When British author Ekow Eshun felt what he called “a harsh time of unbridled racism” in his native London, he turned his anger into an aesthetic and crafted, ‘The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure.’
Highlighting nearly 30 artists from across the African diaspora whose work starts with the totality of the Black figure, Eshun’s ‘The Time is Always Now’ opened to wild success and critical acclaim at the National Portrait Gallery in London earlier this year.
Now, it is calling the Philadelphia Museum of Art home.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art and Eshun have added a wealth of new, young artists and fresh works by Jonathan Lyndon Chase (USA), Kudzanai-Violet Hwami (Zimbabwe), Roberto Lugo (USA), Danielle Mckinney (USA), Deborah Roberts (USA) and Arthur Timothy (Ghana).
Of this current klatch of Black diasporic artists, Eshun told the Philadelphia Museum of Art that his exhibition “celebrates a period of extraordinary flourishing,” and that the exhibition encourages audiences “to look more closely at the imaginative reach of these artists, the ways they are illuminating the richness and complexity of Black life through figuration, and simultaneously asking searching questions about race, identity and history, all while creating artworks that are never less than dazzling.”
Framed by an exhibition title inspired by iconic Black author and activist James Baldwin, curator Eshun focuses on modern and contemporary Black artists who, since 2000, have utilized drawings, figurative paintings and sculpture in order to portray and celebrate the nuance and richness of Black contemporary life. Eshun and his 28 artists’ goal, according to the exhibition’s notes, is to consider Blackness as a lived experience, rather than as a biological fact.
‘The Time is Always Now’ contemporary artists such as Claudette Elaine Johnson (see her ‘Kind of Blue’ from 2020) and Nathaniel Mary Quinn (‘Father Stretch My Hands’, 2021) often critique the past of how Black bodies have been seen and brings that vision into the present and future.
“What is most striking is that there isn’t a singular form with which the Black figure can really be depicted,” Eshun told Wallpaper magazine earlier this year regarding his creation and curation of ‘The Time is Always Now’, and its 21st century look at the Black figure.
It is crucial to note that this exhibition’s all-African diasporic vision is in staunch opposition to how the Black figure has been portrayed by Western and European artists — the white gaze — since the start of time.
“I was interested in the many different ways that all of these different artists approach this shared subject,” Eshun continued. “And, if there’s one thing that unites artists, and quite diverse practices and aesthetics and viewpoints, it is their capacity to invite the viewer to move from looking at the Black figure – which is how Black figures have historically been depicted in Western art – to looking with or through the eyes of the artists or the subject in those pictures.
“This is a shift, and the shift therefore goes from an external gazing out, to an internal subjective relationship, seen from the position of those artists and their subjects.”
‘The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure’ is on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art now through Feb. 9, 2025. For more information, visit philamuseum.org
