BLACK PULP!

A century of visualizing Black experience

June 2–July 22, 2017 - USFCAM Lee & Victor Leavengood Gallery

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Black Pulp! examines evolving perspectives of Black identity in American culture and history from 1912 to 2016 through rare historical printed media shown in dialogue with contemporary works of art. The exhibition highlights works by artists, graphic designers, writers, and publishers in formats ranging from little known comic books to covers for historic books and magazines, to etchings, digital prints, drawings, and media-based works by some of today’s leading artists. Historical printed media includes dust jackets by Aaron Douglas and Loïs Mailou Jones, offset lithographs by Charles White, rare Black comics Lobo #1 and All Negro Comics, periodicals Crisis, Fire!! and Opportunity, novels by Chester Himes, album covers by Sun Ra, Donna Summer and more! The exhibition is co-curated by New-York based artists William Villalongo and Mark Thomas Gibson and organized by International Print Center New York. 

CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS

POPE.L, KENNY RIVERO, ALEXANDRIA SMITH, FELANDUS THAMES, HANK WILLIS THOMAS, KARA WALKER , FRED WILSON, DERRICK ADAMS, LAYLAH ALI, FIRELEI BÁEZ, NAYLAND BLAKE, ROBERT COLESCOTT, RENEE COX , WILLIAM DOWNS, ELLEN GALLAGHER, TRENTON DOYLE HANCOCK, LUCIA HIERRO, YASHUA KLOS, KERRY JAMES MARSHALL, WANGECHI MUTU, LAMAR PETERSON

WOKE!

June 2–July 22, 2017 - USFCAM West Gallery

Woke! brings together recent work by William Villalongo and Mark Thomas Gibson, artists and the curators of Black Pulp!. The term “woke” is contemporary American vernacular terminology for acute awareness, particularly in reference to the socio-political contexts we inhabit. Woke! presents works made over the past two years, a time when the influence of the hyper-visuality of police violence upon Black bodies and the cultural currents of the Black Lives Matter movement informed new narratives in their practice. They traverse the psychic and spiritual landscape of Black erasure through narrative-figural styles; often negotiating high and low forms of image making. Limited notions of the illustrative tradition’s ability to take on grand narrative or serious content is confronted, questioned and overturned by these works. Villalongo and Gibson address perennial change, biology, protest and revolution in highly contrasting ways, opening up pathways to engage the difficult realities of American history and culture. Woke! calls on the viewer to reorient themselves to current cultural inequities and their reverberations on how we imagine ourselves from the inside out. Woke! is organized by USF Contemporary Art Museum.