The Artists Building a Black Cosmos

In imagery that fuses Black artifacts, rituals, and fantasies, three artists offer blueprints for a jubilant new universe.

Lauren Halsey, land of the sunshine wherever we go II (detail), 2021. Photograph by Elon Schoenholz
Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

The visual enjambment we see in collage works entered the collective consciousness through song, specifically the sonic territories mapped and invented by jazz and blues music. Black music made audible ideas that trauma had stifled and muted, and once these sentiments could be heard, it became easier to visualize them and reenact them through images and movement. Black visual artists who do with light what jazz instrumentalists and blues vocalists and hip-hop producers do with sound emerged and began to experiment—pioneers like Romare Bearden early in that tradition, and working artists of today like Jacolby Satterwhite, Lauren Halsey, and Tavares Strachan.

Jacolby Satterwhite, Flying in Paradise, All Above the Business, 2020
Jacolby Satterwhite, Flying in Paradise, All Above the Business, 2020
Courtesy Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York

These artists merge the analog and digital with uncanny ease. The nephew of afro-harpist Alice Coltrane (widow of John Coltrane), Flying Lotus is one of our portals between what’s happening in music and what’s happening to bodies on dance floors and at home, and in factories and offices and schools and prisons and everywhere bodies are sold—and what occurs in the work of Satterwhite, Halsey, and Strachan as a result of the demands the new sounds impose upon how we see ourselves and where we locate the gaze. On Flying Lotus’s album Cosmogramma (2010), harp, bells, voice, synth, and Lil Wayne samples force digital and analog textures to coexist, as if one physical place inextricably united by the texture of desire. He creates a template there for a new grammar of the cosmos. A few years later, we get Jacolby Satterwhite’s Reifying Desire series, videos in which he dances with himself in several dimensions. The same way Black music has purposed sampling as a slick archiving technique which keeps out-of-print music circulating, Black visual intonation takes archives made on paper and film, video, or even cassette tape, as well as the bodies of the artists themselves, and overlays or arranges them to bend time and space and render a paradise of ruins, picturesque detritus.

Collectively, we are at a precipice where we want to embody our gods and ancestors and reclaim their testimonies without reliving their trials. The ancestors we have no names or discernable forms for—because we lost or traded their names on the path to liberation or bondage—we reanimate through fantasy and terrain-making in the visible world using the momentum of music and rumor. The results are unsentimental nostalgias that allow us to see trajectories in Black cultural tradition without overidentifying with their sorrow or mania. It’s as if these artists promise intimately, I’ll be your mirror, and then use that mirroring to deflect everything they are trying to get over and through; they give you your problem back and exorcise their loyalties to struggle and show us that process. Their mazes of Black artifacts and rituals accrue so many personal signifiers for the artists that the weight of their influences is lifted by overfamiliarity, outrun, or so fused with the self as to offer the illusion of having been transmuted.

Jacolby Satterwhite, Black Luncheon, 2020
Courtesy Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York

Jacolby Satterwhite / People in Me

There is an element of remothering in Jacolby Satterwhite’s world-making. Beginning with Reifying Desire (my personal introduction to his work), he bends and reshapes his origin story and turns what was stigmatized as mental illness in his mother into a spectacle of her genius for drawing and singing, for “madness” made into domestic mysticism. Satterwhite focuses on her capacity to remain intentional and hopeful throughout her struggles, and how that hope turns to revelry and obsession. He says he maintained an “objective” distance, that he had to take an almost “sociopathic” approach to working with his mother’s archive. Yet the final product is much more vulnerable than he suggests: songs his mother recorded while at home or institutionalized serve as the soundtrack of an imaginary universe where Satterwhite dances. His mother is lucid and self-aware about her troubled mind, and he is loose-limbed and receptive, genuflecting both literally and in spirit, replaying each memory over and over again at different octaves to see if he can detect where it turns, where she goes from full of light to blinded by it. The gestural tapestry created is its own cosmogramma, a method of reinstating the primacy of dismissed or dissembled modes of testifying. He creates a portal using his mother’s voice, her tones, and in this way she accompanies him, collaborating with him posthumously. The exchange is in no way clinical or remote. They are holding hands in their own exclusive universe; she passes him a note, and he only dictates pieces of it to us.

The cosmic reparenting that many Black people are forced to perform as a rite of passage out of or through abandonment demands the ruthless use of personal archives, sometimes to such an extent that the archives become masks to wear while the face is missing. Satterwhite’s mother is so present in his work that she both disappears and becomes omnipresent, the dark matter of his omniverse. (He refers to himself as a “digital hoarder” in one interview.) To experience his work is to experience the opposite of that: someone intently mapping his personal star pattern and then releasing that constellation into the world of the Black myth, freeing himself of his preoccupations by letting them overtake him for a time. Nothing personal, he shrugs, while recreating his entire social life as an infinitely looping virtual reality. His displacement into forms he can control is wise because what becomes hyperfamiliar cannot haunt as much, and generous because both Satterwhite and his mother transmute distress so well that the audience is only let in to revel with them. We aren’t forced to earn it, we don’t have to hold back our awe to make them feel appreciated in this world they create together; we have to surrender to it.

Lauren Halsey exhibition, installation view at David Kordansky Gallery, 2020
Courtesy the gallery

Lauren Halsey / A New Reality Is Better than a New Myth

Lauren Halsey mixes hoodrich kitsch like neon “check cashing” signs, banana-yellow Afro Sheen aerosols, and technicolor Cheetos logos with sacred cultural iconography and language, including images of musicians Isaac Hayes and Sun Ra, in order to reappropriate the grammar of Black local life. In her 2020 exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery, the effect is both dazzling and sobering. You want to be a member of that society, but you also understand that its weakest links––the economic exploitation, the conflation of stimulation with nourishment––threaten to sabotage all of it. If the state and real-estate mergers and restrictive covenants didn’t dictate the zoning and aestheticizing of neighborhoods, how would historically Black regions of towns and cities be? We’d play more music, surely, and businesses like liquor stores and KFC wouldn’t be more prevalent than fruit stands and mom-and-pops, but at the same time, what does exist would be embraced with love, less a point of shame and more a matter of pride and empowerment. If the liquor store and the fast-food spot are where we convene to discuss free jazz or soul music, and how to build community centers and our own schools, then let them proliferate with all their viscous temptation, simultaneously temping us to resist them.

Halsey invents brand-new environments using the most mundane and familiar ones. She discovers a spectacular mundane, full of soul and glitz and as confident as its detractors. Most importantly, her work, her cosmogramma, dispels the nagging trope in our culture that Black people need a white savior aesthetic to come in and distribute white poise unto Black people or teach us how to be better capitalists, less decadent. Our legacy is one of leaning into ornamentation, orbiting all shades of the light spectrum and, in so doing, being suns ourselves. Halsey rejects energies of lack and collective self-doubt in favor of unapologetic Black opulence. We own everything we touch is her work’s message, so touch this sculpture of a strip mall wrapped in Funkadelic’s royal blue cape and be glad.

Tavares Strachan, No Name in the Street, 2020
Tavares Strachan, No Name in the Street, 2020 Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Tavares Strachan / Leave No Traces

If Satterwhite and Halsey are constructing whole worlds, virtual and tangible, Tavares Strachan is rendering blueprints for the next world. When those dreams and apparitions inevitably implode or grow bleak and redundant, we will crave the nourishment of their bones, their guts sputtered into elegant retractable horizons we can walk toward, or enter, to reinvent ourselves. Strachan constructs such havens and horizons, letting some of his archives remain 2D, at bay, and a little aloof, so that their syncretism can stretch out playfully, a little languid, not committing itself to a bulkier form. He makes footnotes, not ideologies or fully realized new worlds. And instead of implying outer space and takeoff and launch from the local into the infinite, the way Halsey and Satterwhite do, Strachan includes splayed shards of the natural world turned into speaking objects and humans—astronauts and spaceships mid-launch mingle with African fractals and a portrait of James Baldwin. The visual enjambment is a poetics which loops the notion of cosmogramma back to its roots in order to make that visible or “seen” world look the way our music sounds, and the way our bodies aim to move to the sounds of our music.

Tavares Strachan, The Alchemist, 2018
Tavares Strachan, The Alchemist, 2018. Photograph by Brian Forrest
Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles

In his 2D collage works, Strachan’s cosmos is a catalogue of irreconcilable ideas: a crossword puzzle, a football diagram, and a goddess all converge in one iteration called The Alchemist (2018). All of this against the quieting backdrop of a forest. He is more of a digital hoarder than Satterwhite, but his incessant collecting is also aimed at a myth of Black minimalism: the streamlined intent that transforms displaced ruins into new land. He objectifies his need for escape and contradicts it with a clear need to be organized and situated with elements that he cannot tame. His cosmos has less of a sense of being willed by tragedy and urgency and feels more like the thinking one gets to engage when they have touched a bit of the Black pastoral, tidy but dissolved on purpose in places, and private in ways that cannot be breached with words, only pierced with focused looking and deliberate turning away.

Strachan, like Satterwhite and Halsey, is thinking about departure, where we go from here. This is a graduation from obsession with escape; this is a less frenzied approach to leaving, but still the stodgy old world has to go, is the idea. Rather than echoing and looping this concept, the most adventurous Black artists are enacting it, architecting a new universe that exiles any traditions they don’t want to uphold. This exclusivity, while perilous in that it could drive the dwellers in these new universes mad with specificity, is also a form of justice. Toni Morrison spoke defiantly about her novels as not being reactionary to the white world, just existing as their own worlds; and when she announced this, it was a thrilling and new notion. Jacolby Satterwhite, Lauren Halsey, and Tavares Strachan are similar in their approach to world-making that centers the image without denigrating it or making it a source of pity and charity or vulgar protest. Jubilation is more effective. Finally, work that doesn’t visibly wonder what the white gaze will make of it. Finally, a Black cosmos nearly impermeable to detractors, and artists dedicated to accessing and occupying that cosmos without destroying or gentrifying it.

Read more about the visual grammar of Black cosmologies in Aperture, issue 244, “Cosmologies” (Fall 2021).