this journey with his camera collecting images of their ghost paths from the angle of a child, and allowing the viewer to step into the path of the Black children subjected to the horrors based solely on the color of their skin.

Bey uses this same technique to create a quiet journey though secluded homes, forests, greenery, and ponds in Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017). Here he imagines another ghost’s pathway: the path of runaway slaves in a pre-urbanized Columbus, Ohio. Bey describes the series as an “enveloping darkness that was a passage to liberation”. Bey is able to aptly convey and converge these complex ancestral emotions with an eerie air around the photos, as if there is an invisible fog being used as a filter to the black and white images. Bey uses film and photo medias to interrogate Black American history, a feat only someone of the Black American experience would be able to create meaningful and understandable meditation on.

Black communal spaces alone are forms of protest, whether they are seen as such or not. The historical documentation of beauty shops and barbershops show the importance of Black representation within the community. In these spaces there is no policing of the Black presence, and it’s importance in the historical record cannot be downplayed or exaggerated. Black representation is ripe for the picking of respectability politics, and these safe spaces are of the few where these politics do not exist. How we present ourselves to the public is often how we are judged, and the racial connotations of that can be deadly. The Birmingham tragedy stands out because of this fact.

Tina Campt asks the viewers to listen. In the Night Coming series, the art historian argues you can hear the silence. The sound can only exist in relation to quiet because silence is not actually real, and here we must truly pay attention because it holds worlds of creativity. You can compare this to whiteness being unable to exist without it’s perceived opposite, blackness. It is likely within the most marginalized community that we will able to see a true path of liberation, and there are worlds to be spoken within the leftover communities ravaged by colonialism. It is in the expression of art and performance that protest can exist in the loudest and most lasting ways. Art does not exist only as aesthetics, and the commonplace of positioning artists of color in generalized categories outside of “fine art” only reinforces non-political art. It’s here that art becomes an important to protest because of these attempts at silencing.

The artists and scholars using autobiographical references to document the Black experience create a pathway for others to follow, and the more self-representation in Black history the less that history can be left to the discourse of racial lenses. Black American contemporary artists today create their own pathways of expression, glaring into void of Black archival record. The African diaspora and its vastness, and of course the travesties of the Trans Atlantic slave trade, creates a logistical problem for pinpointing any ancestral ties. The contemporary documentation of Black lives as they are lived and experienced contributes to the historical recognition of humanity for Black Americans. That a humanity even needs to be established for Black people is another conversation entirely. Hammons’ expression of bodily abstraction, Bey’s expression of generational meditation, Sharpe’s exploration of Black life and death, and Campt’s fixation on the quiet show us multiple interpretations of Black history. Black Americans are taught their history exists though a rather narrow historical image of slavery and the subsequent Black Power Movement many (many, many) years later with little acknowledgement that they have managed to create and cultivate an entire culture. This culture whose influence reverberates throughout world culture. It is through the Black gaze that there will be a way forward into archival permanence.

*originally written in 2023.

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bibliography:

Campt, Tina. A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See, The MIT Press, 2021. ISBN(electronic): 9780262365666, https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/13762.001.0001

Heinrich, Will. David Hammons, Body and Soul, at the Drawing Center: Critic’s Pick. New York: New York Times Company, 2021. https://www.proquest.com/blogs-podcasts-websites/david-hammons-body-soul-at-drawing-center/docview/2504831275/se-2.

Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2016.

Satire can be a way to make complex and deeply uncomfortable subject matter digestible to a general audience. The finesse of this satire has become an interesting savvy for the Black artists that can create material stemming from multiple generations of complex societal trauma. Peter Williams, who came of age during the Pop Art movement, uses painterly abstraction to create a colorful and incredibly personal account of Black portraiture and satire. In 2018, John Yau remarked of Williams’s work, “Being at the mercy of someone else’s self-loathing is an experience that has permanently marked Williams’s life.” Williams lost his lower right leg as a young man in an accident where a suicidal friend drove them off a cliff. The driver suffered no lasting injuries. He often intertwines this traumatic experience and the traumas of being a Black man with the use of bright saturated colors, geometric shapes, and cartoon-like figuration. Williams’ humorous and heartbreaking work Mosaic (2017) refers not just to the policing of Black men, but also the arresting of disability in an expedition of intersecting marginalized identities.

A Black male figure holds a traditional wooden palette in his right hand in front of an easel stretching the entire scale of the painting while standing atop three stairs as he looks over his shoulder at a plethora of pigs in police uniforms. The painter wears a bright purple jacket with a red lined neckline, grey shirt, and grey pants. He wears a smile as he looks behind him with wide eyes and smiling red lips though there are no hands or feet shown other than a white thumb outline showing from the hole in the palette he is holding. Stuffed behind the easel, appearing trapped within the easel itself is a representation of Williams. He wears only a pair of shorts painted in mosaic styling in black, white, and blue coloring. His brown skin, mosaic shorts, stark white toenails, and the red bottom of his left foot (the only he still has) are the only coloring on the figure. His downtrodden eyes, slight frown, and right nipple are unfilled red outlines. Williams appears as a prisoner of the easel. 

Above the painter’s head is an orange flashlight floating amidst the mosaic background. Immediately to the painter’s right is the spotlight from the flashlight shining its orange light on a large pig in uniform with his eyes closed in seeming serenity, and what looks like two arms extending from behind wrapped around the chest in a tight hold. He wears a blue hat with a yellow plate showing a P in white lettering with flames shooting from the top and pointed ears coming from the sides. Around the waist is a white belt reading the words “WITH SO LITTLE TO BELIEVE IN”BITCHES before fading into the red and white mosaic background. Almost to the scale of this figure is the head of the pig to its right. The size of the head is exceedingly exaggerated, as well as the sharp white canine teeth extending almost to the bottom of its chin in a grim smile as its beady eyes look off into the distance to the right. The cheeks are large, round, and rosy. This figure features the same flaming police cap and pointy ears as the serene cop except the lettering actually reads the word pig. It wears a split uniform: a blue triangular collar where the left side of the uniform is covered in the red mosaic of the background, and the right is stark white with just a red outline. One hand holds down the other as if trying to stop it from moving. These mosaic figures are perhaps visuals of consciousness. 

To the left of and right of the giant head are smaller figures: floating pig heads, two pigs embracing, a strange somewhat human floating head with blue hair, a pig head with a yellow nose looking to see what the painter is doing, and a small pig in a blue uniform sitting on second stair also interestedly watching the painter. A mosaic patterned figure with no features, in a darker red than the rest of the background, has a small devil-like figure holding on to its leg. Reaching from the top right corner is a pair of arms, also in the dark red mosaic pattern, with white hands holding a grey head with no mouth or nose and eyes wide-eyed and scared looking down at the giant emphasized center pig head. Below this greying skull is another pig head with a flaming cap floating head stealing the gaze of the viewer. Below the pig another dark red mosaic pattern floating head with its mouth agape looking at the scene to its left. Finally, below this mosaic head is a brown figure wearing the same cop hat as the other figures but with no lettering on the yellow plate. The nose is elongated with small eyes, long ears, and greying around its large red lips almost as if it’s representing a raccoon. This could be a nod to the corrupt Black cop who follows his white co-workers and is called a coon by his Black counterparts.

Two small inserts overlap the primary image to the left and right of the painting. The left insert shows two floating heads: one pig-like looking to its right with a smile with an arm extending from it wrapping around the head to its right, and the other in a blue-green strangulation coloring with Black facial features, eyes crossed, tongue hanging out. The insert to the right shows a pig wearing only chaps and its police cap as he points a gun at a Black figure running away with his hands in the air and eight gunshot wounds already in his back. A thick red line stands between them in the background with a fence and greenery. An otherwise pleasant landscape. 

The background of the painting largely uses a mosaic pattern of varying irregular lines and geometric shapes in red, orange, blue, green, and pink sometimes bleeding into the figures themselves. The use of primary colors red, yellow, and blue are essential to Williams’ depiction of this crowded composition with little negative space present throughout. The saturation of the painting is high with the brightness of the reds and oranges spread throughout almost invoking the feeling of it being covered in blood due to the context. Empirical perspective is used here to emphasize the different scales of figures, the largest figure being the artist’s self portrait and canvas itself. The painting’s contents are crowded and chaotic, but give an eyeful of relational narrative. 

Peter Williams often used inspiration from modernists, and in particular took inspiration from one of the old Masters: Francisco Goya. Goya’s Black Paintings towards the end of his life were dark and deeply personal looks into not just the political strife in Spain, but also the emotional strife of disability and deafness. These paintings were also controversial, something Williams evokes in his own work with less regard for the viewer’s uncomfortability as he progressed in age and illness. The mosaic elements of Williams's painting give reference to the coloring and blocky, grid-like brushstrokes of a Wassily Kandinsky landscape work, one of his other inspirations. He takes certain elements of his favorite painters and creates his own beautiful rendition of Black representation. Williams shows what new lanes of Black portraiture can look like by using all his identities; showing disability and racism can consistently be in partnership with attacking societal and heteronormative rules. Black satire is meant to be a risk, a challenge, a hovering too close to the edge, and Williams rides this line joyfully. With the particular horrors of staring too long at Mosaic, if you stare even longer it becomes a fun exercise in laughing to keep from crying.