About a month ago I was scrolling through Instagram, as one does, and I came across the image of a floating billboard off the coast of Miami.
The billboard depicted a work by New York based artist Nina Chanel Abney who is also a Black female. The caption read that the painting was in fact an inspired work for Meek Mill’s latest album, “Expensive Pain”. I immediately shared it to my stories because I just knew this was going to go down an interesting path. In the wake of artists like Drake, who also used an artist’s artwork (Damien Hirst) as inspiration for his newest album cover “Certified Lover Boy”, this new trend, while a seemingly great idea for artistic collaboration, has now reached an interesting chapter. If you haven’t been blessed to see the viral video of a man going off after seeing the same painting wrapping a tour bus, let me enlighten your darkness. In the video an unknown white male is seen on Hollywood Blvd yelling into his phone while standing in front of the offending tour bus which is encircled by the naked figures of Black women. His rant not only indicts the Philly rapper for use of the imagery on his bus, but also questions Black women for allowing their image to be used in this way.
Before getting into the implications of the work, I’m an art historian so the first thing I ever start to unpack is what I visually see. The painting is large scale with a predominantly ocean blue background. An array of objects are strewn about the surface: a life raft in the upper left corner, two red dye are seen top-right each displaying four dots, a red motorcycle at the bottom left (probably referencing Meek and his previous legal issues stemming from an almost 20 year old incident with an illegal street bike) and of course, the offending images of three darker-skinned women. One woman with yellow/blonde hair is cropped in half and is seen with her arms above her head wrapped around a Black strip, breasts prominently presented, in a pose resembling that of a stripper. Another woman, and the one who seemed to draw the most ire from the gentlemen previously mentioned, is seen bent over with her buttocks facing the viewer, Abney hints at genitalia with the use of a pink dot. (A bit of visual analysis for y’all).
Now, in addressing the painting and the issue of the controversy surrounding it, I think the first question that came to mind was why was this man so angry with the work? From his account, his biggest gripe was the lewd nature of the figures and its open access to the eyes of innocent children. In this he brings up a valid point. Should children have access to imagery like this?
To answer that question, I must ask another… Is the issue really the eyes of innocent children or is this an issue of how we as a society view Black bodies? Diving into this, you know I must bring in some images. In this painting titled, Gabrielle d’Estrées and one of her Sisters, by an anonymous artist we see two women in the foreground at half length, both nude from their torsos up while a fully clothed female figure is seated at back busily at work sewing. The comparison here is too marked to be dismissed: we have two separate depictions of nude females. In the latter work we literally see one woman tweaking the nipple of the other. Now something to point out is the title. These two women are actually sisters, one being the mistress of the then king of France Henry IV who presumably commissioned the work. Scholars haven’t agreed on the meaning of the work but most assume that this could be the depiction of an incestuous lesbian relationship – relations between women during this time weren't as scandalous or as uncommon as we may think they were back then, incentuous relations, that's another story. The painting was done in 1594 and currently resides at the Louvre Museum in Paris. I bring this up to call to your attention the different responses to these two paintings. With Abney’s work, think piece after think piece flesh out (pun intended) how lewd it is or how sexualized the women are.
However, no one seems to bat an eye or call for the closure of the Louvre for presenting such a work in their hallowed halls. Another image to use in this conversation is that of Picasso’s Demoiselle d’Avignon (1907). In it we see several nude female figures whose abstracted and angular faces were inspired by African masks, an interest many artists like Picasso had during the early 20th century; some scholars even say that Modern art owes much to that of African Art in rehsaping how artists approached form. This work sits prominently at MoMA in New York despite the very obvious nudity being presented or the fact that the one of the figures is spread eagle for the viewer to see. I say all this to say, no one cares when children are shunted off to museums to view artworks where, in most cases, there are whole rooms filled with naked white bodies. Children are taught to read these bodies as artistic and aesthetically pleasing, but not explicit or sexual. Black bodies, however, have been made synonymous with licentiousness, lasciviousness, promiscuity and the animalistic throughout history while white bodies have been associated with purity and even virginity. Even though… fun fact: most of the paintings of nude females in Western art were modelled by prostitutes, a fact that often gets glossed over when visiting museums. When taking this view into account it could be argued that what this man saw wasn’t merely artistic forms but a hedonistic bevy of societally sexualized Black bodies.
So what can we say of Abney’s work today? The irony of this controversy is that this is precisely what Abney does in ALL her work. She deliberately presents Black bodies in varied ways to confront and question the viewer about the beliefs they’ve already formed about Blackness and Black bodies. The painting is doing a lot here. It’s going beyond the scope of her initial artistic intention; it’s now interacting with the wider world and asking questions of society. Where a painting resides does inform or shape how we view it. It’s one of the reasons why curators can spend days, even weeks agonizing over the color of the paint used on the walls for an exhibition. When in a rarified space like a museum we view the art with a sense of awe. When wrapped around a rapper’s bus, however, it elicits disgust and revulsion. Let’s be clear, Meek and his lyrics, along with that of many rappers, are steeped in misogyny and misogynoir. So, it’s without doubt that these cultural issues add to how the image can be read. The point of this isn’t to tell you how to read the painting or to dissuade anyone from being upset at the work but to raise important questions that the art object asks of us as viewers. I leave you with this… Adding to the issue of Black bodies in art, the history and importance nudes played in art making is a long standing one. To enter the art academy, artists had to first master depicting the nude; it was/is a staple of art and is ubiquitous throughout history. With so few artworks by Black artists being displayed in museums due to racial restrictions previously enacted in these academies and the ways in which we the audience have been subconsciously conditioned to view racialized bodies, Abney’s work cannot simply be reduced to misogynoir and dismissed. We see nudes all the time! Should Meek’s team have wrapped the work around the tour bus? Not sure what to say... maybe not. It sure does make you think though, which is one aspect of art that’s vital to preserve.