David Hammons arrived at my door thick with promise and pages. It is a “post-exhibition catalogue,” per Hauser & Wirth, who released the book about six years after the artist’s 2019 show at the gallery’s Downtown Los Angeles location. As a self-professed book lover and exhibition catalog collector, I was nearly beside myself to receive such a gift. Removing it from its wrapping, I let the book fall on my dining table with a satisfying thud, before running my hands across the smooth hard cover. The 12-by-12-inch tome weighs just under 7 pounds and features a countless number of pages—countless, because there are no page numbers to count.

I did not experience the 2019 Hammons show in LA, billed as the largest comprehensive survey of the artist’s work to date, and this catalog, I assumed, would offer unique perspective on his six-decades-long enigmatic practice. I opened the book and quickly discovered that there was no text. The title page flips to reveal a full-page color image with no title or year. Imagine my fervent page-turning as I opened the book to find no table of contents, no section headings, no exhibition text, no timeline, no bibliography, and no essays. No essays. Just a humble colophon and the artist’s name. Assuming does indeed make an ass out of you and me.

As a catalog—a book form traditionally intended to document an exhibition—David Hammons disappoints. This genre of book typically provides context for the art, the artist, and an exhibition; this book does not do that work. It offers hundreds of beautiful images—gallery install shots, artwork reproductions, ephemera—with no titles, no dates, no material lists, organized in no discernable order. It can be assumed that the catalog encompasses the breadth of the 2019 exhibition because that is the occasion on which it was published, but it leaves little for the hungry viewer to contend with beyond the art itself, presented in a raw and unapologetic series of images.

It would be easy to dismiss this “post-exhibition catalogue” as a mislabeled coffee table book, beautiful and easily consumed, or as a response to the anti-intellectual wave in our culture that is drastically impacting the production and publication of the research that undergirds our field. This book, I would argue, is doing the clever work of making itself inaccessible—not to the wider public, but to art historians, curators, and scholars who might seek to express some authority over Hammons’s work or his life. Thumbing intuitively, about halfway through the pages, you’ll find a series of incredible install shots of a past Hammons exhibition where his works are presented together against white walls. With no text to offer context and no dates to anchor us in time, each featured work is left to be contended with via eyesight alone.

David Hammons doesn’t function like an exhibition catalog; it functions like an artist’s book and, more significantly, like a work of art itself. After turning a few pages, readers will come across documentation of the collaborative 2011 installation of fur coats by David and Chie Hammons, made for L&M Arts in the Upper East Side neighborhood of New York City. The images show the pristine frontal views of floor-length winter coats beside views of the altered backs, which the artists used much like canvas, applying various paints, char, and detritus. Those familiar with these works may know of their apt critique of class and class performance, a persistent critique for Hammons. For those who don’t, the work has been removed from the context of the gallery, making it seem as if the coats were seen spontaneously on the city street, which is where he often sources his materials.

The press release for the book states that David Hammons is a “singular book created entirely under the artist’s direction.” Hammons has been labeled “elusive” for his rejection of the institutional structures of the art world and its highly sought forms of validation. Why should his book be any different? Without an authoritative curatorial voice, the images are left to assert the artist’s voice above all others. The result is a rhythmic, almost stream-of-consciousness flow of vivid images that inform each other. There are no references to the art historical canon, no comparisons to other artistic expressions of Blackness. The works become nearly impossible to historicize, let alone identify without strong previous knowledge of Hammons’s career. In other words, Hammons said what he said already; this book of images enables him to say it again and again and again.

Here, I found myself questioning my desire for this book to be legible, conventional, and useful. Is he challenging me, scolding me, or flirting with me? His refusal to make it easy to intellectualize his work feels like an invitation to a wider audience to exercise a different set of skills: he is inviting us to see as he sees while making room for our own responses and interpretations. It is evident through the book’s images that so much of Hammons’s work is made possible by everyday audiences, whether that audience is indulgently purchasing ephemeral artworks or simply taking time to witness the sublime in the mundane. You travel through the pages and experience what compels you. It may be wholly cliché to say, but the book reads much like jazz—there is a rhythm, but it is not consistent. It lingers here or there, it gets loud and hot before lulling to a confident hum.

Looking, as this textless catalog demands, may be the prevailing lesson. The value of the book comes not only from the information it documents, but also from the experience and endurance required to consume it. Many contemporary artists owe their careers to Hammons, and as you flip through the pages it becomes increasingly clear that his practice—not a singular work, but the methods and means by which he makes—have come to define contemporary art. His use of found materials, his iconoclastic appropriation of cultural symbols, his experimentation with temporality, and his reverence for the detritus of life have all shifted and expanded the perimeters of painting, sculpture, and performance as we have come to understand them. Perhaps this is why his name is the only necessary citation—everything you need to know is right there on the title page.

We spent a day together in Manchester. The cloudy sky threatened rain as we walked throughout the postindustrial city, discussing mandla’s multidisciplinary practice, the collaborative energy of the local queer arts community, the potential of museums, and the realities of citizenship … or lack thereof. Mandla was born in Zimbabwe and now lives in the UK—a seemingly unending journey across continents, histories, and legalities that have shaped the infinitely complex and visceral storyteller who walked beside me. I found myself compelled to ask, “so, Manchester is home? It’s good here?” which mandla eagerly affirmed with “good for now.” Over coffee, we discussed mandla’s expansive practice, which includes poetry, scriptwriting, songwriting, and stage performance, all intertwined and individually profound.

Language has always been a preoccupation for the artist: mandla received a degree in English literature and creative writing from the University of Westminster, and has been writing since adolescence. Mandla speaks multiple languages, including English and sleight of hand. Speaking English is more than simply learning grammatical rules and extensive vocabularies, it’s also body language and lilt. I cannot simply say, “I’m British” in my clunky American accent and be believed. I must perform British. For those who navigate the world between countries, cultures, and genders, there is an intimate understanding that performance is a critical survival skill, and mandla has mastered it. Hence, we must make room for lapses in truth and slippages of language … we all have the potential to be liars when confronting the whole of our past.

It was at the Manchester Art Gallery that we began discussing as british as a watermelon (2019), mandla’s breakout work of autofiction written for the stage and now translated to video. In this piece, shown in the 2023 Sharjah Biennial and at the Julia Stoschek Foundation, mandla demonstrates mastery of sleight of hand. The short film features the artist narrating their life, or perhaps the life of someone else, to an unseen audience. Mandla moves within a minimalist set designed to suggest the walls of a little house, or perhaps the holding cell of a prison. Watermelons litter the floor haphazardly, sometimes comically rolling along, or cradled in mandla’s arms like a baby. Dressed in an apron covered in watermelon wedges, mandla drags a knife along healed scars and asks us to bear our own.

“My memory is a long-lost appetite that’s watching, day by day, as fruit turns to mold,” mandla says in the 30-minute video.

Do you know the origins of the watermelon? How the fruit came to the UK, to the wider Western world? Can we trust mandla to tell us how mandla came to the UK, or even how mandla came to mandla? The narrator expresses their control by breaking the walls of performance to reveal what they want revealed, and to hide what needs to remain hidden. As british as a watermelon is a guttural retelling of the personal experiences of a queer immigrant child from the perspective of an adult who is figuring out how to heal. Perhaps it is a beautifully crafted narrative about faulty memory, and the inability to hold on to a singular truth. Personally, I believe the performance is about the death of a young girl named Bridget and a being called mandla who protects Bridget’s memory and plays games with her spirit. 

Subtle and alluring, a brown eye gazes out from behind the mihrab motif at the center of a prayer rug. The gaze pierces the two-dimensional surface, revealing that this work, which has the appearance of a photograph, is actually a collage of images used to partially conceal the body of artist Baseera Khan. In this work, one in a series titled “Law of Antiquities” (2021–), Khan’s images digitally merge the artist’s figure with rare and fragile artifacts from the Brooklyn Museum’s Arts of the Islamic World collection, constructing scenes in which they seem to interact. Mosque Lamp and Prayer Carpet Green from Law of Antiquities (2021) features that richly colored seventeenth-century Iranian prayer rug floating in the foreground. The textile was photographed against a stark white background that contrasts with the draping chroma-key backdrop of the overall image and the deep red of the artist’s shoes. Khan digitally cut out and slightly shifted the rug’s intricate mihrab, allowing it to suggest a niche, much like the architectural feature that inspired the motif. Several sets of hands, some with vibrant green nail polish, grip the rug’s virtually excised core and, in two images within the mihrab, support an ornate glass lamp that once illuminated a mosque. The rug functions as a wall, guarding the artist’s body, and the center cutout as a window, drawing the viewer’s gaze deeper into the mihrab.

Khan’s solo exhibition “I Am an Archive,” curated by Carmen Hermo at the Brooklyn Museum, features more than forty works made since 2017, more than a dozen of them brand new. The pieces explore a range of experiences that come with existing in a brown Muslim body in the United States—including Islamophobia, assimilation, adaptation, and pride. Throughout, Khan positions the body as an essential site of knowledge and cultural retention. Artists and scholars alike have increasingly problematized the archive as a site of power tied to white supremacy and cultural erasure. The titular statement “I am an archive” asserts the artist’s authority over their own history while subtly undermining a Western understanding of canonization. The objects Khan chose to incorporate into this series—often labeled and categorized by nation, religion, and period—contain spiritual and colonial histories, as well as larger migratory, transient, and multicultural ones, that come alive outside the museum context. That these objects reside in the Brooklyn Museum indicates not only that they are part of pervasive stereotypes of orientalism, but also that they belong to transnational histories of power that span antiquity to the present.

Khan explores the intersection of materiality, technology, and identity in their practice. Known as a performance artist, image-maker, and sculptor, they here demonstrate the breadth of their practice and skill, most evidently their expert manipulation of materials. In one of the galleries, a long thick braid of what appears to be human hair hangs from the ceiling and pools on the floor before a large projection that documents Braidrage (2017–), a performance in which Khan created a large-scale drawing using their entire body. The drawing surface resembles a rock-climbing wall, but in place of stone protrusions, Khan has installed casts of their own body parts made from resin, embedded with hair, chains, and remnants of hypothermia blankets, like those often given to refugees. With a rinsing gesture, they cover their bare hands and feet in black charcoal, after the Islamic pre-prayer tradition of Wudu; then the artist climbs the wall and begins to “draw.” A ritualistic act ensues as they climb vertically and horizontally, making prints or sweeping marks with their hands and feet, and then descend only to scale the wall once again. Having confronted their own body, through both the mounted casts and the physical exertion, Khan considers the drawing complete after reaching exhaustion.

At the forefront of the exhibition is its namesake, I Am an Archive, Speaker, from Bust of Canons (2021), a 3D-printed sculpture modeled after Khan’s body in acrylic, resin, and steel, completed with a long ponytail of the artist’s hair. The figure references a white marble Yakshi sculpture (twelfth to thirteenth century) from the museum’s collection in which a goddess’s body is carved in an S-curve pose. Erupting from the figure’s chest, or anahata, is a bulbous speaker playing songs written and performed by the artist. Some twenty melancholy alternative songs permeate the gallery, in which a series of ornate revolving chandeliers hang. Their bright colors reflect light and make patterns on the floor, creating a potential space for gathering, dance, and contemplation. The inclusion of the artist’s hair is personal and significant. In many Muslim cultures the presentation of hair represents one’s expression of spirituality and gender, and is a marker of health and beauty. Hair is also a global currency that can be cut and sold, indicating earning potential and social worth. Throughout the exhibition, hair acts as an alternative archive, containing not only various cultural meanings, but also, more literally, DNA. This great length of hair is a testament to a particular type of sacrifice, be it to one’s freedom from convention or to the fidelity of the sculpture. A three-dimensional collage, Khan’s sculpture again uses technology to composite an object from the collection and their own body, ultimately enabling us to conceive of hybridized, and arguably more legitimate, archives.

“The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse” surveys the past hundred years of artistic expression by Black artists who have lived or worked in the American South. The exhibition claims that the culture and aesthetics of Southern hip-hop constitutes an American art form. It firmly situates the musical genre within the lineages of interdisciplinary Black cultural production, including and referencing forms not often recognized by museums, such as Black fashion, architecture, and contemporary music genres. The more than 140 works in the exhibition, on view at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) in Richmond through September 6, are united by what curator Valerie Cassel Oliver calls the “sonic impulses” of Black expression, which this intergenerational group of artists expresses as the compulsion to be not just seen but also heard and felt.

Visitors may enter “The Dirty South” expecting to find a definitive statement on what constitutes the American South. Subverting geographic, iconographic, and historical distinctions, the exhibition instead offers a range of depictions of the South directly through objects, images, and sounds. Among them are fantastical drawings by North Carolina artist Minnie Evans (1892–1987) of vivid mindscapes figuring vegetation and the human body. Her 1969 piece Three Faces Surmounting Landscape is placed in conversation with contemporary Atlanta artist Michi Meko’s multimedia work on canvas, The Seasons – Summer, 2019, which suggests the cosmos or a lively field of fireflies against the night sky. The juxtaposition of the works points to a legacy of interrogations of the physical and psychological landscapes of the South, across time and space. Such artistic cosmologies can be identified throughout the galleries, through shared uses of materials, craft traditions, and cultural references.

Parked within the atrium of the VMFA is a 1990 Cadillac Brougham d’Elegance titled Slab, credited to rapper International Jones. Those familiar with hip-hop culture may view the work and recall summer car shows and anticipate the boom of subwoofers filling the streets. The Cadillac became a symbol of economic stability and social status within mid-twentieth-century Black American culture: acquiring the vehicle was a means of making the American dream more tangible, despite the onslaught of systemic racism that made it nearly impossible to attain. Hip-hop culture of the later twentieth century subsumed the Cadillac to represent not the aspirations of the Black middle class, but power and wealth. The machine became a canvas of expression through innovative technology, design, and embellishment. Slab thus illustrates the porous barriers between art and material within Black Southern culture. “Embellishment” can be used as an anchoring term to describe how even the most mundane of objects produced by Black people becomes an opportunity for artistic expression. This is most legible in the varied uses of found objects, assemblage, and quilt motifs throughout the show.

“The Dirty South” uses sound—both musical and vocal—as guide and metaphor, permeating space, contextualizing and recontextualizing everything it touches. The diverse examples of Southern culture are connected by a foundational impulse of call and response, expressed aurally, visually, and materially. No Black art form can exist without the other, and meaning is made and remade through articulation. Hip-hop exists because of jazz, poetry, dance, sculpture, red clay earth, and praise houses. This is beautifully illustrated by the exhibition’s installation itself, which unfolds across the encyclopedic institution’s sprawling grounds. Interdisciplinary artist John Sims’s audio installation The AfroDixieRemixes (2002–15) reverberates against the gabled ceiling of a historic chapel owned by the museum and dedicated to those who died in service to the Confederacy. Engaging the hip-hop methods of sampling and remixing, Sims appropriated Daniel Decatur Emmett’s 1859 minstrel anthem to instead center the Black American perspective on Dixie sentiment. Through the chapel’s open doors and out to the Richmond campus, sound forces listeners to contend with the presence of Black history within the revered Confederate site. This will probably be the most historically significant venue for Sims’s installation, which is set to travel with the rest of the exhibition to several locations across the United States.

Beckoning visitors to the exhibition’s entrance is Paul Stephen Benjamin’s Summer Breeze (2018), a large-scale configuration of various sizes of tube televisions in a form resembling an altar. The majority of the screens play a video of a Black child on a swing, moving back and forth toward and away from the viewer. At the installation’s core, a single screen plays footage from Billie Holiday’s iconic 1959 performance of “Strange Fruit,” flanked by clips of Jill Scott’s impassioned 2015 version of the same song. Reaching toward the ceiling of the atrium, the sculpture’s scale is surpassed only by the resounding audio of Holiday crooning “Black bodies swinging, in the summer breeze,” echoed by a belting Scott. The screens’ pulsing blue and gray light paired with the voices’ hypnotic repetition envelops viewers in the contradictory realities of being Black in the American South. Summer Breeze creates a second meaning for Holiday’s phrase, juxtaposing the legacy of lynching with the fact of survival and Black joy. These tensions between pain and pleasure, violence and peace, oppression and transcendence, pervade the show, rendering the South complex and beautiful.

This is an important exhibition. It does not attempt to explore the full history of Southern hip-hop; rather, “The Dirty South” illuminates the powerful influences—the body, the landscape, and spiritual practices—that undergird all forms of Southern expression. Aligned with the efforts of contemporary rappers, such as Jay-Z, the exhibition seeks to pay proper reverence to the hip-hop genre, claiming its mutual engagement with the artistic, intellectual, and spiritual experiences of Black people in the South. The sheer size of the show can make it feel disjointed at times, yet it does the essential work of illustrating that Black culture is not produced in a vacuum. Artists of all genders, trained and untrained, call and respond to each other across media, uncovering persisting themes, but ultimately presenting a non-monolithic and dynamic South. Including both Benny Andrews’s 1994 Revival Meeting, a painted snapshot of a spirited congregation, and Felandus Thames’s Just Hanging (2014), a sculpture that recalls the tradition of tennis shoes thrown over telephone wires, the show makes clear why we respond, “Na nah, na nah” when New Orleans rapper Master P calls, “Ungh!”