Yet now, the value of black creativity and the works of its artists are absolutely on the money. Kerry James Marshall's Past Times (1997) sold for $21.1 million on May 16 via Sotheby's in New York to rap mogul Sean "Diddy" Combs.
The nine-by-13-foot painting, which depicts African-Americans engaging in leisure and recreational activities, had been expected to fetch between $8 million and $12 million; the price paid was four times higher than the artist's previous record. To put that in even greater perspective, Past Times had been purchased in 1997 by the Illinois-based Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority for $25,000. One of Marshall's latest works, Rush More, shows the faces of eminent black women carved into trees, with Gwendolyn Brooks and Oprah Winfrey among them. The commercial rush for that work can't be long in coming, either.
Then there's Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze. She may be Nigerian-born, UK-educated and Brooklyn-based, but the artist feels she's "not any one of them. I'm all of them and it is just what it is." Thus, while her collage-y, large-scale, narrative-based and multidimensional drawings bespeak aspects of her upbringing to date, ultimately she feels the world she's "creating on paper is a representation of all of 'us'.
It cannot be told for us and it certainly cannot be told through the lens of being so-called 'authentically African'," she explains. Instead, Amanze sees her work as contributing to the global conversation of drawing and of contemporary art by African artists, particularly those who are female. "We need more of these voices," she says. Amanze's work is currently on show outside the Hayward Gallery in London's Southbank Centre, where she was commissioned to create a special mural over the summer period.
Ironically, more than Amanze being black or black-African, time spent observing her work positions the protagonist somewhere between nowhere and everywhere. She's an architectural, geometric, shamanistic geomancer, whose works feels like moodboards to a post-internet, post-global, pre-futurist world. With titles for her works including A Slice Through the World and Where Do We Stand?, it may take the rest of the planet some time to catch up with Amanze's message, yet her drawings sample old-school print and new-school digitalia with breathless technique. She's like a latter-day Leonardo, creating drawings on iBrushes for Instagram where no frame exists, so infinite is the message.
