The Time is Always Now, Ekow Eshun (2024) (EMPIRE LINES x National Portrait Gallery, The Box)

Curator Ekow Eshun reframes the Black figure in historic and contemporary art, surveying its presences, absences, and representations in Western/European art history, the African diaspora, and beyond, via The Time is Always Now (2024).

In 1956, the American author James Baldwin wrote: ‘There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.’ Heeding Baldwin’s urgent call, Ekow Eshun’s new exhibition brings together 22 leading contemporary African diasporic artists from the UK and the US, whose practices emphasise the Black figure through mediums such as painting, drawing, and sculpture. These figurative artists and artworks address difficult histories like slavery, colonialism, and racism and, at the same time, speak to contemporary experiences of Blackness from their own personal perspectives. Ekow explains how artists like Kerry James Marshall, Amy Sherald, and Thomas J. Price acknowledge the paradox of race, and the increased cultural visibility and representation of lived experiences. Beyond celebration, though, The Time Is Always Now follow the consequences of these artists’ practices, and what is at stake in depicting the Black figure today.

We discuss the plurality of perspectives on view, and how fragmented, collage-like works by Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Lorna Simpson, and Titus Kaphar reconsider W.E.B. Du Bois’ understanding of ‘double consciousness’ (1897) as a burden, to a 21st century vantage point. Ekow shares the real people depicted in Michael Armitage’s surrealistic, religious scenes, whilst connecting works with shared motifs from Godfried Donkor’s boxers, to Denzil Forrester and Chris Ofili’s dancing forms.

We talk about how how history is not just in the past, and how we might think more ‘historically from the present’. Plus, we consider the real life relationships in works by Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Jordan Casteel - and those shared between artists like Henry Taylor and Noah Davis - shifting the gaze from one of looking at, to looking with, Black figures.

Starting at the National Portrait Gallery in London, The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure travels to The Box in Plymouth from 28 June to 29 September 2024. It will then tour to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and North Carolina Museum of Art in the US into 2025.

Join me at The Box in Plymouth in conversation with Ekow on Saturday 29 June.

And as promised, some news - EMPIRE LINES will go on, returning to a fortnightly basis.

For more about Claudette Johnson, hear curator (and exhibition text-contributor!) Dorothy Price on And I Have My Own Business in This Skin (1982) at the Courtauld Gallery in London.

Listen to Lubaina Himid on Lost Threads (2021, 2023) at the Holburne Museum in Bath.

Hear curator Isabella Maidment on Hurvin Anderson’s Barbershop series (2006-2023) at the Hepworth Wakefield. Read about that show, and their work in Soulscapes at Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, in recessed.space.

Hear Kimathi Donkor on John Singer Sargent’s Madame X (1883-1884) and Study of Mme Gautreau (1884) at Tate Britain in London.

For more about Barbara Walker’s Vanishing Point series, hear curators Jake Subryan Richards and Vicky Avery on Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance (2023) at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

And on W.E.B. Du Bois, hear Professor Paul Gilroy live in conversation with EMPIRE LINES at the Black Atlantic Symposium (2023) in Plymouth, marking the 30th anniversary of his formative text.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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