Young, FITTED and Black
Gagosian curator-director Antwaun Sargent on Black faces, Black spaces + HOW HE GETS HIS BODE CUSTOM!!
Antwaun Sargent — he’s a critic, author and, as of a few weeks ago, the newest director & curator at Gagosian gallery. Over the years Antwaun’s written about art for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Vice, among other places. In 2019 he published his first book, The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion, and last year he edited Young, Gifted and Black: A New Generation of Artists. His first Gagosian show is slotted for later this year.
More impressive than any of that, as far as we’re concerned?? Antwaun stays flooding the damn feed with elegant over-the-top fit pic upon elegant over-the-top fit pic … And since Blackbird Spyplane is the No. 1 source across all media for “unbeatable art-theorizing while being dripped down,” it was only natural that we hit up Antwaun & ask him to tell us about a rare & cherished possession…
He didn’t think long before choosing a sketch of himself, drawn by L.A. artist Henry Taylor, whose incredible paintings first came on our radar at the 2017 Whitney Biennial. “It’s bizarre for me to say as a gallery director, but my personal relationship to art isn’t about objects, it’s about social, communal relationships,” Antwaun says. “So I haven’t actually gotten around to framing the drawing yet — but I need to.”
Blackbird Spyplane: You’ve said the first Gagosian show you work on will explore “notions of Black space” — tell us more about that.
Antwaun Sargent: “I’ve gotten deeply interested over the last few years in visual artists who’ve expanded their practices out into the communities in which they live, and who have a real material effect on those communities — and the reason they have that effect is because they’re obsessed with the spaces which we as Black people occupy, and the spaces we’ve been excluded from occupying. That’s ‘spaces’ in the sense of institutions, like galleries and museums; it’s ‘spaces’ in the sense of communities; and it’s spaces that are psychological. Because all of those are important in the ways we negotiate power and negotiate worth.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Community-building is cool in any case, but especially in the context of the art world, which can often feel like this insular, closed-off system…
Antwaun Sargent: “What’s funny about the art world is it’s obsessed with talking about audiences — ‘reaching this audience,’ ‘reaching that audience’ — but the actual work does not always reflect that. I think things are changing, though. Over the last several years, people have started to address the historical limitations and erasures and the ways we’ve used spaces in racist and sexist ways. What I basically mean by that is we used to just show white straight men, and that’s starting to change.”