Modern Primitive (2020–Ongoing): Ink and Pencil Crayon on Paper

Abstract

The COVID19 pandemic represents a period in time in which people all over the globe witnessed the hypervisibility of white supremacist violence, antiBlack racism, and Black activism on a global scale. Inspired by this, Modern Primitive (2020) is a new series of drawings I began in March 2020 that features colorful portraits of individuals who are both known and unknown to us. Using familiar cultural tropes like “Karens/Kevins,” “AntiMaskers,” and “AntiVaxxers” as character studies, which are also invoked in/by each individual work’s title, Modern Primitive offers intimate glimpses of what living together as well as apart looks like and means to/for different people in a/our shared world(s) yet with diverse and distinct realities. Resisting traditional art histories and notions of “primitivism” that are based on Eurocentric, modernist constructions of other cultures as “exotic” and “Other,” these images portray popular subjects in rough figural poses and gestures akin to how “nonwhite” cultures have been historically misrepresented as less sophisticated and “civilized” than white artists and “modern” cultures. Here, the white gaze and its logics that have for so long defined ethnographic portraiture and visual culture are subverted and replaced with/by a critical, contemporary, queer Black lens and gaze.