With their deviant movements, carefully defined features, and exquisitely detailed faces, the serial drawings of Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Titus Kaphar, and Whitfield Lovell offer refreshing approaches to visual indexes of Black bodies. For some artists, the act of drawing is only a preliminary step toward a final artwork yet to be realized. However, these artists create drawings as complete manifestations of transient forms ā humans in various stages of life and death. Each presents the beauty of Blackness, not to promote its consumerism, but to provide a space for meditation on the invisibility, misrecognition, and complexity of Black people.
Since the moment of European contact with Africans, literary and visual representations have been organized through the Western perception of the world. Colonial images of Black people were generated internationally ā from the nineteenthācentury watercolors of Sarah Baartman in South Africa, to photographs of enslaved Africans in South Carolina, and to stock images of wanted runaways in newspapers throughout the British colonies and the Danish West Indies. Like the images that art historian, Guy C. McElroy (1990) describes in the epigraph above, images of Black people made by racial scientists, artists, and anthropologists formed an index for the purposes of identification, categorization, and containment. Physical differences were categorized as either self or other, a separation that produced a false hierarchy of humanity. The social and psychological impacts of these projects have had a ripple effect across space and time. Their destructive logics are sustained today through the obsessive state management and destruction of Black people in the name of law and order. Powerful in their political intention, yet disguised as scientific objectivity, these images tell the viewer more about the maker than the sitter.
In response to the visual fixing of Blacks as subhuman, photographic practices by Black Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries sought to fight fire with fire by creating their own index from an insider's point of view. From the determined daguerreotypes of abolitionist author Frederick Douglass in the midānineteenth century, to the Exhibit of American Negroes at the 1900 Paris Exposition organized by philosopher and historian W.E.B. DuBois, and to New Negro studio photographers such as James VanDerZee, James Latimer Allen, and Richard Samuel Roberts, counter images were carefully constructed to unsettle previous and ongoing photographic projects that upheld the legacy of White supremacy. The artists featured in this essay build upon the tradition of Black selfārepresentation as counter to colonialist images. Their translations of photography challenge its longāassumed qualities of objectivity, legibility, and identification ā the phenomenological premise of the index. Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Titus Kaphar, and Whitfield Lovell have changed the terms of the index for visual identification. Their drawing projects create an alternative practice, what I am calling a Black index, that counters the assumptions of photography as the most accurate and transparent form for providing information about Black subjects. If āindexes establish their meaning along the axis of a physical relationship to their referents,ā their function as useful signs have failed to establish the recognition of Black people as photographic subjects. (Krauss 1977, p. 70) The Black index is a strategy to contest the overwhelming number of photographs of Black people as victims of violent crimes that are circulated with such regularity and volume that they no longer refer to the persons they depict. Instead, the photographs become a nonāevent that marks the monotonous, unremarkable, and numbing condition of the normality of Blackness as death. The Black index creates new synapses, perceptive inroads into conceiving Black death as loss ā loss to be mourned and remembered. It argues the loss of something that existed in the full complexity of form and spirit that is not presented in the daily march of photographs of Black death.
These artists use drawing to question and transform the reliance on photography as the source for visual objectivity and understanding. In their hands, the index still serves as a finding aid, but the artists challenge their viewers' desire for classification and, instead, redirect them toward different information outside of the photographic, to communicate and offer insight.
I argue that these artists accomplish three things through drawing: (i) make viewers aware of their own expectations of a portrait; (ii) interrupt traditional epistemologies of portraiture through unexpected and unconventional presentations; and (iii) present the Black body through a conceptual lens that acknowledges the legacy of Black containment that is always already present in viewing strategies. Their drawings are not visually similar, nor do they resemble strategies of counter image projects through photography. Their dissimilarity hints at the unexplored approaches to offering new representations of Blackness even in a moment in which contemporary viewers have greater access to images of Black bodies than ever before. Their strategies suggest understandings of Blackness and the racial terms of our neoāliberal condition that are alternatives to legal and popular interpretations. Their art offers a paradigmatic shift within Black visual culture.
Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle: The Evanesced
In her ongoing India ink on paper series, The Evanesced (2016) (Figure 1.1), Californiaābased artist Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle addresses the alarming numbers of Black women internationally who have been abused, murdered, ādisappearedā and trafficked. She intends for the over 100 drawings of women to highlight the subsequent lack of media attention given to their murders. One particular case that prompted her to make the work is that of Los Angeles serial killer, Lonnie D. Franklin, Jr., known as āthe Grim Sleeper.ā At his arrest in 2010, officers discovered more than 100 photographs of the Black women Franklin targeted as his victims in the 1980s and early 2000s. Many of the women have yet to be identified. Hinkle's work resists letting the lives, and deaths, of the women disappear. By making them visible through individual drawings, she seeks to redefine their murders as a loss that should not pass unnoticed. Her title for the series emphasizes the false sense of the women's disposability as objects suitable for violence, whose deaths are treated as unremarkable. The impossible bodies she draws to represent Franklin's victims and other Black women whose lives have ended tragically, intervene in their dismissal.
Hinkle draws in ink rather than pencil, charcoal, or ContĆ© crayon ā the traditional media expected for works on paper. The permanency of ink forces her to commit to her initial mark making and not overthink her gestures. This practice stems from her belief, materially and conceptually, that āartists don't make mistakesā (Cooks 2017a). In The Evanesced, Hinkle uses ink on raw paper so that it is impossible to erase her marks, and thus foreclose the erasure of Black women as her subject matter. Her choice of materials, along with the determination to manifest representations of the forgotten, empowers Hinkle to make the women visible, without apologies.
Although she has looked at Franklin's archive of photographs as a starting point for some of the drawings, his images, which she describes as āmementos of power,ā proved to be too disturbing (Cooks 2017a). Alternatively, she chose to look at photographs shared by the victims' family members. These photographs, a combination of professional headshots, graduation pictures, and candid snapshots, show family bonds, friendship, and love. Some were carefully framed and matted with lace doilies indicating their histories as privately possessed photographs taken by the police from bedroom nightstands or domestic āwalls of prideā to help locate the women. These photographs provide a glimpse into the women's lives that inspired Hinkle's drawings. However, Hinkle prefers to work instinctively, saying that āthe images come from a very raw, intuitive, visionary placeā (Cooks 2017a).
Her final drawings do not visually recall the photographs. The resulting 12 Ć 9 in. artworks on paper are installed with different dimensions, but always in a grid pattern. The modernist format emphasizes the institutional uniformity that police use to present mugshots and photographs of missing victims. In mugshots, faces are ...
