The Art of Remembering: Essays on African American Art and History

15 What deana laWson Wants the text that the Guggenheim Museum had placed on the web page for Centropy, Deana Lawson’s Hugo Boss Prize exhibition, was indeed intriguing. It promised a body of conceptual photography in which “the everyday is transfigured into the uncanny and the magnificent” by drawing on “the legacies of historical portraiture, documentary photography, and the family album, but [it] transcends these traditions, constructing scenes that merge lived experience with imagined narratives. . . . The aesthetics and intergenerational connectivity of the Black diaspora guide Lawson’s choice of subject matter. Each of her works takes its place in an overarching project , cohering into what she terms ‘an ever-expanding mythological extended family.’”1 But what did centropy mean? A Google search revealed only links to Lawson ’s show and a stray entry in the online Urban Dictionary. Was this a bespoke term for the new visual order that Lawson had miraculously achieved? How was this fantastical language, and the highly orchestrated images that Lawson made by placing models that she had specifically sought out or strangers that she had approached in public places and then paid to pose in locations of the artist’s choosing, changing the ways that Black people are 238 — Chapter Fifteen being seen in the space of the gallery or museum? Was Lawson really picturing Black people in a transcendent and “magnificent” new way, I wondered. Over the past three or four years, I had become familiar with Lawson’s work but had yet to see it in person. Since an appreciation for and curiosity about the aesthetic expressions of Black life in the United States and throughout the African diaspora is a key motivator for my own work, I wanted to see Centropy for myself.2 Compelled by the spirit of “intergenerational connectivity,” I thought it would be helpful to encounter the show with my good friend and former student Brittany, a Brooklyn-born and -based television writer who specializes in hip-hop and youth culture and is just young enough to be my daughter. A few weeks later, we spent an afternoon in Centropy, talking through the work surrounded by the large crystals, holograms, lenticular images, and other shiny objects that Lawson had included in her installation. Brittany began by confessing to me that while she had always loved Lawson’s work when she scrolled past it on her phone, now that she was encountering the same images almost life-size, framed within wide bands of mirrored glass, the work was having a different effect. Yet it was still gratifying to see familiar spaces of Black life finally being presented in the space of one of the world’s 15.1 Installation view of Deana Lawson’s exhibition Centropy, Guggenheim Museum New York, May 7–October 11, 2021. Photo by Lakshmi Amin for Hyperallergic What Deana Lawson Wants — 239 most important museums. She pointed to Barrington and Father (2021) and related how the mirrored wall behind the two male figures resembled one from the 1970s in the living room of the Clinton Hill apartment that she had inherited from the grandmother who had raised her. I agreed with her; there was a highly satisfying nostalgia quotient that felt familiar to me. I can vividly recall my own five-year-old thighs sticking painfully to the plastic slipcovers that protected the Louis XV sofas in my Nana Shaw’s tiny, subsidized apartment in Blackity-Black Roxbury, Massachusetts. But as we moved through the exhibition, we became increasingly concerned by the ways that Black people were being presented in other examples of Lawson’s work. “That lady there, who looks like she might be sleeping,” Brittany said, indicating Deleon? Unknown (2020), a piece that appeared to be a blown-up snapshot of a pregnant woman lying on a bed with a scribble of ballpoint ink across its surface. “Look at her hair. No Black woman that I know would ever let anyone take her picture with her hair sticking up like that. It’s so clear she has no idea what’s going on. What about consent?” I wondered whether some of Lawson’s images were other people’s personal snapshots that had been appropriated without the subjects’ or makers’ knowledge. But I couldn’t be sure, since adding digital effects to provide a faux-historical patina is one tool in Lawson’s complex of methods. And what about the subjects who either were not looking back at the camera or seemed unaware of...