Hunter College Art Galleries, Leubsdorf Gallery
February 1 – April 3, 2022
Dennis Delgado
Alicia Henry
Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle
Titus Kaphar
Whitfield Lovell
Lava Thomas
Curated by Bridget R. Cooks, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of African American Studies and the Department of Art History, University of California, Irvine.
Exhibition and tour organized by Sarah Watson, Chief Curator, Hunter College Art Galleries, New York in collaboration with the University Art Galleries at UC Irvine, Palo Alto Art Center, and Art Galleries at Black Studies, University of Texas at Austin.
For more information about The Black Index programming and exhibition tour visit: https://www.theblackindex.art/
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
The Hunter College Art Galleries are pleased to announce the traveling group exhibition The Black Index featuring the work of Dennis Delgado, Alicia Henry, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Titus Kaphar, Whitfield Lovell, and Lava Thomas. The artists included in The Black Index build upon the tradition of Black self-representation as an antidote to colonialist images. Using drawing, performance, printmaking, sculpture, and digital technology to transform the recorded image, these artists question our reliance on photography as a privileged source for documentary objectivity and understanding. Their works offer an alternative practice—a Black index—that still serves as a finding aid for information about Black subjects, but also challenges viewers’ desire for classification.
The works in The Black Index make viewers aware of their own expectations of Black figuration by interrupting traditional epistemologies of portraiture through unexpected and unconventional depictions. These works image the Black body through a conceptual lens that acknowledges the legacy of Black containment that is always present in viewing strategies. The approaches used by Delgado, Henry, Hinkle, Kaphar, Lovell, and Thomas suggest understandings of Blackness and the racial terms of our neo-liberal condition that counter legal and popular interpretations and, in turn, offer a paradigmatic shift within Black visual culture.
This exhibition is dedicated to David C. Driskell.
