On Seeing and Reading the "Nothing": Poetry and Blackness Visualized

Because the ideology of colorblindness swings between the visual and the verbal, it sharply magnifies the challenges black artists already confront in navigating between the problems of image and the problem of language. I submit that, in the post-Reagan contemporary period, the proliferation and diversification of "black graphics" (works that function to make blackness visible by foregrounding text and/as image) indicate the heightened stakes of black artistry within a social context dominated by colorblindness. By examining how different artists have negotiated this context, we stand to enrich our comprehension of contemporary black culture and the innovative modes of resilience demanded of—and produced by—those who are determined to represent their vision of a world in which black freedom is becoming/possible. This essay takes up two such artists: Hank Willis Thomas and Renee Gladman, each of whom began developing their artistic practice within this period. In Thomas's work, we have the output of an artist who is deeply concerned about the ongoing impact of racial discrimination upon black people—indeed, who creates startling conceptual art of bold visual immediacy, intended to promote awareness and understanding of the absurdity and injustice of racism. At the heart of both the absurdity and injustice, in his view, is the fact that we—all of us—continue to attribute to the construct of "race" a reality it does not have. To what extent is this stance informed by the logic of colorblindness, and what might the implications of that logic be for his art? On a different note, Gladman's abstract, intellectually knotty art can also be understood as the product of a creative practice intended to explode the limitations placed upon black people. That said, one of the challenges her work presents is determining whether, when, and how her racial subjectivity informs art that does not often invoke "blackness" in the ways our society has encouraged us to expect. What do the "colorblind" stand to miss in works that seem to embrace its mandate of eschewing racial markers?