Seeing Black Futures
Black culture is flourishing. Jenna Wortham and Kimberly Drew want to preserve it. Here’s what that means.
The queer South African artists Mr. Allofit, left, and Gyre performing in Johannesburg, as photographed by Gucci, a member of FAKA, an art, music and performance collective in South Africa.
This essay and the portfolio below are adapted from “Black Futures,” to be published in December by One World, an imprint of Random House.
In a piece titled “LTS I,” the Nigerian-American artist Toyin Ojih Odutola paints her brother in repose, with midnight-colored skin, gold jewelry and piercing eyes, unconcerned by who might be looking at him. The painting is part of “Like the Sea,” a series of portraits of her two younger brothers rendered in her signature style, which emphasizes the depths of Black skin by applying layers of color, in this case, black pastels. Ojih Odutola said she gave her subjects the range to “just be” and exist “as they are,” rather than forcing them into backdrops that might have felt more recognizable, or informed by historical representations of Black people.
Ojih Odutola named her series for a passage in Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” in which the main character, Janie Mae Crawford, reflects that “love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.” Crawford comes to realize that love is as vast as it is mysterious — like Ojih Odutola’s practice, which insists on the beauty in seeing ourselves as we are.
What Ojih Odutola presciently conveys through her work is that Black representation is almost always limited if we allow ourselves to be crunched into other people’s fantasies. In authoring our own images, Black people achieve some sovereignty beyond the reach of colonialist ideas and racist mythologies. Today you can see brilliant examples of this throughout our culture, whether in the plays of Jackie Sibblies Drury, or in the painter Amy Sherald’s portraits of Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor, or in the comedian Jaboukie Young-White’s sly wit on Twitter, or even in the satirical takes on politics and public policy from young cultural producers on TikTok.
Online and off, we are witnessing a flourishing of Black creativity and art. Our Instagram posts, likes and quoted tweets are creating an unparalleled sense of dynamism and interconnectivity, and what is noticed feels more expansive than it has before. It is now possible, for instance, to witness our everyday thoughts and reactions and experiences — a staggering feat considering how little has been historically logged about the lives of Black people, unmediated and from our own perspectives. Read the full essay in the New York Times Magazine right here.