The show of artist Amira Brown’s work, up now at the Mitchell Branch Library in Westville through the end of the month, doesn’t have a title, nor do any of the individual pieces. That gesture alone seems to be part of the point, as is the elliptical, border-melting nature of the work itself. It’s a show to find your way into; one possible starting point is a piece that shows, in outline, a person in a classic pose of pondering, but the pondering itself is dissolving the person. The person contains other people. The person contains stars. But Brown’s sly humor is on full display as well. “Meh,” is one complete thought. “Shrug,” another. And then: “rodeo.” The rodeo of making art? Of showing it? Something bigger? Whatever the case, it isn’t Brown’s first.
Such is the general vibe of this show, which at the end leaves a viewer (or, let’s be precise, this viewer) with a lot of great questions, and perhaps, too, a sense of simpatico. It begins with form, as Brown’s show displays a restlessness with the way art is often viewed. That’s there in the structure of the pieces and the way the show is hung. Many of Brown’s pieces have no frames. When they do, Brown is almost certain to explode them, sometimes to a ludicrous degree. In the piece above, the art hemorrhages from the frame, spilling across the wall in ever larger pieces. It’s inchoate, its destination unclear. It’s almost everywhere — except in the little wooden rectangle with canvas stapled to it, where people usually expect the art to be.
Brown deftly uses a word or two, incomplete phrases, to offer suggestions as to what the art is “about” without explicitly saying (unlike many artists these days) what the art is about. The same restlessness for the formal constraints of the frame get applied to how people approach art, in particular when they incorporate what they perceive to be the identity of the artist. “All Black art …” one fragment reads, followed by “blah blah blah.” There’s a frame within a frame here, and in a sense both are empty, the art escaping, the art elsewhere, there and not there.
To some extent, the same is true of the artist. “Amira is an artist who uses their work to witness, and capture the various Black psychological subtleties that evade rational language,” they write in a personal statement on their website. “By layering various histories into the work while recording their own subtleties, they use various materials and substrates from their environment to document and map out these slippery underbellies with the work serving as a document and therefore a testament to these nuances.”
Brown’s approach has added potency In the context of current trends in visual art. The past several years have seen a true push to make space for more Black and Brown artists in places large and small, from local art shows to national museums. This is great; what art fan doesn’t want to see more art, and a greater diversity of perspectives in art? Art can also be a powerful vehicle for helping people confront racism, sexism, and other social issues that we all still wrestle with. But accompanying that has been an uneasy sense of the art world pigeonholing Black and Brown artists. Does the work of those artists have to be overtly political? Does it have to deal with racism, with historical pain? Does an expression of positive emotion have to be labeled simply as “joy?”
The artists themselves, of course, can create whatever art they are moved to make. But is there enough room yet in the art world for Black and Brown artists who choose to create work that doesn’t have an explicit message, that deals in complexity and nuance, that isn’t overtly about their identities as Black and Brown people, or is even art for art’s sake? Is there room in the minds of art critics and viewers — and especially White critics and viewers — to see the work of Black and Brown artists without putting them in that frame, if the art isn’t asking for that?
The last set of questions buzzes in the background because, among the borders Brown loosens is the concept of identity itself. Brown works from the perspective of a Black artist, but their first step is to make the idea of that fuzzy. “I got me and my 27 alter egos,” they write on one of their pieces. The word “identity” has a star next to it that gives the vibe of an asterisk; it gives the sense of identity-and, that there’s more going on both within and around the idea of identity that evades comprehension or even stability. Identity is something less to be declared than interrogated (and what if every answer just opens another question?), or perhaps even just lived with as something ever-changing, unknowable. It’s there and it isn’t. It’s a messy world, all around us and inside us all, full of, as Brown says, “subtleties that evade rational language” (was it crazy to even try to write this piece, using English, that sad, broken thing?). It’s so easy to put meaning on what we see. But are we really seeing?