“30 Americans,” an exhibit curated from a collection of works by African-American artists at Miami’s Rubell Museum, brings pieces from some of the globe’s most influential artists to Honolulu.
It is a must-see: If you have a chance to see a Jean Michel Basquiat or a Kara Walker in person, you must take it.
Beginning in the 1960s, the Rubell family collected emerging artists from the post-war African American arts movement, amassing some of the finest works by Basquiat, Robert Colescott, Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, and dozens more. Over the years, “30 Americans” was developed, and exhibited in 27 galleries across the United States. It has been traveling since 2008.
Individual museum curators choose from among 200 pieces available from the Rubell Museum to display in their locations. Here, the Honolulu Museum’s Katherine Love curated the exhibit of 40 works.
The decision on the title of the show, to omit “African” before the “American,” is “because nationality is a statement of fact, while racial identity is a question each artist answers in his or her own way, or not at all,” collectors Don and Mera Rubell state.
IT’S IMPOSSIBLE to overstate the influence of several artists in the show, particularly Kerry James Marshall, whose retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art was the talk of Los Angeles in 2017.
In the show, Katherine Love chose a piece small enough for a Honolulu apartment, “Vignette #10,” from 2007.
Even a small Marshall piece is a wonder. Marshall is a technical master, painting scenes of intimate domestic interiors, vast landscapes, and straight away portraits.
It is not enough to say that Marshall depicts black skin in flat tones. Marshall paints and prints black skin as the Po — the darkness from which life emerges — the black of creation in the Kumulipo and the darkness of the Book of Genesis. One has a feeling of falling into a Marshall painting.
In the way that he upends hundreds of years of beauty standards by celebrating darkest of skin tones, Marshall has altered the way we see and present the human form. Acclaimed films like the 2016 Barry Jenkins film “Moonlight” or the 2018 Ryan Coogler film “Black Panther” owe something to the work of Marshall, in the way worlds are re-imagined, black bodies are not the minority but the norm, and the palette is built around their lives. Several Pow! Wow! Hawaii murals currently on display in Kakaako celebrate dark skin, influenced by this living master.
Marshall’s paintings go to the heart of — and undermine — the ways that European and American landscapes and portraits have been used to promote power, validating white supremacy in humanizing and aggrandizing slave owners, military leaders and those who grew rich from international trade in the 19th century. In those paintings, black bodies were relegated to exoticism, absence, or worse.
Marshall earned a MacArthur “genius” grant in 1997. With enthralling technique, his paintings convey an entire world of black American identity, and can’t be done justice by digital reproductions. They must be seen.
KEHINDE WILEY’S three-piece work, “The Triple Portrait of Charles I,” occupies a massive east wall.
In 2018, Wiley became internationally famous for his rendition of Barack Obama for the national portrait gallery, using trademark themes — masculinity and blackness and the unabashed use of beauty, flowers and gold and exuberant patterns that represent the entire history of painting in praise of the human face.
In the piece chosen for this iteration of “30 Americans,” viewers are treated to a triptych, several meters high and across, unabashedly worshipful in its praise of black skin and green leaves. Whereas dark skin is muted as a form of protest in Kerry James Marshall’s work, dark skin glows with the hues of nature under Wiley’s brush.
There’s humor here too. Notice the way Wiley portrays his subject with a nod, or Kara Walker upends Victorian sensibilities with the violent truth of history in her piece, “Camptown Ladies” — 55 feet of expertly cut black paper silhouettes on a white background.
Taken together, these are the works of (mostly) living artists that painted, cut, printed, sewed, or spoke things that were never painted, printed, sewn or spoken before.
“30 AMERICANS” is relevant to island viewers. Over the last year, civil rights protests have appeared throughout Hawaii, and these have ties to African-American history, particularly the intersections of art and protest, with trauma and resilience portrayed through the arts.
The Honolulu Museum of Art has forged a partnership with the Popolo Project, a Hawaii-based nonprofit. This organization is seeking to redefine “what it means to be Black in Hawaii and in the world through cultivating radical re-connection to ourselves, our community, our ancestors, and the land, changing what we commonly think of as Local and highlighting the vivid, complex diversity of Blackness.”
In the last several years, the Popolo Project has hosted several events throughout the museum: concerts, speaking engagements, and now programming around “30 Americans.”
HoMA director Halona Norton-Westbrook said she is excited to present the exhibition.
“This program is a feast for the eyes,” she said. “These are artists that are presenting contemporary, urgent messages.”
The exhibit opens as Norton-Westbrook is only a few months into her new position at the museum.
“When an organization has been around as long as this, you’re looking to celebrate the best of what’s contemporary as well as the permanent collection,” she said. … “We’re doing our best to promote community feedback and dialogue. The diversity and inclusion extends to our staff, and is going to be internalized in the museum and the content we produce.”
“30 AMERICANS”
From the Rubell Museum collection
>> Where: Honolulu Museum of Art
>> When: Opens Saturday, through June 21
>> Cost: $10-$20; free for ages 18 and under
>> Info: 532-8700, honolulumuseum.org
