The Brooklyn Museum presents John Edmonds: A Sidelong Glance, the Brooklyn-based photographer’s first solo museum exhibition. Edmonds’ intimate photos, featuring friends from his creative circle as well as still lifes of African artwork, examine Black queer experiences and identity.
Originally from Washington, DC, the 31-year-old artist earned his BFA from Corcoran School of Art & Design and an MFA in Photography from Yale University. His portraits of friends, lovers, and sometimes strangers, explore “identity, community, and desire,” according to the artist's website. His early work includes The "Du-Rag Series," featuring candid shots of men and women donning the headwear on the streets of his Crown Height neighborhood, he said in an interview for Another Man. These photos soon led to his portraiture work which combines elements of Black American culture with references to religious paintings and modernist photography.
A Sidelong Glance features three groups of recent work. The first includes portraits of friends from the NYC creative community posing with African masks and sculptures borrowed from a Brooklyn collector. Many of his models gaze at or grasp the objects to illustrate “the reception of African art in the United States and Europe that has been conditioned by the legacies of colonialism,” according to the museum. “I was drawn to the objects because of how they were stylized and how that stylizing spoke to a wider view of an ‘African’ vernacular of Black homes in America,” Edmunds stated.
In Tête de Femme (Portrait of Ladin), a young woman with her head propped on a table poses next to an elaborate African mask, emulating Man Ray’s Noire et blanche in which a white model poses with a mask from Côte d’Ivoire. Unlike Man Ray’s model, the woman in Edmonds’ portrait has her eyes open and stares directly at the viewer. The model’s confident gaze suggests a reclamation of the artwork from Man Ray's photo.
A shirtless figure seated before a Kuba cloth wears a large-beaked mask in Two Spirits. The Ge Gon (male spirit) mask from Liberia is traditionally worn during masquerade performances. The double exposure image gives the surreal appearance of two masks. According to the artist this portrait “calls and echoes the sentiments of Ibeji” a spirit that represents a pair of twins—a reference to the model’s gender-fluidity.
The second series of images features models interacting with Edmonds’ personal collection of African artwork which includes a mix of both religious objects and commercial pieces to question “what makes or who deems an object ‘authentic.’”
Anatolli & Collection features a man staring intently at a selection of sculptures from the artist’s collection. “Anatolli gazes upon these sculptures as he himself is gazed upon by Edmonds and the viewer, rendering him a parallel object of desire,” the wall text reads.
For the third group of images, the Brooklyn Museum gave Edmonds access to its Arts of Africa collection, including objects donated to the institution in 2015 by the estate of Ralph Ellison, the author of the 1952 novel Invisible Man.
Shot in the Brooklyn Museum’s Beaux-Art Court, a man dressed in black admires a Yaure mask once owned by Ellison in Untitled (Marion & Yaure Mask). Unlike Edmonds' earlier works in which his models engage with the objects, this model sits at a distance from the artwork to illustrate “barriers created by art history and its institutions.”
Edmonds’ elegant and evocative photographs pay tribute to African arts while revising art history narratives by incorporating his experience as a young Black artist. His work was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Edmonds was also the recipient of the inaugural UOVO Prize for emerging artists in Brooklyn. A Sidelong Glance is presented as part of that prize along with a $25,000 cash grant and the installation of a 50 x 50-foot mural of Edmonds’ 2019 photo Whose Hands? on the façade of UOVO’s Bushwick facility.
John Edmonds: A Sidelong Glance
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn
Exhibition on view through August 8, 2021
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