This Ocean Brought Us Here
To be presented at 1-54 London by PM/AM Gallery
October 2024
Excerpts below from an essay I wrote prior to commencing work on this series in Dakar.
When I arrive in Senegal it will be my first time in sub-Saharan Africa. As far as I know, it will be the first time anyone in my family has been to West Africa since my ancestors were forcibly brought to America, however many centuries ago. I imagine this would not be uncommon for most black Americans visiting their place of origin. The very idea in our cultural imagination of Africa as the spiritual “homeland” of black American descendants of slaves seems rarely to inspire many to make the journey—although it must be said that not all are fortunate enough to have the resources to make such a trip if they wanted to. Save for past quasi-colonial projects like the establishment of communities of black Americans in Liberia in the nineteenth century, or the small numbers of black Americans that have since emigrated to West Africa (the subject of black Americans moving to Ghana was one of the most interesting in my class), the status of Africa in the minds of black Americans can seem more chimeric than real.
There is, of course, no single or prevailing view of Africa in the collective consciousness of black Americans. On one hand, there is an enduring fascination that can be an immense source of inspiration and empowerment. In one of my favorite musical moments, Kendrick Lamar performed a brilliantly theatrical medley of “The Blacker the Berry” and “Alright” at the 2016 Grammy’s that heavily employed African instrumentation and dancing, and concluded with a borderless map of the continent with “Compton” printed across its center. On the other hand, there can be a sense of superiority among black Americans reflecting the disparate social and economic status between the developed and developing nations. Here I sometimes think about a joke told by Jordan Peele during an introduction of a sketch from the first season of Key & Peele where he says, “Look, slavery was an awful thing . . . All I’m saying, silver lining, it got my ass out of Africa.” While clearly said in jest, it speaks to something that dominates the duality: there may be commonality in our blackness, but black Americas are still Americans, and there is a lot of baggage that comes along with being both subject and citizen of the preeminent global superpower.
There is, of course, no single or prevailing view of Africa in the collective consciousness of black Americans. On one hand, there is an enduring fascination that can be an immense source of inspiration and empowerment. In one of my favorite musical moments, Kendrick Lamar performed a brilliantly theatrical medley of “The Blacker the Berry” and “Alright” at the 2016 Grammy’s that heavily employed African instrumentation and dancing, and concluded with a borderless map of the continent with “Compton” printed across its center. On the other hand, there can be a sense of superiority among black Americans reflecting the disparate social and economic status between the developed and developing nations. Here I sometimes think about a joke told by Jordan Peele during an introduction of a sketch from the first season of Key & Peele where he says, “Look, slavery was an awful thing . . . All I’m saying, silver lining, it got my ass out of Africa.” While clearly said in jest, it speaks to something that dominates the duality: there may be commonality in our blackness, but black Americas are still Americans, and there is a lot of baggage that comes along with being both subject and citizen of the preeminent global superpower.
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There are hardly any new observations to be made about the paradox of being black and American. It is a problem that has been analyzed thoroughly from Fredrick Douglas’ What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?, to W.E.B. Du Bois’ theory of double consciousness, to then-candidate Barack Obama’s A More Perfect Union speech given in the wake of backlash over the anti-American sermons of Obama’s former minister Jeremiah Wright. But for these reflections, I want to include an excerpt from my favorite James Baldwin essay, Stranger in the Village.
[The American Negro] is unique among the black men of the world in that his past was taken from him, almost literally, at one blow. One wonders what on earth the first slave found to say to the first dark child he bore. I am told that there are Haitians able to trace their ancestry back to African kings, but any American Negro wishing to go back so far will find his journey through time abruptly arrested by the signature on the bill of sale which served as the entrance paper for his ancestor… It was his necessity, in the words of E. Franklin Frazier, to find a “motive for living under American culture or die.” The identity of the American Negro comes out of this extreme situation[.] I think there is a place for envy, from a black American’s perspective, of the ownership that black Africans and others in the diaspora have of their own history and culture. While there is an obvious privilege in living in one of the richest and most powerful nations in human history, there is something invaluable in having an unsevered lineage. There are clear parallels between the experiences of Africans under colonization and the struggle of black Americans for freedom and civil rights, but there is also a key difference between the African desire of liberation from an outside force and the black American fight for liberation within a system that is the only one we have ever known.
I come from a mixed family – my mother was born in Switzerland but moved to the United States as a child and was raised by her Swiss mother and a black American father who was a direct descendant of William and Ellen Craft as well as William Monroe Trotter. My father, as I have mentioned, is a black American descendant of slaves from a family in North Carolina. I grew up in Durham, North Carolina where both of my parents worked (and still work) as law professors at Duke. While growing up I had a vague sense of the richness of my family history, but I lived in a mostly white community and attended mostly white schools. Notwithstanding that, I generally had ethnically diverse social groups with roughly equal numbers of white, Asian, Jewish, and black friends. At times, I succumbed to the immature and conceited temptation of seeing my circumstances as unique or special, and I think that the coherence of my racial identity probably suffered as a result.
My art has always been an exercise in reinvention and identity-forming in ways both public and private. As I have started to exhibit and share my work with a broader audience, I have been challenged to rethink how I perceive and present myself. In this sense, I would say that perhaps my racial identity has been informed by my art more than my art has been informed by my racial identity. Still, I have a hard time honestly articulating the ways in which my work fits into the larger genre of black art. On one hand, it is easy enough to say that black art is simply any art created by black people. But to do so would be to ignore the complex sociopolitical dynamics that both allow for and necessitate the existence of a separate category within art specific to a historically marginalized group. 
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There is also a risk that as Americans, we may be either arrogant or feel resentment toward black Africans and the role that African kingdoms and merchants played in the slave trade, as if there is still an unpaid balance owed by descendants of African slave traders to the descendants of black slaves. While this can take the form of unproductive invective, there has also been, to be sure, illuminating discussion of the issue. In a 2010 editorial in The New York Times, for example, Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. discussed the role of African slave traders in contemporary discussions over reparations writing, “Advocates of reparations for the descendants of those slaves generally ignore this untidy problem of the significant role that Africans played in the trade, choosing to believe the romanticized version that our ancestors were all kidnapped unawares by evil white men, like Kunta Kinte was in ‘Roots.’” To illustrate the enduring nature of this issue, Gates quotes Fredrick Douglas who stated in 1859, “The savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa, who for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage and pocketing the ready cash for them, will not more readily accept our moral and economical ideas than the slave traders of Maryland and Virginia.” So, for centuries there has been this lingering sense that the cleft between black Americans and black Africans was not just an accident of history, or an evil perpetrated by Europe, but rather a crime committed between peoples who now fall precariously under a common identity.
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Returning to the subject of art, the recent explosion in international interest in black art has brought an entire new dimension to my experience of the relationship between black Americans and black Africans. In many ways, the institutional elevation of black art has been a successful project in the sort of Pan-Africanism that often seems quixotic. Driven in part by the American-led “racial reckoning” following the murder of George Floyd, there has been a genuine international movement to uplift black voices, stories, and histories across many facets of society. This period has included some truly groundbreaking artistic exhibitions, such as the American tour of Afro-Atlantic Histories, a sweeping show that started in Brazil and was adapted and brought to the United States in 2021, with an explicitly Pan-African focus on black art since the seventeenth century. It has also brought immense opportunities to a younger generation of black artists, in addition to delivering overdue institutional recognition to those from previous generations. While there has certainly been a distasteful element of exploitation on the part of those in power and a crass commodification of and profiteering off the work of those black artists, I would still argue that this movement has been a massive net positive.
I have no doubt that whatever success and opportunities I have found so far as an artist are owed in large part to these monumental forces propelling a wider interest in black art. At times, it has been difficult to appreciate fully what I am able to contribute to this moment. My work has never been explicitly about race or racial identity. I think of my paintings as being autobiographical, and as such, the extent to which they deal with topics related to race is determined by how salient those topics are in my self-conception. 
As I prepare to leave for Black Rock, I am once again set to benefit enormously from the forces propelling the growing power and prominence of the black artistic community. I am unequivocally proud to have some place within this story. I have no desire to find easy answers to any of the questions I have raised here. I suspect that I, and many around the world, will wrestle with the complex and evolving matters of race and identity in perpetuity. The magic of art is that the purest beauty can be created out of questions left unanswered. Our highest calling is to illuminate the ideas that one would be foolish to attempt to put into words. It is the universal experience of the artist to revel in that ambiguity. No matter how concrete the issues we approach, our prerogative will always be to answer in ways that begin, not end, discussion. I am glad to be an artist more than I am glad to be anything else. ❖
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