When We See Us

24 May 2024

This extraordinary exhibition at the Basel Kunstmuseum’s center for contemporary art (Gegenwart) is a remarkable example of images given meaning by words. In this case, the words are the exhibition’s title, “When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting”, in essence telling us how we are to view them.

The message is succinct and clear: we are seeing Black people as Black people see Black people, and we are being invited to approach the images from the perspective of the subjects rather than from our own outsiders’ perspective, which more often than not is tainted with negativity.

The title was inspired by the 2019 Netflix series When They See Us, which examined how white people indiscriminately perceive Black teenagers as potential criminals, fostering prejudice and tolerance for wrongful prosecutions.

Substituting “we” for “they” transforms the paintings into so many privileged views of another world: Africa and its vast diaspora. We become in a sense invited guests, even participants, rather than suspicious observers on the periphery of a world so many of us know so little about.

The paintings were assembled in Cape Town under the direction of Koyo Kouoh, the executive director of the world’s largest museum for African contemporary art, Zeitz MOCAA, where they were shown from November 2022 to September 2023. The Basel exhibition, running until 27 October 2024, is their debut away from their home continent, and for the occasion, the Kunstmuseum has emptied all the vast galleries of the Gegenwart building (2,460 square meters of exhibition space!) and turned them over to the exhibition’s 150-plus works of art.

The space is not at all too much, for its ample wall surfaces make it possible to set off most of the paintings distinct from the others. This is particularly striking in some cases such as the Botswanan Meleko Mokgosi’s 2014 three-panel spread Pax Kaffraria: Graase-Mans. Measureing overall 244 x 884 centimeters and covering an entire wall of a gallery, it draws in the spectator to almost life-size settings to the exclusion of all else.

More than that, this spatial spread reinforces the idea of the great geographic spread of their provenance. Thus, Koyo Kouoh explained, the paintings, representing figuration stretching back some one hundred years, are drawn from the world’s “Black countries”. For her, countries of Africa’s diaspora such as Jamaica, Cuba, Brazil and the United States with their significant populations of African descent, are every bit as much “Black countries” as those of Africa.

We find from the United States, Horace Pippin’s Victory Garden from 1943, when people were encouraged to plant vegetable gardens to avoid food shortage in the midst of war-time rationing. An elderly woman sits in a white cap sits embroidering next to the fruits of her labors. From the other side of the Atlantic in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chéri Samba’s Une femme conduisant le monde from 2017, celebrates women’s accession to positions of prestige and power.

Rather than arranging these disparate works of art in a temporal sequence or by countries of origin, the exhibition gathers them under six universal themes titled Triumph and Emancipation, Sensuality, Spirituality, The Everyday, Joy and Revelry and Repose. Any one of the themes reveals artists working with the same subjects, regardless of when and where, whether in Africa or in a setting of the African diaspora. The parallels are often striking.

More than anything else, the exhibition presents a universe of people whom white people have obstinately set aside on the basis of skin color. This segregation, occasionally rigidly legal, often subtle, always iniquitous, has influenced the way that the subjects see and depict themselves in a world dominated by those who for centuries have sought to dominate them. The artists have refused the centrality of colonialism by recurring to figuration, one of the oldest forms of representation, and that figuration is breath-taking in its inventiveness.

Triumph and Emancipation marks the beginning of the visit, an end-point as a beginning from which to look backward and take the measure of what the past hundred years have meant for these people and their struggle to be recognized as full human beings.

But it is the themes The Everyday (which includes Meleko Mokgosi’s three-panel spread), Spirituality and Joy and Revelry that bring alive real people carrying on their ordinary lives, an ordinariness consistently belied by the extraordinary vividness of the depictions.

Spirituality covers everything from various traditional rituals and situations to those obviously emanating from the colonizers’ imposition of Christianity. Between the two are hybrids of sorts, testifying to both European influence and indomitable African tradition. To Jacob Lawrence from Atlantic City, who died in 2000 at the age of 83, we owe an entire wall of eight canvasses, Genesis Creation, depicting in brilliant colors the various stages of creation as recounted in the first book of the Bible. Without knowing his life’s details (he was a product of the Harlem Renaissance, spent his life working in the United States and taught at the University of Washington) one would immediately assume he was from, working in, and uniquely inspired by Africa. This is only one example of the unity in diversity that infuses all the artists’ works.

Under Sensuality, one finds the Ivoirian Roméo Mivekannin’s La modèle noir, d’après Félix Vallotton (2019). The naked model is a woman reclining on a bed, a uniform very pale brown (along with the voluminous cloth covering the bed), and on the foot of the bed is seated a very black woman in a turquoise dress wearing a brilliant red turban and smoking a cigarette. For those familiar with the Lausanne painter’s works, it is at once blatantly iconoclastic, almost a repudiation of Vallotton, and at the same time instantly evocative of many of his paintings.

The exhibition is accompanied by a sumptuous catalog of 336 pages, reproducing all the paintings, with each thematic section preceded by an original work of fiction from Black writers. These alone make the catalog worth acquiring.

Running through 27 October, the exposition is punctuated by a series of related cultural events organized by the Kunstmuseum ( Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart ).

Robert James Parsons
24 May 2024