'Hood Ornament' at Container a well-curated selection of Black art

SANTA FE — “Hood Ornament,” a multigenerational art show curated by Charles Moore for Container, brings together 14 Black artists, including leading figures like Kara Walker and Shinique Smith, alongside rising stars whose work is being presented in New Mexico for the first time, including Aristotle Forrester, Alexandria Couch and Suni Mullen.

Moore, an art historian, tastemaker and second-generation art collector, is the author of “The Black Market,” a guide to art collecting that foregrounds Black perspectives. His cheeky and provocative exhibition title, “Hood Ornament,” came to him after someone swiped the hood ornament from his own vintage Mercedes, reminding him of the late-’80s hip-hop fashion trend of wearing stolen hood ornaments as necklaces.

Moore is not suggesting that the artists in the show represent “the hood.” Many grew up in middle-class neighborhoods, and most attended prestigious universities. Still, as Black artists navigating predominantly white art spaces, they must all constantly contend with what the sociologist Elijah Anderson has termed “the iconic ghetto.”

In his 2021 book “Black in White Space,” Anderson states, “The urban ghetto is no longer simply a physical space; it has also become increasingly a mental construct, a point of reference that hovers over phenotypic Black people as they make their way in civil society.”

Even as galleries and museums began exhibiting more Black artists in the wake of America’s post-2020 “racial reckoning,” the conceptual framing of Black art has remained relatively thin and riddled with stereotypes. As the art historian Sarah Lewis put it in 2021, Black art is “under-theorized.”

Moore’s generation-spanning exhibition includes a piece by Bill Traylor (1854–1949), an artist born into slavery whose paintings were misinterpreted and fetishized by generations of white collectors, as the artist Kerry James Marshall detailed in a 2018 Hyperallergic article.

Traylor fell victim to what Moore describes as a double-edged process whereby a predominantly white art world “simultaneously marginalizes and appropriates (Black) cultural contributions” — an ongoing process which Moore is doing his small part to counteract.

Placing Traylor in the company of contemporary Black figurative painters, as opposed to white modernists with whom he’s often been paired, is a step in the right direction.

Most of the works in “Hood Ornament” are figurative paintings, a research interest of Moore’s, although he has also included outstanding conceptual sculptures by Mullen and Terrence Musekiwa.

Mullen’s “Shoot Me Open” presents three personal objects — a food stamp coupon, a prerolled joint and a paperback edition of “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” — which together form an intimate self-portrait of a starving artist as a political and spiritual seeker. But I could also imagine the same objects being examined by a cop during a stop-and-frisk, or a TSA agent during a security screening. The implied double consciousness of the artist’s self-perception in relation to that of the carceral state makes this deceptively simple work powerful.

The “ornament” part of Moore’s title clearly fits Smith’s calligraphic brushstroke-and-flower clusters and Jamea Richmond-Edwards’ maximalist Afrofuturist collages. Richmond-Edwards’ mythological scenes are packed with visual pleasure, and I can’t wait to see more.

Felandus Thames’ curtains of pony beads work well with the “ornament” theme, too, although I fear Thames has stopped challenging himself. A lot of his recent work looks pretty similar. His contemporary, Kori Newkirk, is doing more interesting things with pony beads, as is emerging artist Quinci Baker, both of whom would have been great in this show.

I was delighted to see Couch’s paintings in “Hood Ornament.” I first encountered her work in 2022, when she participated in the “Brought It Home” show at Yale University’s Afro-American Cultural Center. At the time, she was a graduate student, making technically impressive large-scale portraits from collaged monoprints.

I imagine it took considerable courage for Couch to move away from that highly refined style, which was beautiful but safe, in favor of these much more expressionistic paintings, which she leaves compositionally unresolved. Whereas the previous work was always guaranteed to look good, these paintings risk failure and ugliness for the sake of emotional truth, and the risk pays off handsomely.

Forrester makes abstract-expressionist style paintings with a lot of physical collaging and ripping of layers, which recall the physical carving and scraping away of pictorial space in Willem de Kooning’s and Jack Whitten’s work. I also see echoes of postwar European street collage artists like Asger Jorn, Mimmo Rotella and Jacques Villeglé, all of whom made expressionistic collage paintings from torn-up wheatpaste ads.

Forrester came of age amid the optimism of Barack Obama’s presidency, skateboarding around Hyde Park — a culturally diverse, affluent, tree-lined neighborhood of Chicago — not exactly “the hood,” although also not far geographically from places so designated. In his paintings, he seeks to capture what he calls the “fabric of interaction” between people and their environments. He now lives in New York City and explores the psychogeographic complexity of his new home in works like “Harlem City Requiem.”

Kevin Cobb, known for his M.C. Escher-like distortions, has one perspectively straightforward still-life painting in the show, titled “Dorothy the Fiddler.” It depicts a fiddle leaf fig plant in a woven basket, which rests on a blue bandana with white paisley patterns. The bandana, which is used as a makeshift tablecloth, may seem a simple decorative item to some viewers, but for those of us who have lived in neighborhoods with significant gang activity, blue bandanas will forever signify the Crips. A symbol of “the hood,” then, repurposed as ornament.

What I appreciate most about Moore’s curatorial approach in “Hood Ornament” is that he doesn’t push any particular theme or style too hard. A few of the works make oblique allusions to “the hood,” and a few might be described as “ornamental,” but the eclecticism of the show is its strength. “Hood Ornament” is not defined by the white gaze but by Moore’s connoisseurship as a collector and a historian of contemporary Black art, providing an idiosyncratic but compelling cross section of some of the most interesting art being made today.

'Hood Ornament' at Container a well-curated selection of Black art