Through their art work, these women confront the injustices of misrepresentation done to black women throughout history and disrupt the built-in prejudices they have faced. Importantly they also prove that the importance of black female’s bodies run more than just skin deep.
In Pencil Me Down, drawing again shows itself as capable of holding the textures of life and the complexity and variety of human emotions as any other medium.
Vince is not an artist of preconceived concepts and sketchbooks full of experiments. He begins a work when he feels the need for it and lets it form associatively or intuitively.
Heidi Sincuba has not abandoned her original commitment; she has added a dimension to it. This is evident in the works on paper she is showing at Gallery 23 in Amsterdam.
I had recently visited a number of exhibitions which had given me fresh ideas about abstraction: Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965 (Munich, 2016) and Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983 (London, 2017), being two stand out examples. I was especially interested in a group of artists associated with ‘Black abstraction’ from the second half 20th century, most of whose work I was familiar with but had not always had the context for. Then I re-read James Baldwin’s short story ’Sonny’s Blues’. And now I stood before Rembrandt’s painting Oopjen Coppit. My intuition told me they were connected. I began to write, the outcome of which is an essay about Oopjen, Black Aesthetics, and abstraction.