BLACK PANTHER

Self’s newest edition sees the artist translate the Black Panther Party’s iconic symbol into a large-scale etching. The work is comprised of seven plates and employs a mix of etching techniques including soft ground, spit bite, open bite and gravure. Several of these etching techniques mimic the patterns of manufactured fabric while others are gestural, showing the artist’s hand. These textural differences in each of the seven plates, along with the gold leafing of the eyes of the panther, create distinct patterns and swirls of tone that appear collaged together, mirroring the approach of the use of fabric and layered materials in Self’s canvas works. The panther appears on a white void, highlighting its status as a symbol while also showing the plate edge and emphasizing the dimensional effect of pressing. The image is encased in a frame painted with the colors of the Pan-African flag, placing it in context of a movement celebrating Black liberation in the United States.

In a speech delivered at the 1966 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)-sponsored “Black Power and its Challenges“ conference at U.C. Berkeley, activist and organizer Stokely Carmichael said, “We chose for the emblem a black panther, a beautiful black animal which symbolizes the strength and dignity of black people, an animal that never strikes back until he‘s back so far into the wall, he‘s got nothing to do but spring out. Yeah. And when he springs he does not stop.”

HISTORY OF DRAWINGS

Repetition and Community in the Work of Tschabalala Self
by Claire Gilman, Chief Curator at The Drawing Center, June 2021

Repetition, long considered the purview of artistic mediums like printmaking, photography, film and video, is less typically associated with drawing, the art form that, more than any other, is synonymous with the unique, personal impression registered in the moment, and once and for all. And yet, this view is predicated on a particular notion of repetition, one that equates repetition with simulation and stasis, and that fails to grasp the movement and change that any attempt at manual reproduction necessarily implies. In the words of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, to repeat is not to generate a series of empty signs that undo singularity. Rather, “repetition as a conduct and as a point of view concerns non-exchangeable and non-substitutable singularities” that reject the very notion of a “perfect” model or essential rendition or meaning. According to Deleuze, repetition is, in this sense, a “transgression.” It introduces “disequilibrium” in a process that is predicated on real movement and that understands repetition’s assault on originality as the precondition for true collectivity.

It is in this spirit that I approach Tschabalala Self’s recent body of work, a series of drawings and videos—as well as a work in sculpture and neon—inspired by the publication of Angela Davis’s landmark essay “Art on the Frontline: Mandate for a People’s Culture” by Afterall books for which Self was asked to provide the illustrations. In the essay, Davis asks how we create true social consciousness to which Self responded with a series of portraits of three individuals repeated multiple times with slight variation. Writing about this series, Self observes: “The series entitled ‘Black Faces’ shows the various expressions of 3 individual subjects. These subjects stare inquisitively out of the picture plane at the viewer and perhaps one another. Collectively the works emerge as something greater than their individual parts. Together this grouping becomes a community of sorts with a shared social consciousness. Their gazes shift in moments from disdain, to joy and even mockery -- mimicking the various ebbs and flows of any philosophical didactic.”

BLACK FACES (2020 - 2022)

Tschabalala Self‘s subject is the iconography of the Black female body in contemporary culture, but isolated from historical and environmental references, floating free on the canvas - breasts, hips and buttocks flaunted joyously, over-emphasized, sexualized, celebrated. ”I believe in cultivating positivity and optimism in my work“, she says, remarking elsewhere that “the disgusting and perverse violence projected onto the Black body in Western society is an abomination“. If the pale, slimline, adolescent look that the mainstream fashion industry promotes as the paradigm of feminine beauty could be taken as a reproach if not an insult to all women of other shapes and sizes, how much more so to the Black women whose bodies are often viewed as a foil to Eurocentric standards?

Self‘s painting are composed of scraps of cut fabric and paper, sequins, glitter, acrylic, gouache and oil paints and coloured pencil drawing. All of the collaged elements are sewn onto the canvas. Drawing is the starting point and remains an element in some of the paintings, especially the faces. She describes her characters as coloured pencil and watercolour portraits are similar, looking with an air of self-assurance straight at the viewer, wholly on their own terms.

BLACK JOY (2019)

Black Joy is a series depicting the idea of Black happiness which has been spoken about in relation to the widely discussed and understood concept of Black pain. Black Joy glibly references this very complex idea through the simple gesture of a smile.

LEISURE DRAWINGS (2021 - 2022)

In these works, Self examines the notion of leisure as a gesture of refusal: of both the expectation or demand to perform and the ideal aspiration of the home as a place of refuge and relaxation.

Continuing the artist‘s blurring of public and private environments, these works introduce new iterations of the archetypal characters depicted in Self’s first live performance Sounding Board, which premiered at the 2021 Performa Biennial in New York City. Here, these hand-painted figures merge with depictions of Self’s furniture, a crucial prop from her performance, each contained within its own ‘home’ or unique painted environment.