The Past in Front of Us: Imagining Black Diasporas in the 21st Century

The Past in Front of Us: Imagining Black Diasporas in the 21st Century seeks aesthetic connections between Black artists working around the world today. This project prioritizes aesthetic perception and affect in relation to Black Diasporic studies and reimagines the canon of work by Black artists. This project does not relegate aesthetics to surface or formal analyses, but understands aesthetic motifs as intelligent entities which communicate the experience of existence. This project affirms Black Diaspora as a dynamic imaginary. I extend traditional analyses of Black Diaspora from the continental edges of the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. I look horizontally and create juxtapositions between artists working in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and the Pacific Rim. I use transdisciplinary terms from art history, psychoanalysis, semiotics, philosophy, rhetoric, trauma theory, and critical race studies. Analyses build on multiple discourses because Black Diaspora is a mutable concept that shifts and evolves. This project is one of the first investigations of twenty-first century artistic production by Black artists globally. Until now, these artists’ work has been covered primarily in magazines, exhibition catalogues, and art reviews in the popular press. Chapters, organized by themes rather than regions, focus on emerging artists Dannielle Bowman, Sandra Brewster, Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo, Kambui Olijimi, and Frida Orupabo. In addition, this thesis contributes a new theoretical frame to existing scholarship on artists Sammy Baloji, Sanford Biggers, Mark Bradford, Glenn Ligon, and Cauleen Smith. As a speculative work, this thesis articulates a vocabulary and uncovers a multitude of aesthetic connections between art practices globally. A significant component of this work is to foreground Black artists’ historically sidelined insights about being in the world.