Ellen Yoshi Tani

“Black Conceptual Practice” analyzes the legacy of two seemingly incommensurable yet mutually generative discourses: Conceptual art and Black art. Through five chapters, I analyze how U.S.-based artists Charles Gaines, David Hammons, Senga Nengudi, and Lorraine O’Grady used systems, seriality, information, ritual, and language as processes of artistic exploration and as tools for navigating the constraints of racism: its arbitrariness, discriminatory gaze, and deleterious effects on the careers of Black artists. The artists’ commitment to indeterminacy and ephemerality provoked questions about the structural integrity of whiteness while frustrating essentialist readings that bound their racial identity to the visual field. In doing so, they extended conceptualism’s strategies in directions that remained latent in the work of its first generation of practitioners. This confounded audiences who expected racial iconography and instead found abstract, process-oriented, and conceptual approaches to ritual performance, Third World alliance, and intra-racial tensions. Black conceptual artists’ experimental aims and eschewal of stylistic and identificatory categories resulted in their marginalization from the market for Black art in an already racially segregated art world. Drawing on first-person interviews, oral histories, and recently processed archives, I analyze Gaines’s use of systems, Nengudi’s and Hammons’s conceptual materialism, and O’Grady’s performative critique, drawing on underexplored accounts and theories of the era by Adrian Piper, Judith Wilson, Howardena Pindell, and Just Above Midtown Gallery. This book’s methodological aims are germane both to art history and to critical race studies: first, to reveal longstanding and complex issues around blackness as a conceptual strategy (or, as artist Pope.L has described it, a “social technique”); and second, to offer an interpretive framework for artists who sought a space beyond the racial paradigms that shaped the historiographic narrative of their moment.