Image.. Black Flesh?

“Black Flesh” is a solo exhibition by Noel W. Anderson delving into the relationships between media, image making, and race. In his tapestries and works on paper, Anderson is interested in how far he can push abstraction without losing meaning. He takes historic images of anti-Black violence and intentionally distorts them to show how racism warps perception.

Noel W. Anderson’s work deals with the intricacies of art history and the distortion of images. He is specifically interested in how art shapes the perception of race. Anderson, a non-linear thinker, conceives of the art historical ecosystem in a holistic way and draws parallels between his practice and other artists. Anderson chooses to model his practice after that of Peter Paul Rubens, a renowned Flemish artist who worked during the Early Renaissance and was known best as a painter. He also worked with printmakers and tapestry weavers as a way of making his work more affordable and replicable than his paintings. In what could be considered an early modern marketing campaign, he expertly adapted his work to those media for one reason: to widely disseminate his images and establish himself as an artist with few peers. The search for broader relevance drives Anderson’s work across printmaking and weaving. His distorted images provide a framework for understanding how historic and contemporary accounts of African American history are social constructs fabricated using American media images. Anderson’s unusual display strategies for his tapestries support this because their presence in a formal gallery can be seen as a disruptive critique of how African Americans are not represented equitably in museums.