Creative Vision: Celebrating the Black Artists who Inspire our Studio’s Perspective
At ThoughtMatter, we challenge the premise that art relies on notions of beauty. Instead, we endorse the idea that it exists for a higher purpose — to provoke. Art calls us to attention and demands we take note. It cultivates compassion, conveying awareness through a unique language of ideas and emotions. Most importantly, it brings us into the stories it shares.
In our pursuit of creativity, we believe that the ability to stir feeling, challenge viewpoints, and evoke thought is imperative. Our commitment to being a studio with an artful perspective is driven by our belief in art that has something to say — especially from individuals who have been systematically silenced or have gone unheard.
Through a closer look at the art that inspires us throughout the year, join us in celebrating the perspectives of the Black artists that share our studio and how they inspire us to expand and deepen our creative practice.
Hew Locke turns a critical eye across his work to the ‘heroes’ who have inspired public monuments, and how society’s continuous evolution shifts our understanding of the power dynamics that lifted their legacies.
Informed by his Guyanese-British heritage, Locke’s own monumental creations disfigure Western history to call attention to these flawed narratives. He layers time through visual juxtapositions or by reworking pre-existing imagery, seeking to re-contextualize people who were formerly lionized.
One such example is Locke’s “Stuyvesant” (2018), a sculptural photograph of the last Dutch governor of the New Amsterdam colony. His is a name known across New York City, yet his involvement in the slave trade and antisemitism has only more recently been acknowledged.
In Locke’s recognition, Stuyvesant is presented in forbidding armor adorned with an intricate collage of skeletons and skulls. The result is a figure who is much more fearsome than revered, acknowledging the many lives unjustly harmed and too long forgotten.
In fantastical landscapes of highlighter hues, Lavar Munroe converges narratives of personal, historical and mythological conception. Inspired by his upbringing in the Bahamas and travels throughout Africa, his work often expresses the conflict between a desire to escape and a longing for home — challenging curious onlookers to journey beyond the familiar.
Landing between painting and relief sculpture, “Land That I Heard Of Once in A Lullaby” (2023) depicts the experience of displacement through unexpected imagery. Recently awarded a Guggenheim, Munroe both grounds and abstracts the adversity faced by migrants seeking survival around the world.
Though primarily a photographer and visual artist, Lebohang Kganye tells stories of home, refuge, family and identity. Born, raised, and currently based in South Africa, her work relates intimately to the enduring impact of Apartheid and the Bantustan people.
Enlisting oral tradition as source material, Kganye explores the familial history of herself and others to re-enact ideas of home and belonging. Composed of artfully collaged elements, the black and white scenes found in works such as “Never light a candle carelessly, from TellTale” (2018) and “O emetse mohala, from the Reconstruction of a Family” (2016) speak to the cruelty of a population forced to leave all they’ve known behind.
Roméo Mivekannin was trained as an architect, but notably began painting in 2019 after visiting a landmark exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay spotlighting the Black models portrayed in historic French masterpieces. In her book ‘Takedown: Art and Power in the Digital Age,’ journalist Farah Nayeri recounts the artist’s reflection on this experience. “I had an instant desire to relive the past, to put myself in those people’s place, to cross over to the other side of the canvas,” he explained. “I wanted to make the viewer confront history.”
Mivekannin’s own work pieces the past and present together through self-portraiture, replacing the faces found in colonial imagery with his own. He creates tension through converging representation: of now and then, of male and female form, of perception and reality, of a direct and subjected gaze. One such example is “Jeunes Filles Sénégalaises” (2021), which was created on fabric buried in soil to impart natural color, then illustrated with photographic and painted images that superimpose Mivekannin’s own face onto the bodies of young Senegalese women. Though visually arresting, the resulting piece of work bears many layers of intangible story. His work additionally recognizes his own family’s history as part of the royal Benin lineage, ancestors who fell from power as a result of colonizing forces.
Jean-David Nkot is a painter of the human condition of which “PO Box the feet story” (2019) is a striking example. Showing a diagram of a densely-populated city and its streets from above, the painting gradually reveals the foot of Africa, referencing its people working in those environments who too often go unseen.
From his native Cameroon, Nkot has delved into the exploitation of raw materials in Africa and the economic and political stakes driving these industries since 2020. More recently, his work finds focus in fields of cotton, the cultivation of which he associates with the beginnings of capitalism. His paintings express the impact this crop has had not only on humans, but the environment.
Nkot brings to light the workers who toil in the shadows. He compensates for their lack of visibility through contemporary consideration, prompting his viewers to rethink the relationships we conduct between ourselves and with the planet.
The work of Malala Andrialavidrazana is inspired by moving from one place to the next. Raised in Madagascar before settling in Paris, she interrogates the barriers and interactions of culture through both abstract and figurative depiction. In doing so, her work presents a new language of considering history while simultaneously engaging contemporary issues and developments.
Her Figures series begins with maps to trace the complex consequences of empire-building in the 19th century. Elements of photography, collage, illustration and text are brought together to form a pictorial narrative of ‘movement, space and connectivity.’ “Figures 1899, Weltverkehrs und Kolonialbesitzen” (2016) is a resounding instance: a map of the world framed and reclaimed by the creatures it was meant to hold.
From the charted narratives of Malala Andrialavidrazana to the symbolic appropriation of Roméo Mivekannin, our founder Tom Jaffe has spent years collecting work by artists with a point of view. In surrounding our work with ideas often shied away from or seen as difficult to put into words, this art makes visible what we seek to continue to create — work that is launched by a passion for connection, fueled by purpose, and driven by the goal of a better world to share.
Amidst the artistry that fills our walls, we take note of the artists who seek to express themselves in the face of adversity, recognizing the creativity that has prevailed against injustice and oppression.
Together, our embrace of visual communication is a generous act that connects us at our core. It’s said a picture is worth a thousand words, but perhaps the true value of imagery still lies in what the artist hopes to convey.
This post was written by Shanti Basu. ThoughtMatter is a creative branding, design and strategy studio in New York City’s Flatiron District. Find us on LinkedIn.
