Every Moment Counts (Ecstatic Antibodies) by Rotimi Fani Kayode (Images courtesy of Art Galleries at Black Studies)
What kind of art are people allowed to make? More particularly, what kind of art are specific people allowed to make? For centuries, mainstream Black stories have been relegated to themes of suffering and pain. But what about Black joy?
Phillip A. Townsend, curator at UT-Austin’s Art Galleries at Black Studies, takes that question further. He asks, what about Black ecstasy? What about Black queer ecstasy?
AGBS creates a sanctuary – a sacred display of people who have long existed without fanfare.
Enter “Transcendence: A Century of Black Queer Ecstasy, 1924-2024.” Beginning in AGBS’s Christian-Green Gallery in Jester Center and continued in the Idea Lab in the Gordon-White Building and the university’s Visual Arts Center, the exhibit’s deeply peaceful ecstasy radiates. Paintings, photos, sculpture, and video reflect serene, contented faces; bodies relishing in the beauty of movement and connection; exuberant resistance of expectation. AGBS creates a sanctuary – a sacred display of people who have long existed without fanfare.
Because Black queer art has been around. That’s what Townsend discovered as he dug through archives, finding proof of its ecstatic existence. At the exhibit’s opening on Jan. 23, he told me two central touchstones led his curation: the visual spark of glowing enthrallment in Bernini’s sculpture Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, and the core ethos in a letter from Alain Locke to Langston Hughes. In the original letter, which is on display in the exhibit, Locke addresses the artists’ shared days in Paris and his hope to “keep the gleam of the transcendental thing” in their friendship. Those two compasses – and an elaborate spreadsheet of requirements, he told me – guided Townsend through his exploration of hidden artistic treasures.
Tender by Didier William
“Transcendence” is more than proof of a successful quest. It’s proof of the historical breadth of this subject. The work represents artists of different styles, classes, and even races, but joyous nature shines brightly through. The show is separated into seven categories: Portraiture, Beyond Figuration, Dance and Movement, Spirituality, Sex and Sensuality, Black Queer Futures, and Altered States. Each label provides a comforting structure, a helpful way to dissect how each piece fits the assigned lens. But a few universal threads connect pieces.
One of those threads is a constant display of raw intimacy. Photographer Texas Isaiah crafts worshipful images in the Portraiture section, sparking audience connection to the specific head tilts and hand placements of his beatific subjects. In the woodcut print Tender, on display in Sex and Sensuality, Didier William subverts the imagery of Black caricatures, tackling the curves of embracing bodies to depict their holy power.
Radical self-acceptance also runs rampant in the exhibit. Covers from THING, a Nineties-era zine, serve in-your-face punchiness with screams and smiles and the thinnest of eyebrows. Elsewhere, Devan Shimoyama’s mixed media Self Portrait as Ronnie is a vision of glitz and glamour, as the artist imagines himself as the original bad girl of rock & roll with sparkly button eyes and a glitter mustache. And in Tourmaline’s film Salacia, which weaves a mythic tale around trans sex worker Mary Jones, the subject moves through space before staring down the camera, stamping out her territory by repeating, “We can be anything we want to be.”
DEITY II by Bre’Ann White
I found myself musing on that sense of emergence while viewing other pieces as well. In the Beyond Figuration section, collages by Dana Robinson contemplate becoming. She features abstract forms in rising shapes, bits of bodies peeking through colored bursts of flowers or butterfly wings. In an explosive print by Julie Mehretu, ironically named Local Calm, dark slashes expand in smoky clouds, wrestling with angular orange and yellow zones. The colors add peace in chaos, offering a visual map through the madding crowd.
“Transcendence” does the same. It leads through our current mass of pain with a reassuring hand. Others have been here and endured, the exhibit reminds us. We can too.
Art Galleries at Black Studies hosts “Toward ‘Transcendence’: A Symposium on Black Queer Ecstatic Art” virtually and at the William C. Powers, Jr. Activity Center Feb. 20-21.
“Transcendence: A Century of Black Queer Ecstasy, 1924-2024”
Christian-Green Gallery and Idea Lab, through May 9
Visual Arts Center, through March 8