Your charcoal drawings are large and densely layered with figures and non-representational gestures. For example, Sincerely Yours features multiple heads, like portrait studies, but the finely rendered heads are overlaid with marks, like embellishments in places but sometimes like scarring or defacing. Can you talk about your process of making these drawings? Do you start with the figural and then gradually mark over it?
The non-representational gestures in the drawings function like an internal language. The various marks carry their own meanings, which dictates when they are employed. With Sincerely Yours, I was looking at a collection of colonial-era stamps. Specifically, I was interested in the postal watermarks as a signifier of bureaucracy, place, and migration. Through the drawing process, these watermarks are abstracted, and the colonial figureheads are replaced with my portrait figures.
As for the scarring of the paper, I refer to these embellishments as keloids. My interest in keloids is twofold: it fascinates me that keloids disproportionately occur in people of color, and I am attempting to reframe unintentional scarification on the body (more specifically, the Black body). If we think of each body as a living archive, then the keloid becomes a visual marker of an event on that body’s largest organ. The keloids become the body’s record of history. Once these marks make their way into the drawing, each abstract shape carries meaning, like a hieroglyph.
Each drawing starts with the figure, with several layers of charcoal applied throughout. The non-representational gestures are introduced halfway through the process. The length of time needed for each drawing varies. I know the drawing is complete once clarity is achieved.
In the drawings, there are abstract passages of gold leaf. I associate gold leaf with medieval Christian manuscripts and paintings, the gold leaf signifying sacred otherworldliness. The gold leaf in your paintings is more like a trace, broken bits of a glittery surface. What is behind your use of gold leaf?
I embrace the many associations that gold embodies. The application of the gold leaf is evolving with each new drawing and, with it, my material exploration. Within the drawings, the gold-leaf also points to the history of resource extraction from the Caribbean. I remember an image from my high school history books—a detail from the America series of engravings by Theodore de Bry (1592). The image depicts Christopher Columbus landing on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola in 1492 and being greeted by indigenous Taínos bearing gifts of gold. The image suggests a benevolent encounter. Even as a teenager, I understood this engraving as part of a larger colonial propaganda project. There was very little actual gold to be found in the Caribbean, but the notion of the region as the playground for others and a site for extraction persists to this day (with new actors entering and exiting).
The images in your charcoal drawings often appear fleeting and ambiguous, as if they are in the process of coming into being or in the process of disappearing.
I am interested in depicting this tension between coming into being and disappearing. For me, this tension is the liminal space of migration. All identity is an ongoing process of coming into being; however, the migrant can trace a former self to multiple lived locations. The drawings allow me to explore these interior spaces, allowing the sculptures, photographs, and installations to do other things.
I’m fascinated by your work The Fire Next Time, a beaded curtain—actually nickel-plated steel balls—on which a newspaper image of London’s 1981 Brixton Riot has been transferred. The spatial ambiguity is interesting: it appears as a flat archival image but then ripples and breaks as people push through the beads. How did you come up with the idea for this form (beaded curtain) and material (steel balls)?
I was looking for a new way of engaging with archives. I wanted a tactile experience. Domestic spaces of the Caribbean are a reoccurring source of inspiration for me, and I started thinking about the bamboo-beaded curtains that adorn some homes in Jamaica. After months of material exploration (bamboo, glass, plastic) and research with the collaborative platform HEKLER, we arrived at the nickel-plated steel balls.
I’m assuming your title alludes to James Baldwin’s book of essays The Fire Next Time, published in 1963, about race and religion in the United States. In the piece “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation,” Baldwin writes that white Americans are “still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.” So, your title alludes to 1960s United States and the figure of James Baldwin, but the image calls to mind racial violence in 1980s UK. Why this image?
I am always trying to create temporal layers within the work, culling from the personal and archival. That work was created as part of a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA GA) entitled Beneath Its Tongue, The Fish Rolls the Hook to Sharpen Its Cadence. The curtain hung at the entrance to the exhibition; once breached, the audience was greeted by drawings and sculptures engaged in a diasporic conversation between Jamaica, the United States, and the UK. Specifically, I was exploring moments of rupture and resistance from the quotidian to the spectacle of the riot.
The image used for The Fire Next Time fascinated me on many levels. First, the photographer chose anonymity to protect their identity, suggesting a tension between those being photographed and the photographer. By walking through the image, my hopes were that the viewer’s actions would momentarily muddy the legibility of the image, negating the intrusive gaze of the camera. In the 2015 essay “Through the Wire: Black British People and The Riot,” historian Eddie Chambers discusses the media’s (and the Queen’s) indifference to Black death (and, in this case, the ones that precipitated the riots) and the media’s role in shaping public perceptions (nationally and internationally) of the Brixton riots through the proliferation of images like this one. There is a striking similarity to the US media’s reductive representation of race-based riots. I was interested in having audiences engage with an image now reframed through the lens of Black resistance and, through the title, allude to the critiques embedded in Baldwin’s text. Additionally, there is a wonderful level of ambiguity to the image that makes it hard to place it at first. This allows the viewer to project their own histories onto the image.
Stuart Hall has said that “identities are about questions of using the resources of history, language and culture in the process of becoming rather than being.” Can you talk about how you work with history and archives in your practice?
Many of Stuart Hall’s writings, including the aforementioned quote from Questions of Cultural Identity (Sage, 2011) and Identity and Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2019) have informed my relationship to identity as a continuous negotiation between history, place, and self. His essay “Constituting an Archive” has also been instrumental. The use of history and the archive is ever expanding as I continue to work with them as media. Most recently, I created an installation for the Prospect 5 Triennial in New Orleans, which engaged with and interrogated a number of archives. This included drawings and a beaded curtain as well as a large-scale wall installation.
A distinction can be made between identity and subjectivity. Identity might be understood as those external, socially legible images we project (or are thrust on us), whereas subjectivity is our embodied, psychological experience of the self. What I find moving about your work is how these two experiences—identity and subjectivity—are evoked. Can you speak to this tension in your work between identity and subjectivity? I’m thinking of your drawings—perhaps self-portraits?—of a nude male body wrestling with ties, or of your performance photographs in which ties have accumulated into monstrosities.
These works were a watershed moment for me. They were made as an ode to my father, Cosmo Charles Whyte, who died suddenly when I was twenty-two. We were very close; in fact, he was my first art teacher. You are never really prepared for the death of a parent. It marked a new phase of adulthood and, in the wake of his death, I had to grapple with Caribbean patriarchal expectations of how to grieve and love. His neckties, which overnight became my heirlooms, came to embody both my connection to him, and, through the act of accumulation on my body, external societal expectations. With this work, I am always hesitant to divulge too much. People come to me with varying interpretations, and I am always reluctant to disclose my own various readings.
Another work I’d love to hear about is the photograph Stranger than the Village, in which you have been photographed in a suit, your back to the viewer, bullhorn balanced on your hand, and a headshot of James Baldwin, with those haunting eyes of his, also wearing a suit, pasted to your back. Can you tell us about the performance that this photo is documenting? Do you consider this image to be a self-portrait?
Somewhat. I made that work in graduate school after a trip to Ghana. I was on a research trip that would take me through the transatlantic triangle backward on the departure, then forward on the return. I started in the American South, then went to England, Ghana, and returned to Jamaica. It was a massive undertaking and, to offset expenses, I stayed with family in each location. I was attempting to sonically map the Black Atlantic imaginary and come back and make work from the experience with the audio and materials collected. One of the books I took to reread on the trip was Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son.
While in Ghana, I had a very interesting experience. Due to my complexion and the fact that I was a foreigner, I was referred to as “Obroni.” Obroni is the Ashanti word for a white person, which is also interchangeable with “foreigner.” This created all kinds of angst for me as this trip was also meant to be a diasporic pilgrimage. Protesting was futile with “Whyte” as a last name. So, while traveling in my aunt’s rural village of Bekwai in Ghana, I became the Obroni of the village.
In the essay “Stranger in the Village,” Baldwin is the only Black man in Leukerbad, Switzerland, and connects that experience of estrangement to his alienation in the United States. While I was in Bekwai, another American verdict had sanctioned the killing of another Black boy, Trayvon Martin. I was absolutely gutted. Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village” hit me in a different, more devastating way: I felt a stranger in both lands.
Have other poets or novelists been important to your work?
Meena Alexander. Édouard Glissant. Marlon James. Edwidge Danticat. Derek Walcott. Jamaica Kincaid.
I’d like to ask you about the installation The Enigma of Arrival in Four Sections. The installation includes a row of airline seats upholstered in chintz and capped with lace doilies, broken porcelain plates under the seats. It’s a devastating image of “home” as “homeless,” of being perpetually on the move but immobile, too.
Each section of the series is self-contained, tackling different aspects of migration. The piece you are referencing is Section 3: Carry On. Though I made this work before being introduced to the late poet Meena Alexander, I often think of her words from the essay “Another Voice” in conjunction with this work. Migrancy, she writes, “forces a recasting of how the body is grasped, how language works. What we were in one life is shattered open. But the worlds we now inhabit still speak of the need for invention, of ancestors, of faith. In a time of literally explosive possibilities, we must figure out how to live our lives.”
So far there are two chairs in this series, Carry On (2012) and Disembarkment (2020), with plans for more in the future.
The installation includes the image of Frederick Douglass in a porcelain bowl and bright blue pigment spilling from the bowl. Can you say more about this intriguing set of objects and materials?
This is Section 2: Red, Green, Blue And Black. This work includes a neon sign that reads “We process Visas and Green Cards Here,” a broken porcelain bowl with images of America’s founding fathers, an image of Frederick Douglass, and a mixture of indigo and gunpowder spilling out of the bowl. I created this work after reflecting on the naturalization process for US citizenship—particularly how the various civic questions and process do little to prepare an immigrant of color in navigating the many moving parts of race and the history of empire in the United States.
You have said that there is no “post” to colonialism. Can you say more about this, especially in relation to your art practice?
I think there is a danger in historicizing the colonial project. By doing so, we talk about it as a past, singular event that ended in the 1960s after independence. This undermines how pervasive the reach of colonialism and its mindset is in our modern lives, and the ripple effects that afflict multiple generations. We are still in the wake of colonialism, and the need for decolonization in almost every facet of modern-day life, institutions, and self is urgent. Just this November, Barbados took the bold (and long overdue) steps in renouncing the Queen and becoming a republic. I applaud Barbados’ Prime Minister Mia Mottley and President Sandra Mason. This is a necessary step in healing, but there is more work to be done. I hope Jamaica follows their lead.
