A reference to the first DC Comic to feature a black superhero, Robert Pruitt’s new exhibition, “The Forever People,” attempts to harness the attitudes of the hippie generation. Pruitt shifts conceptual gears significantly with this latest work. Here, deep yet subtle juxtapositions are coupled with heartfelt humanity. The new works’ subjects—rendered in charcoal and conté—hail from some mixed-up time and place, their poses, clothes, and attitudes reflecting fractured identities. A serene iconography sets “The Forever People” apart from the artist’s other drawings, which juxtapose American and African identities but subsume their personalities to their accoutrements. These latest drawings are given more care and real character, their countenances powerfully expressive but not caricatures.
Superbad Garveyite (all works 2009) portrays a defiant figure standing tall, his pose half Bad-era Michael Jackson, half Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, 1830. He wears a bright red shirt emblazoned with the Kongo Cosmogram, an African and Caribbean religious symbol signifying the continuity of life. An exuberantly hued painting by Sam Gilliam is creased and draped over his shoulders. Be of Our Space World focuses on the chiseled profile of a woman sitting at rigid attention. Her updo resembles Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, 1920, extending diagonally to a precarious height; this Constructivist reference is coupled with the new age astrological print of her loose-fitting shirt. Pruitt’s work still holds some of the acidity that propelled black radicalism into the twenty-first century, but the artist has gone on to search for harmonies among the cultural elements that capture his attention. Between Kehinde Wiley’s exalting, illustrative portraits and Michael Ray Charles’s biting historical remixes comes Pruitt’s interpretation of contemporary Americana as seen through the lens of African-American identity.
