It’s my pleasure to be included in, 9 Nebraskan’s a wheat paste woodcut print installation featuring posters created by nine Nebraska artists who do not normally do woodcut prints as their primary form of artmaking. The participating artists are Sarah Rowe, Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez, Bart Vargas, Kyle Nobles, Ryan Crotty, Gerardo Mesa, Byron Anway, Nathan Murray, and myself. Throughout July, these nine prints will be wheat pasted at various locations throughout the city in locations to be determined. The outdoor nature of the installation feels particularly necessary for the work I am including. Street art has always been and continues to be a vital art form as we seek to reimagine our country, our cities and our neighborhood. Street art can shift the visual landscape to include bodies and stories that are not readily visible or readily told.
I am honored to have gotten to work with my friend and artist N8 DeVivo to photograph Dwight Brown for the reference image for this woodcut. In many ways this woodcut is owned by a community which starts with me, N8, Dwight and Barkley Hendricks.
In Hendrick’s work, “Icon for My Man Superman (Superman Never Saved Any Black People - Bobby Seale-) the artist stands centrally with a Superman t-shirt, sporting an afro and no pants. His arms are folded over his chest. He is looking directly at the viewer. The work is inherently confrontational: the return of the gaze, the unabashed nakedness, and the pride exhibited by his posture. Hendrick’s politicizes the black body in order to reassert the autonomy we have over it and thereby our humanity. This is fascinating work because it is the exact opposite politicism which we are accustomed to: that which seeks to oppress and dehumanize black people. Furthermore, he is politicizing himself and he is fully aware of it.
In the same way, Dwight came to our photoshoot with a yellow crop top he made with the words honey embroidered on the front. He wore tassel earrings I had gifted him. He brought another black and white striped shirt embroidered with the words “ALL BLACK.” One of the thing I find striking about Dwight is his ability to exist visibly outside of our cultural expectations of who a straight black man is or should look like. He exists in such a way to say blackness is his and he shapes it and he owns it and he shares it but it doesn’t own him in the way the media marginally represents the bodies and experiences of black men.
As a multiracial black person it sometimes feels like your body is up for debate or like you are to soon categorized. In conversations I had with Dwight preceding our image making, Dwight talked about the way his hair informed people’s racial perception and treatment of him as a part of or aside from his Blackness or Puerto Rican roots. Additionally he talked about the social pressure to identify with his Puerto Rican roots and the way this pressure was rooted in racism.
The assertion “all Black” in a country that would blot you out, that would white you out if it was able, that would seek to diminish the beauty of black people, is a radical proclamation and ownership of the thing it would rather you forget. So in these black and white stripes, really it’s all black stripes on white paper; really it’s all Black.