David Huffman by Miles McEnery Gallery

DAVID HUFFMAN

520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

DAVID HUFFMAN’S SOCIAL ABSTRACTIONS By Derek Conrad Murray, PhD

Recalling the dismissive American response to his 1968 novel, A Bear for the F.B.I. (Un Ours Pour le F.B.I.), the acclaimed African-American filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles quipped: “When I sent my book to American publishers, they said, ‘It’s very good, but it’s not black enough.’ I said, ‘What does it mean, it’s not black enough?’ ‘Well, we don’t feel your anguish of being black. And furthermore, give us some lynching in there.’”1 Un Ours Pour le F.B.I. was an autobiographical novel originally written during Van Peebles’s time in France. The bitterness of the iconic filmmaker’s recollections suggests an acknowledgement of the perilous terrain of black representation (and the predicament of the black cultural producer). “You see,” he explained, “one thing that’s usually expected of a black man in America . . .you can yell, you can scream against the American system. But the one thing the white man wants is to show you’re in pain. Show that the system has made you suffer.”2 My recent writing on contemporary African-American art has been concerned with the very conundrum Van Peebles articulates: that is, the need (of the black artist) to speak against the perniciousness of racism, while also contending with a cultural thirst for images of black deprivation. What happens when blackness is embodied and represented? How does it function within the very culture that produced it? What is its role? Who owns blackness? There has always been a perilous tension between recognition and fetishism, between ennobled representation

and the degradation of stereotype. But how are black artists to negotiate for themselves a representational space of dignity when their fortunes are controlled by the interests of a largely Eurocentric culture industry, and a confining set of scripts?

My effort to untangle the reasoning behind these formulations has been informed by the work of David Huffman, an artist whose production has always wrestled with the complexities of content vs. form. When pondering the above quote from Van Peebles, I often recall the evolution of Huffman’s enigmatic artistic practice. The artist’s early work often played with the history of racial stereotypes. His mixed-media painting Trauma Eve 2 (2003) is in many respects a tribute to the infamous Betye Saar assemblage The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972). Saar’s controversial work inverted one of the most damaging racial caricatures, Aunt Jemima—the sexless domestic worker whose life was defined by degradation and servitude. Saar’s envisioning presents Aunt Jemima as a revolutionary, mop in one hand and rifle in the other. Huffman’s Trauma Eve is part blackface mammy, part futuristic robot. Her melancholic glare is contrasted by the physicality of her body, as she stands ominously above the wreckage and detritus of a futuristic and dystopian landscape. Behind the figure is a kind of murky and otherworldly sky that is evocative of Abstract Expressionism’s grand gestures. The combination of the racial signifier and nonobjective formalism creates a peculiar dynamism that is both unexpected and alluring. I have previously written about how Huffman reconciles the tension between abstraction and figuration, interweaving two modes of image making that have been historically and theoretically codified as antithetical.3 Abstract Expressionism, and artistic formalism in general, have traditionally been positioned as politically benign and beyond the politics of identity—despite the prominent role postwar American Jews, who were battling the persistence of anti-Semitism in the West, had in its creation. I have always been fascinated by the positionality of nonobjective art as a visual expression that is more elevated and resists grousing about social ills. The brilliance of postwar Jewish American abstraction (like the traditions of African-American jazz) is precisely its gesture toward universality and

expressive freedom, in the face of ethnic animus. These expressive forms emerge out of societal intolerances and structural bigotries designed to constrain certain constituencies—essentially trapping them within their Othered bodies. Perhaps abstraction is about freedom, self-determination, and transcendence: a means to express an interiority and complexity that can only be articulated via the intangible. Is it possible to speak beyond the confines of one’s skin, so to speak? In other words, can black artists transcend the racial fantasias and reductions that so often restrict the expressive potential? The tension between racial legibility and the emancipatory creative gesture encapsulates Huffman’s work—as he wrestles with the varying demands and minefields of being an African-American artist. Huffman was raised in Oakland, California, by a mother who was an artist for the Black Panther Party, and one can see the conflicting dualities of racial fidelity and the mythical universalism of abstraction in his painterly works. Many of his earlier paintings depicted astronaut-like figures that the artist terms “traumanauts.” These futuristic, minstrel-like characters are often dwarfed by ominous and surrealistic landscapes that allude to the visual language of formalism. The built-up surfaces, densely layered textures, and tonal washes of color give these works a rich threedimensionality, while iconographic and allegorical references are also utilized. Black Hole (2008), is a mixed-media work on canvas that interweaves formalism and narrative representation. The painting’s formalist backdrop is beautifully rendered in densely applied layers of oil and acrylic paint. Its muted tonalities of murky greens, dark yellows, ochres, reds, and blues give the painting an almost gloomy and threatening feeling. Along the bottom right of the composition is a carefully rendered capsule-like structure. In some respects, it appears to be a cylinder-shaped building with a dome ceiling, but it also looks like a kind of futuristic space station. At its base is a traumanaut figure, replete in white space suit, entering the mysterious structure from a small door. Despite its otherworldliness, Black Hole brings to mind the subtle layering of Chinese landscape painting. As Huffman’s work has evolved, both the figure and the artist’s more didactic allusions and iconography have begun to dissipate. The use of racial signifiers has

receded in favor of a more direct engagement with formalist abstraction. Blue Ice (2013) is large-scale abstraction from Huffman’s “Dark Matter” series, a body of paintings that draws its inspiration from astrophysics. “Dark Matter” explores the formal nuances of darkness, while simultaneously evoking the cosmic netherworlds that serve as backdrops for the artist’s more illustrative traumanaut paintings. The figure tends to haunt the works in this series. Blue Ice, with its densely layered applications of acrylic, oil, spray paint, and glitter, reads like a psychedelic cosmos in some yet-unexplored region of space. While it nods to the history of American abstraction, it also feels entirely new and unexpected, as if intent on pushing the boundaries of nonobjective art beyond its romantic distancing from social engagement. Atop its richly applied layers and drips of blue paint, are cylindrical forms that, at first glance, appear to be stars and planets in dense configurations. On closer inspection, these forms are actually basketballs, complexly arranged like hieroglyphs. The basketball has long had a metaphorical relationship to African-American culture, but as a formal gesture, Huffman has managed to create an iconographic sign system that is nonfigurative, yet still engaged with the social-political realities of the African-American experience. The manner in which Huffman has injected sociopolitical concerns into a formal language is as stirring as it is inventive. Huffman’s series of pyramid sculptures, constructed from colored basketballs, are compelling in their three-dimensional realization of key aspects of his twodimensional works. The found-object works concentrate key ideas from his paintings. For example, his Liberation (2019) features 650 basketballs, strikingly arranged in an Afrocentric formation of red, black and green, with a sound element containing a 10-minute loop of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech combined with sound files of Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon. The balls themselves are fraught emblems of the purported athletic (though not intellectual) prowess of black men. The pyramid signifies the greatness of African antiquity, monumental structures of cultural aspiration and achievement. While basketballs conjure the exploitation and objectification of black bodies in professional sports, the pyramid shape evokes references from his video and paintings to Western culture’s conspiracy theories around alien intervention as the only possible

explanation for the technological skill of the ancient African cultures that build such impressive structures. With their pungent odor of rubber, which strongly recalls a particular kind of embodied play, the basketball pyramids are complex: both lighthearted and symbolically burdened. Even as Huffman strays further away from watermelons, minstrels, or traumanauts, his work continues to be politically engaged—playing with even more challenging forms of social symbolism. Recent works have begun to utilize screen-printed images of cotton gins, basketball nets, and chains, carefully applied with spray paint. I Can’t Breathe (2015) is a large abstraction with the stenciled titular phrase: the last words of Eric Garner as he was being choked to death by a New York Police officer, Daniel Pantaleo. The words became a mantra of sorts and fueled activist resistance concerned with extrajudicial violence against the black community. Huffman’s utilization of this phrase is both disturbingly powerful and cathartic in its anger and sense of urgency. Huffman’s Brother from Another Planet (2019), continues the artist’s fascination with abstraction, with its highly gestural applications of paint, combined with more minimalist color fields in shades of yellow, green, and blue. In this work, Huffman mines similar themes and iconographic references, while returning to his earlier astronaut-themed works. In this instance, the artist inserts a repeated screen-printed image of himself in an astronaut suit. In these recent works, Huffman returns to more didactic forms of representational symbolism, playing with the unsubtle and the overt, while staying nestled within the formal and the material excesses of abstraction. His rather whimsical semiotic engagement with Colin Kaepernick’s visage, collaged African batik fabrics, the colors of the black nationalist flag, and stenciled basketballs may—at least on the surface—appear to be a sign of an artist whose political commitments and machinations are overwhelming their creative spontaneity. On the contrary, the artist has crafted a new formal language, and has reinvigorated nonobjective painting—engendering a new set of potentialities for formalist abstraction. What Huffman’s “social abstraction” teaches us is that abstraction has always been a political act; it is as entangled with the messiness of identity, as it is

concerned with materiality and form. If it is true that the black artist must always “show that the system has made you suffer,” as Melvin Van Peebles suggests, then Huffman’s reconciliation of the impasse between content and form is a powerful rebuke to those social forces intent on segregating artistic production—restricting the creative potentialities of artists to prescribed genres and themes. Huffman makes art about blackness, but he is also an abstract formalist, which in art historical terms is the ultimate contradiction. That said, Huffman’s social abstractions make a powerful argument that formalism is not just about escapist pleasures and fraudulent claims of the universal, that within all those tempestuous gestures and drips has always resided an irrepressible social urgency. One need only look a little closer.

1. Melvin Van Peebles. Quote from the documentary: How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (And Enjoy It), Directed by Joe Angelo, 2005, 86 min. 2. Ibid. 3. Derek Conrad Murray, “David Huffman, Black Universe” in The International Review of African American Art, http://iraaa.museum.hamptonu.edu/page/David-Huffman%2C-Black-Universe.

Derek Conrad Murray, PhD is an art historian and interdisciplinary theorist. He is Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Murray is the author of Queering Post-Black Art: Artists Transforming African-American Identity after Civil Rights (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016) and the forthcoming Mapplethorpe and the Flower: Radical Sexuality and the Limits of Control (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

Abracadabra, 2017 Acrylic, oil, spray paint, glitter, collage, crayon and graphite on canvas 84 x 72 inches 213.4 x 182.9 cm

Afro Hippie, 2017

Acrylic, oil, spray paint, glitter, collage, crayon and graphite on canvas 72 x 60 inches 182.9 x 152.4 cm

Ganymede, 2018

Acrylic, oil, spray paint, glitter, collage, crayon and graphite on canvas 48 x 48 inches 121.9 x 121.9 cm

Blindcut, 2019 Acrylic, oil, spray paint, glitter, collage, crayon and graphite on canvas 48 x 48 inches 121.9 x 121.9 cm

Brother From Another Planet, 2019 Acrylic, oil, spray paint, glitter, collage, crayon and graphite on canvas, diptych 84 x 96 inches 213.4 x 243.8 cm

Makeba, 2019

Acrylic, oil, spray paint, glitter, collage, crayon and graphite on canvas 60 x 48 inches 152.4 x 121.9 cm

People Get Ready, 2019

Acrylic, oil, spray paint, glitter, collage, crayon and graphite on canvas 60 x 48 inches 152.4 x 121.9 cm

Psychlodroma, 2019

Acrylic, oil, spray paint, glitter, collage, crayon and graphite on canvas 48 x 48 inches 121.9 x 121.9 cm

Transcendance, 2019

Acrylic, oil, spray paint, glitter, collage, crayon and graphite on canvas 72 x 60 inches 182.9 x 152.4 cm

Liberation, 2019

rubber basketballs official size, wood frame, bluetooth speaker 90 x 120 x 120 inches 228.6 x 304.8 x 304.8 cm

DAVID HUFFMAN Born in Berkeley, CA in 1963 Lives and works in Oakland, CA

EDUCATION

2014 “Everything Went Dark Until I Saw Angels,” Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2011 “Out of Bounds,” San Francisco Art Commission Galleries, San Francisco, CA “Floating World,” Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, CA

1999 MFA, California College of the Arts & Crafts, San Francisco, CA

2008 “Dig It!” Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, CA

1986 California College of the Arts & Crafts, Oakland, CA

2006 “Pyramid Dreams,” Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, CA

1985 New York Studio School, New York, NY

2005 “Land of the New Rising Sun,” Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2020 Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA 2019 Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY Chase Center and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (permanent commission), San Francisco, CA 17th & Broadway Apartments (permanent commission), Oakland, CA 2018 Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2017 “Print Project,” Paulson Fontaine Press, Berkeley, CA Residency, Palo Alto Art Center, Palo Alto, CA 2016 “Worlds in Collision,” Roberts and Tilton Gallery, Culver City, CA

2004 “Light Matter,” Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, CA “Dark Matter: The Art of David Huffman,” de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA 2001 “Trauma Travel,” Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, CA 1999 “David Huffman,” Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, CA 1998 MFA Exhibition, California College of Arts & Crafts, Oakland, CA 1997 “David Huffman, Selected Paintings,” The Renaissance, Santa Monica, CA “Broadsides,” Jeff Baum Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2020 “Personal to Political,” Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Detroit, MI 2019 “Ordinary Objects / Wild Things,” de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA “Counternarratives,” Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “There’s Reality and Then There’s California,” NIAD Art Center, Richmond, CA 2018 “Way Bay,” Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA “Personal to Political: Celebrating the African American Artists of Paulson Fontaine Press,” Bedford Gallery, Lesher Center for the Arts, Walnut Creek, CA; traveled to Las Cruces Museum of Art, Las Cruces, NM; Art Museum of West Virginia University, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV; Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, AL; Museum of Arts and Sciences, Daytona Beach, FL and DeVos Art Museum, Northern Michigan University, Marquette, MI “Sidelined,” (curated by Samuel Levi Jones), Galerie Lelong & Co, New York, NY 2017 “Where is Here,” (curated by Jacqueline Francis and Kathy Zarur), Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA “Public Arts Project,” Franz Mayer of Munich, Munich, Germany “Call for Beauty,” (curated by 3.9 Art Collective), Root Division, San Francisco, CA 2016 “Perfect Day,” Roberts and Tilton Gallery, Culver City, CA “March Madness,” (curated by Hank Willis Thomas and Adam Shopkor), FORT GANSEVOORT, New York, NY “Place,” Art Projects International, New York, NY

2015 “Portraits and Other Likenesses,” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA “Vertigo@Midnight: New Visual AfroFuturisms & Speculative Migrations,” Clark Humanities Museum, Claremont Colleges, Claremont, CA “Color Fields,” Bakalar and Paine Galleries, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA “Hydrarchy: Power, Globalization and the Sea,” Fine Arts Gallery, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA “Artadia,” The Battery, San Francisco, CA 2013 “The Shadows Took Shape,” The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY “Dissident Futures,” Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA “Making Space,” Euphrat Museum of Art, De Anza College, Cupertino, CA “Fear Not: African Aesthetics of Faith, Belief, and Resistance,” Museum of Biblical Art, New York, NY “Space is the Place: Guillermo Gómez-Peña, David Huffman, Wendy Red Star, and Saya Woolfalk,” Disjecta Contemporary Arts Center, Portland, OR 2012 “At the Edge,” (curated by Larry Rinder), Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA “25, Celebrating 25 Years of the Barkley Simpson Award,” Oliver Art Center, California College of the Arts, Oakland, CA “NEXT GENERATION, Selections by Artists from the 30 Americans Collection,” Contemporary Wing, Washington D.C. “The Calendar’s Tales: Fantasy, Figuration & Representation,” (curated by Lynne Cooney), College of Fine Arts, Boston University, Boston, MA “Variant Visions: The Art of David Huffman and Irving Norman,” Shasta College Art Gallery, Redding, CA

2011 “Bay Area Now 6,” Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA 2010 “Opening Show,” Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA “A Child’s World,” (curated by Stephanie Learmonth), Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara, CA “Opening Group Show,” Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA “Five Centimeters Short: Bruce Conner, Tracey Emin, David Huffman, Desirée Holman, Erick Bakke,” Rupert Goldsworthy Gallery, Berlin, Germany “A Sense of Place: Location/Inspiration,” de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA 2009 “I Do It For My People,” Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA “A Universe We Can Believe In,” Oliver Art Center, California College of the Arts, Oakland, CA

2008 “Looking Back,” Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2007 “Passed as Present,” Lodeveans Collection, York Gallery, York Castle Museum, York, United Kingdom “The Fullness of Time,” Luggage Store Gallery, San Francisco, CA “Artists of Invention: A Century of California College of the Arts,” Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA “Alien Nation: Laylah Ali, Hamad Butt, Edgar Cleijne, Ellen Gallagher, David Huffman, Hew Locke, Marepe, Henna Nadeem, Kori Newkirk, Yinka Shonibare MBE, Eric Wesley, Mario Ybarra Jr,” (curated by John Gill, Jens Hoffmann, Gilane Tawadros), Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, United Kingdom; traveled to Manchester City Art Gallery, Manchester, United Kingdom; Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, Norwich, United Kingdom 2005 “Artadia Award Recipients,” Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA

2005 “Strange Tales,” Luggage Store Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2004 “Black Belt,” Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA “Black Belt,” The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY “Tribulations,” Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2003 “Holiday Rapture,” Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2002 San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, CA “Retrofuturist,” (curated by Berin Golonu), New Langton Arts, San Francisco, CA 2001 “Freestyle,” The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY “Freestyle,” Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA 2000 “Renditions 2000,” Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA “Hybrid,” Southern Exposure, San Francisco, CA “Second Bay Area Now,” Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco Heritage Bank, San Jose, CA 1997 “Introducing. . . ,” Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, CA “Over, Under, and Around,” Southern Exposure, San Francisco, CA “Social Engagements: Observations and Personal Narratives,” Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 1996 “6th Annual Juried Works by Northern California Artists,” (juried by Thelma Golden, Associate Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art), Southern Exposure, San Francisco, CA “Sixth Biennial National Drawing Invitational,” Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, AR

AWARDS

SELECT COLLECTIONS

2008 Eureka Fellowship, The Fleishhacker Foundation, San Francisco, CA

Arizona State University Art Museum, Arizona State University, Tempe Campus, Tempe, AZ Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, AR

2005 Artadia Foundation Award, San Francisco, CA 2005 Palo Alto Public Arts Commission Award, Bishop Building Mural Project, Palo Alto, CA

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA

1998 Barclay Simpson Award, California College of the Arts & Crafts, Oakland, CA

de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA Embassy of the United States of America, Dakar, Senegal Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA Palo Alto Arts Center, Palo Alto, CA San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

DAVID HUFFMAN 14 November – 21 December 2019 Miles McEnery Gallery 520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011 tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com Publication © 2019 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved  Essay © 2019 Derek Conrad Murray Photography by Christopher Burke Studio, New York, NY Color separations by Echelon, Santa Monica, CA Catalogue layout by McCall Associates, New York, NY ISBN: 978-1-949327-22-9 Cover: People Get Ready, (detail), 2019