Illuminated Levity

It still has not snowed. The oddly mild weather plays with my expectation of street light bouncing off mounds of piled snow as busy drivers maneuver the city. On this night, the walk was brisk, with leaves enjoying their pirouettes in the wind for an extended season. I was heading to the MOCA, Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Art, to see the Dancing in the Light exhibition. The wind of the city kissed my face as I prepared to enjoy Black art.  Namely, Isabel Okoro’s, portrait negotiating space with memories of fluid landscapes. MOCA does not have a permanent collection, and instead exhibits visiting collections. This time, the visiting collection was The Wedge Collection, founded by Dr. Kenneth Montague in 1997. As a Black collector, Montague’s focus has been on “exploring African diasporic culture and contemporary Black life.” Dancing in the Light is an exhibition of portraiture drawn from The Wedge Collection.

When I arrived, I anticipated that there would be music, and Black bodies folding into each other as they walked, connected, by beat and body around the gallery space. Instead, there was a reception desk, a café, and Phyllida Barlow’s posthumously installed Eleven Columns on the main floor. I went searching to find the Black art.

After asking for help, I was guided to the art outside. I was disappointed by when I learned that the Black art was outdoors, a piece standing alone in the cold. Mounted on the northwest façade of the art space, I saw the artistry of Isabel Okoro, a piece called negotiating space with memories of fluid landscapes. Okoro’s work presents the image of two Black people – their own portraits doubled – at a shore’s edge, moonlight and water in the background, with the cut-out of a rose in the foreground.

To me, the artist is playing with an immediately recognizable nod to 90’s hip hop, namely Tupac’s autobiographical poem “The Rose That Grew From Concrete.” Okoro’s rose has no stem and no thorns, but its intricate petal pattern is a symbol of softness and strength, beauty and survivability, vulnerable masculinity, the unfair resilience of Black boy children, and the grit required to thrive in the concrete jungle of any city. These antecedents in contemporary Black cultural productions form their own cultural genus. A recognizable figure of Black male youth, risk, haunting, and hope. The boys’ identities are obfuscated by the purple of dusk, concealing their features but not their presence. Natural hair, bare-footed, seemingly comfortable in their place was as much as the image would reveal. Void of any verdant flora that would make the image typical of a postcard from any beach, the only foliage we get is the white, stencilled cut-out of a rose.

This symbolizes to me that Blackness is in every location, wild, free, but also well-skilled at climbing lattices affixed to any barrier. There is a “purity” in these boys, these Black roses, who seem comfortable at the edges between two touching dualities: land and sea, free and climbing, here and everywhere. The comfort is learned, at home and outside, and therefore familiar although there is no discernable expression. There is a sense of comfort, of understanding the adaptive nature of Blackness. It is not a contrast that creates a “this or that” binary but an “all of it” dynamic. Sometimes “free” and “climbing” are not opposites, as wild roses show us. They only become contrasted under oppression, when we are forced into climbing ladders not of our choosing or making. Blackness has adapted to all of it.

As I was interpreting the portrait, I thought back to my first encounter with Okoro’s work. At Gallery 44, an exhibition I previously reviewed, intrigued by the layers stacked in the question in “Is Love A Synonym for Abolition?” Okoro’s eye for Blackness is akin to x-ray vision. She sees the bones of the structures of Blackness as a construct. She gives us the skeleton to layer on our own cultural symbols and meaning. She then equips us with a cardiogram, both giving and recording the heartbeat of Black subjects. Her eye shows us, and invites us to just feel, as our own pulse reminds us of why we feel connected to these subjects. We know them. Somehow, we can see and feel them and know they are alive. As I saw the piece outside, with the light of nearby construction lamps bouncing off the cool-coloured digital image printed on vinyl, the image seemed unnaturally “in its place.” We are familiar with Blackness being excluded and being pushed out, but this portrait was mounted in a way that it danced with natural light as well as intrusions of nearby light. Its own kind of double exposure. Its own unique way of depicting Black boys in the city, from here, and not from here at all.

Back inside, I went to the third floor where the exhibition continued. Here is where I found the music. None was playing, but the exhibition displayed some very heavy-hitting vinyl; including Steel Pulse’s True Democracy (1982), Faith Nolan’s Africville (1986), The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998), Frank Ocean’s Blonde (2016) and much more, encased in glass and rimmed by books patrons could peruse.

The exhibition was curated by architect Farida Abu-Bakare. There is intentionality in the placement of each piece. In addition to Okoro’s portraiture mounted on the northwest façade, on MOCA’s south stairwell there is a projected video by the late autodidact Peter Dean Rickards, playing on a loop. The pieces inside were placed skillfully, grouped together by subject matter as well as splayed across bookending walls. This architect’s gaze added something to the artistry of the experience. It made it feel more familiar, more related, playing with homeliness, extended family, play cousins, and other familiar Black ways of expressing kinship and closeness.

On the far wall of the third floor was a digital video by Jah Grey. Grey’s work challenges hyper-masculinity, as we see stunning Black, male bodies dancing with strength and tenderness. The silent video features three dancers: Daniel Santokie, Rodney Diverlus, and Shakeil Rollock (the latter of which I actually went to high school with). Again, there is an emblematic sense of individuality woven onto collective. Blackness recognizes this self in selves. It is part of our community, and our beauty.

The way the light was dancing in the MOCA this night was about being in a room full of people who came to be held by the same tapestry; one collaged together to make the music and the mosaic of Blackness from many corners, of Blackness that dances on the rays of light and levity.