In this special edition of the T List, we revisit five profiles from the magazine of black American artists and designers — Nick Cave, Carrie Mae Weems, Arthur Jafa, Pope.L and Kerby Jean-Raymond — whose work specifically addresses violence visited upon black bodies. (Sign up here, if you haven’t already, and you can reach us at tlist@nytimes.com.) |
 | | Nick Cave, photographed in his Chicago studio on June 6, 2019.Renée Cox |
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Using materials that range from twigs to crystals to rainbow-colored hair, Nick Cave makes sculptures that, for all their beauty, are visceral and necessary critiques of racial injustice. The Chicago-based artist is perhaps best known for his Soundsuits, many of which are ornate, full-body costumes designed to rattle and resonate with the movement of the wearer. His first was created in 1992, after the beating of Rodney King by the Los Angeles Police Department in 1991, a still-vivid racial touchstone in American history. “It was an almost inflammatory response,” Cave remembers, looking shaken as he recalls watching King’s beating on television 29 years ago. “I felt like my identity and who I was as a human being was up for question. I felt like that could have been me. Once that incident occurred, I was existing very differently in the world. So many things were going through my head: How do I exist in a place that sees me as a threat?” Read the full profile here. |
 | | Carrie Mae Weems, photographed in New York City on Aug. 7, 2018.Photograph by Mickalene Thomas. Styled by Shiona Turini |
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As one of our best contemporary photographers, Carrie Mae Weems creates work that insists on the worth of black women — both in art and in life. Her photographs and short films, as gimlet-eyed and gutsy as they are visually compelling, have gone a long way toward resetting our expectations of pictures and challenging our assumptions about her largely African-American subjects. It would be hard to overstate the impact of “The Kitchen Table Series” (1989-90), which combines panels of text and image to tell the story of a self-possessed woman with a “bodacious manner, varied talents, hard laughter, multiple opinions,” as it reads. The series made her career and inspired a new generation of artists who had never before seen a woman of color looking confidently out at them from a museum wall, and for whom Weems’s work represented the first time an African-American woman could be seen reflecting her own experience and interiority in her art. “I think that the first time I picked up that camera,” said Weems, who lives in New York, “I thought, ‘Oh, OK. This is my tool. This is it.’” Read the full profile here. |
 | | Arthur Jafa, photographed at his studio in the West Adams neighborhood of Los Angeles on May 21, 2019.Wayne Lawrence |
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Having worked with Spike Lee, Stanley Kubrick and Solange Knowles, Arthur Jafa is changing representations of blackness in museums and beyond. The artist, who lives in Los Angeles and was awarded the Golden Lion at the 2018 Venice Art Biennale, is perhaps best known for the seven-and-a-half-minute film he made in 2016, “Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death.” Composed to a large extent of found footage spliced together, it’s a kind of D.J. mix of pure chills, spun with urgency: The white South Carolina police officer Michael Slager shooting and killing the unarmed black forklift operator Walter Scott in 2015, a black Texas teenage girl in a bikini being hurled to the ground by a white policeman two months later. We see swaying crowds and iconic faces — Coretta Scott King, Nina Simone, Barack Obama singing “Amazing Grace” — as well as newer ones, like the young actress Amandla Stenberg, who asks, “What would America be like if we loved black people as much as we love black culture?” A phantasmagoria of brutality and magnificence, the short unsparing film is an expansive, unshakable fever dream of blackness as both a creative force and an object of white violence, a kind of digital-age “Guernica.” Read the full profile here. |
 | | Pope.L, photographed in his Chicago studio on Dec. 11, 2017.Paul D’Amato |
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No artist has so consistently broken down the accepted boundaries of performance art in order to bring it closer to the public than Pope.L — and none with such lacerating, perspicacious and gloriously anti-authoritarian projects that play with our received notions of race and class and almost always cut more than one way. He is probably best known for his “interventions.” First begun in New York in the 1970s, they include physically punishing “crawls,” during which he drags himself, clad in a Superman costume or a business suit, down busy city streets, bringing the high art of performance down to the gutter, and elevating the gutter to the realm of high art. His incitements have earned him many admirers within the art world, but Pope.L, who now lives in Chicago, has remained at the periphery of fame, an anti-consumerist loner in a business that runs largely on money and schmooze. Read the full profile here. |
Kerby Jean-Raymond of Pyer Moss |
 | | Kerby Jean-Raymond, photographed in New York City on Jan. 8, 2020.Photo by Michelle Sank. Styled by Jason Rider |
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Kerby Jean-Raymond’s political, narratively rich designs for his fashion label, Pyer Moss, presaged today’s gestures at activism on the runway. Jean-Raymond is the child of Haitian immigrants, and his designs — especially given the way he presents them publicly — collectively offer a strikingly personal and singular narrative about his own life as a black designer in America. Throughout his career, the New York-based designer has built collections referencing themes that together read like a checklist of certain generational touchstones: the beginning of the Iraq War (which inspired a T-shirt line, printed with slogans like “We won’t fight another rich man’s war”), the 2008 financial crisis and its effect on American politics (Pyer Moss’s Bernie vs. Bernie collection, spring 2017), the widely documented and institutionally sanctioned murder of innocent people of color by police (Ota, Meet Saartjie, spring 2016), depression and the various pharmaceutical and chemical responses to it (Double Bind, fall 2016). Read the full profile here. |
George Floyd’s Final Words, Written in the Sky |
 | | Jammie Holmes’s “They’re Going to Kill Me (New York City)” (2020).Courtesy of the artist and Library Street Collective |
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This past Saturday afternoon, a small plane glided past the Statue of Liberty and into view over the Hudson River. A banner swelled behind it, which read, “They’re Going to Kill Me.” These were among the last words of George Floyd, a black man who was killed while in the custody of the Minneapolis Police Department on May 25, and whose death has spurred demonstrations all over the country. The plane was part of the latest artwork by the Dallas-based artist Jammie Holmes. Read more about the project, an act of protest, at tmagazine.com — and follow us on Instagram. |
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