Flow, an exhibition of Harlem’s Studio Museum from 2008, was conceived by the curatorial team, lead by Thelma Golden, Christine Kim and Naomi Beckwith, as the third chapter of a line of inquiry that had begun in 2001 with the much commented upon Freestyle exhibit. Along with 2005’s Frequency, Freestyle was largely responsible for ushering in the era of the so-called 'post-black' artist to American art discourse. The term post-black was coined initially “to describe the work of young African-American artists who [were] ‘adamant about not being labeled as black artists, though their work was steeped, in fact, deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness.’”¹
Flow, then, was to do for African art what its older siblings had done for the African American context. To that end, Kim and Golden designed Flow to be an exhibit of the art of Africa’s youngest generation. Each of the 20 artists represented in the museum’s relatively small main gallery were born after 1973, making the oldest of them 35 at the time of the shows opening. For several of the artists on view, including Lynette-Yiadom Boakye, Flow was the first major showing. But more than youth, the Studio Museum’s team sought a certain post-African ethos—aesthetic practices that “reflect an attempt to express rather than define what it means or can mean to be an African artist today.”²
A particular preoccupation of Christine Kim’s was the sheer mobility and trans-nationality of the contemporary African art world. This preoccupation was reflected both in the willfully transient title of the exhibition itself, and in the selection of artists who are all simultaneously engaged in at least two and as many as five distinct global contexts. In a rapturous moment of what is perhaps overstatement, Kim identifies “… a new generation of ‘cultural hybrids’ from Africa, not African citizens, but global citizens, from Africa and of the world. Neither strictly African nor American nor African-American, the work seemed to reside in a sort of elsewhere or, perhaps more accurately, a nowhere space.”³
In terms of shared formal themes and practices, all of the artists in Flow show a serious concern with the materiality of their work. If there is anyplace where these artists can be said to investigate the conditions of their own 'African-ness,' it is at the level of materials. In a strange way, this materialism locates them both more firmly within western contemporary art trends, and within a romanticized notion of Africa as a place where humanity is somehow closer to the land and to sensorial experience. Might the Studio Museum have a vested interest in claiming a vision of contemporary Africa that suits African American narratives of the self as transient and displaced? To what extent does it even make sense to talk about being post-African, and if displacement and in-between-ness become central organizing principles, why does the notion of Africa persist as relevant at all? What does it mean to exhibit the work of young African artists in America's most historical African American neighborhood (a neighborhood that was largely responsible for producing the pan-African consciousness in the first place)?
1. Flow: the Studio Museum in Harlem. Christine Y. Kim; [edited by Samir S. Patel].
New York, N.Y. : Studio Museum in Harlem, c2008. p19.
2. Flow: the Studio Museum in Harlem. Christine Y. Kim; [edited by Samir S. Patel].
New York, N.Y. : Studio Museum in Harlem, c2008. p21.
3. Flow: the Studio Museum in Harlem. Christine Y. Kim; [edited by Samir S. Patel].
New York, N.Y. : Studio Museum in Harlem, c2008. p21.
-Imani Roach
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