Dear friend,
It was quite a year, wasn’t it? Some might say 2019 was grim: I wish I could disagree. I wish I could offer artwork to capture the world’s ills, move us to radical change, or even get us to be kinder to our neighbors. Unfortunately, there is no one piece existing on these terms.
Instead, I will tell you something I witnessed in 2019, hope and wonder that I tucked into my coat pocket because it reminded me of what the Kenyan filmmaker Likarion Wainaina said: “I want to make work that makes people more human.”
The following, my friend, is a human moment.
In October I attended a deeply moving talk at the Yale Center for British Art. Hilton Als, theater critic for The New Yorker and occasional curator, spoke about Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s work and what it means to him. Yiadom-Boakye is a British-Ghanaian painter creating transcendent worlds with her brushes. The results are beautiful images of black people plucked from her imagination, combined with Western canonical influences—particularly Johannes Vermeer’s interiority and Alice Neel’s frankness. In his engagement with her style, Als toggled assuredly between philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, writer Jamaica Kincaid, artist J.M.W. Turner, and others.
What I found most astonishing, however, wasn’t his command of theory, but rather the intimacy with which he spoke, reading from a letter he had written. In that letter he addressed a long-lost companion (of course, I thought of you). He spoke of melancholy borne from the absence of his friend, how they had waited for a black artist like Yiadom-Boakye to come along, and his immense relief when Yiadom-Boakye emerged.
Though Yiadom-Boakye paints as though she has nothing to prove, shifting pigment around the canvas without explicit political connotations, there is something very meaningful about the self-assured blackness in her images. It was thrilling to hear someone expand on this meaning and engage with black art beyond the helpful but limiting lenses of identity politics. And for me, a child of the diaspora, to hear about black art made my joy impossible in its enormity yet also close and simple.
Listening to Als, I also thought about how many biblical texts are in the form of letters. “Churched” folks have mostly been urged to see them as correctional tools, but there is so much more to the epistolary address: love, anguish, despair, wisdom. Letters connect us to the past and future, soldering people together across time and space. Like Paul’s words to the Corinthian church, or Yiadom-Boakye’s characters emerging from reverie to look at the viewer, or Als reaching back for an estranged friend while talking to an audience. Like you and me, anchored on one end by your eyes and, on the other, my typing fingers.
I tug on the cord that binds us; you tug back. This is being human.
Love, Faith
Faith-Marie Zamblé is an artist, writer, and M.F.A. candidate in dramaturgy and dramatic criticism at the Yale School of Drama. This is her final "Curated" column (for now).
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