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Martin Puryear. Avey (plate, facing page 50) from Cane. 2000. Jean Toomer. One from an illustrated book with 10 woodcuts and a supplementary suite of seven woodcuts, composition: 10 3/8 × 12 13/16" (26.4 × 32.5 cm); page (each): 11 1/2 × 13 7/8" (29.2 × 35.3 cm). Publisher: Arion Press, San Francisco. Printer: Arion Press, San Francisco. Edition: 400. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Anna Marie and Robert F. Shapiro. © Martin Puryear, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

We asked poet Anaïs Duplan to respond to works from MoMA’s collection that resonate with his own ideas around Afrofuturism.

William Scott. Dear Barack Obama. c. 2009

In his letter to President Barack Obama, William Scott is enacting a core tenet of Afrofuturism, which is envisioning and attempting to articulate the future.

It feels reasonable to expect violence at the end of the world. At the peak of our desperate efforts to survive, we may also be fighting against one another. Scott’s letter to Barack Obama is a negotiation of apocalyptic violence. The speaker tries to wager presidential power to stop the possibility of violence altogether. But in Scott’s letter, there’s cognitive dissonance. There are clashes between how the world already is, Scott’s sense of how it ought to be, and what is “needed” to get there.

I chose this particular Scott piece mainly because it is imageless. We don’t need language to describe the future. Imagelessness can sometimes be a catalyst to look more deeply—or to listen more actively. The letter feels as if it’s written by a child, or perhaps by an adult, manically. The frenetic energy indicated by the lack of punctuation raises a question about the letter’s intentionality. Does the speaker have the capacity for reflection? Has this language been planned? Taken together, the words would seem to reveal not just the speaker’s anxieties but a collective anxiety around what’s next, or what’s needed. In other words, we could also hear these as not just Scott’s words, but the collected words of many people.

Margo Humphrey. The History of Her Life Written Across Her Face. 1991

Immediately, I see the text, image, and text in Humphrey’s lithograph as a single composite message. As encrypted as the work is with words, symbols, and metaphor, Humphrey does want her story to be figured out. She wants to be seen.

I’m drawn in, over and over, by smaller moments, like the mom and dad in the nose, hovering above the nostrils. My eyes zip to meet a number of other smaller figures in the face, like the weight-lifting arm, the two kissing people, some trees. Even inside the face, where I have an expectation of cogency, the images are visually and spatially distinct. The face could be, in another kind of piece or just in our imaginations, something like a unifying field. Instead, in Humphrey’s face there seem to be numerous simultaneous thoughts: warm colors, sunshine, balls of heat and light, including the sunlight in the middle of her face, lipstick, shoulders.

I could read these as a kind of “pure” image. We don’t really need context for them; they’re straightforward symbols. But then we’d need to ask, “What’s going on behind the face” in the background? There isn’t just one plane of images to read, but many interconnected planes. The figure’s pitch-black skin creates a background for other figurations. The face is simultaneously a background and a foreground. Her face is ultimately more like a transparency than a foundation.

Kandis Williams. We have spared no expense. scope, scalpel, axe, drill. The Sort of Thing You Should Not Admit: violent death, turns out to be puzzlingly complex and if you have a problem figuring my out whether you’re for me or, then you ain’t black. 2020

I can think of a number of collaged bodies in Black artworks, like those of Krista Franklin and Troy Michie. I think about those other images when I look at this one, and what I find myself stuck on here is the grid. The figure is arranged in a grid, whose imperfect orthogonal influence makes up the axes of the body, or something like the urban grid. The makeup of the human body itself is not very grid-like in general, so the grid here is an imposition. The rigidity of this arrangement is somewhat disrupted by the fire-breathing being at the shoulder of our primary figure. The double-headedness of this entity, a sort of double-consciousness, is off-putting.

The background feels cosmological but also like a gritty, Earthly terrain. And like a black mass, slippery and spilling. The conflation of blackness (space) with blackness (body) seems germane. There’s the suggestion that bodies are made of the matter of mud, and that we should read the Earth’s body as human (or vice versa).

Martin Puryear. Avey (plate, facing page 50) from Cane. 2000

This print is found in a Jean Toomer novel, Cane. So we should likely read it as depicting narrative action. Without having read the novel, however, I’ll confine myself to reading what narrative I can discern in the image itself. For instance, the upper sky comes together with the lower sky, where the latter contains seeds. Seeds or stars? Is it important which planes are sky and which are Earth? They are effectively rendered the same.

Puryear primarily works with wood in three-dimensional space. I think about the implications of flattening down, confining oneself to a two-dimensional plane. The simplicity of the plain/plane in the image is captivating; it is largely darkness. The lack of texture in the darkness creates a monolithic black that in turn swallows up the frame. Consider, as a point of contrast, the Kandis Williams piece in this selection; its darkness is more variegated. Because Puryear’s darkness is so absolute, the line becomes a pathway. We enter the world of drawing but also navigation, where the line facilitates wayfinding as much as it tells us about the boundaries of shapes.

Melvin Edwards. Cup of? from the Lynch Fragment series. 1988

Edwards’s sculpture, in all its heaviness, speaks of multiple kinds of technologies: the body as technology, the machine as a substitute for the body, and finally the cyborg entity. In this work, Edwards turns his focus to the technologies used to lock up the body. We could say we are in each of these three technological terrains: the laboring Black body as technology needing to be secured with chains, the drive to see the Black body as a machine rather than as a body, and then the result of mechanical intervention on that laboring body. Throughout Necropolitics, scholar and critical theorist Achille Mbembe paints a picture of our techno-humanity, our emerging ability to transmogrify the body and its boundary, which is moveable, with machines. Capitalist growth desires that bodies should become more useful, desires them to be useful for usefulness’s sake. This ultimately ends in our making ourselves into machines.

Kelani Abass. Casing History, Spilling Memories 1. 2022.

This work is in conversation with a Betye Saar piece that I almost included, in which, similarly, a single frame is broken up into smaller ones—each inner frame like a window or a portal. I’m wondering about how the images are divided. In turn, how are they pieced together? The piece is both internally collaborative and dissonant. The coloration and discoloration of its photographs is likely a result of direct artistic intervention and the effects of aging. One effect is indistinguishable from the other.

I’m searching for faces in a gridded sea. Some images are totally contained, or encased, within a wooden square while others are segmented into many littler squares. In the latter cases, the visual register (how the total image comes across to me) is mathematical. One thinks of the images, in general, as occurring on a plane but one rarely thinks of the plane itself. When the plane is so loud, as it is here, I can’t help but see math.

The photographs potentially pull across generations, creating a nonlinear temporality, as if suggesting we can have a more spatialized relationship to time. We don’t know about the relationships between these family members or the time in which they existed, but we can speculate.

Houston Conwill with Joseph De Pace, Estella Conwill Majozo. Du Sable’s Journey. 1991

This is an image of voyaging, which resonates with many global (and maybe even intergalactic) Black histories of migration. The space of the map is immediately recognizable as that of Earth, but it is one of many possible Earths.

The image was familiar to me at first glance. I asked myself if I’d seen another Conwill like this, maybe in a subway station. Eventually I remembered Rivers, the Conwill piece on the floor of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. In that Conwill, as in this one, the navigational vocabulary of astronomy and earthly navigation symbols are intermixed. My approach to viewing them is the same. Mentally, I mark off some of the points on the map, and see if some kind of accompanying mental picture is possible: the Illinois River and the Mississippi River, the Gulf of Mexico, the Great Lakes, or the Atlantic Ocean. I follow along with the spiral of verbs and non-intersecting arrows: remembering, dismembering, crossing, recalling, sounding, breathing. What might a spiral indicate, as opposed to an arrow?

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