Thelonious Stokes USA, b. 1996

This portrait by Thelonious Stokes portrays Louis Till holding his joyful son Emmett upon his lap. The portrait offers a noble glimpse of the Till men during a moment of calm, an image belying the tragic ends which befell both of these individuals. Louis Till and another soldier were hanged while serving in Italy by the United States army for crimes of which they were convicted after a single unsubstantiated confession from another soldier. Ten years later, Louis’s son Emmett Till was abducted and lynched in Mississippi at age 14 after a verbal encounter with a White girl in a store. The murderers of Emmett Till were found innocent. They later confessed publicly that they tortured and killed the young man, but were never punished due to a legal technicality. Stokes mobilizes his painting practice to examine Black identity and representation through various personal, social, and historical lenses, especially in the context of the colonial, mostly White structures and concepts that have traditionally defined what we are calling the “Western art historical canon.” Throughout his practice, Stokes has sought ways to reconceptualize the Black experience. Whether through his paintings, his performances, his videos, or his songwriting, he challenges the inconsistencies and myopic representations of Black identity offered by institutional systems of belief such as art history.