By Jenn Mondoux
The majestic halls of the Art Gallery of Ontario once again played host to a debate on black issues, and this time the AGO itself was the topic of discussion.
Last Wednesday night, 150 people met to participate in a panel discussion entitled, “The Black Male and Questions of Representation.” The evening was a first in a series of events sponsored by the AGO in honor of Black History Month. And as Ryerson journalism instructor and panel moderator Cecil Foster suggested, “it’s about time.”
“I take this as a sign,” Foster said, commenting on the number of African Canadians in the audience. “This is the beginning of the opening up of institutions like this so that we can discuss the issues of great importance to us in the black community.”
One such issue is the controversy surrounding the Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibit “The Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art.” The exhibit opened last November in New York—complete with a slide show from curator Thelma Golden—and it became the focus of the evening’s discussion.
The Whitney exhibit combines the work of 29 multiracial artists, and takes a powerful look at how the image of the black male has been portrayed since the 1960s. There are 100 works on display, ranging from clips of the Bill Cosby Show to Adrian Piper’s “Vanilla Nightmare,” a 1986 takeoff of an ad for Poison perfume, depicting hollow-eyed black men surrounding a white woman.
The exhibit has raised a lot of eyebrows, especially within the black community. But for Golden, controversy comes with the territory.
“I was prepared for the response to this project,” Golden told the audience. “What I haven’t been prepared for is the fact that three months later the controversy hasn’t died.”
But does Canada have its own skewered perceptions of the black male? NOW magazine film critic and commentator Cameron Bailey thinks so.
“We are fluent in American iconography,” Bailey told the audience. “But we do also have our own arena where the iconography of the black male is being developed for local consumption.”
Bailey cited the Canadian media’s coverage of the Just Desserts killings, negative treatment of Jamaican immigrants and the size of Canadian audiences for the O.J. Simpson trial as examples of how the image of the black male is developed and portrayed in this country.
To drive his point further, Bailey showed a clip from the Canadian Airborne Regiment’s hazing video of August 1992.
“These are not spontaneous actions,” said Bailey, noting how the only black soldier in the unit was urinated on and had the words “I love the Ku Klux Klan smeared on his back with human excrement. “These are real people taking cues from images and symbolism that already exist in the culture.”
But a larger issue at last Wednesday’s debate was the relevance of the “Black Male” as a Whitney exhibit. For writer/activist Wesley Crichlow, who also teaches at Ryerson in the Faculty of Social Work, the discussion surrounding the “Black Male” has as much to do with its location as its content.
“How would the ‘Black Male’ be viewed as an exhibit if it were placed in Regent Park or Jane and Finch?” Crichlow asked the audience. “We need to talk about how mainstream institutions like the Whitney are hostile in ways that will not allow the black community to take part in what people perceive as ‘high culture.'”
The AGO was also targeted as an institution which needs to feature more black artists within its walls.
“It’s very urgent that institutions like the AGO begin to show black artists,” Bailey said. “When we were talking to staff about this event, we couldn’t come up with more than one black artist in the entire history of the AGO show, that being Stan Douglas.”
The AGO’s Cathy Jonasson agrees that the gallery needs to feature black artists on a more permanent basis, and not merely for special events like Black History Month.
“It’s the first time we’ve started to talk with the black community on a continual basis and there is a real willingness to listen to ideas,” Jonasson said. “But a larger issue is how we can make the AGO more approachable for any member of the community.”
The AGO’s series on Black History Month continue next Sunday evening, with a blues concert by Dianna Braithwaite.
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