Forthcoming, Skin + Masks: Decolonizing Art Beyond the Politics of Visibility curated by Vic Mensa: Kavi Gupta | Elizabeth Street
“Before it can adopt a positive voice, freedom requires an effort at disalienation.”
—Frantz Fanon (b. 1925, d. 1961)
Kavi Gupta | 219 N. Elizabeth St. Chicago, IL. 60607
Opening reception: Saturday, June 18, from 5 - 9 PM
Kavi Gupta presents SKIN + MASKS, a group show curated by Vic Mensa, Grammy-nominated rapper, author, singer, visual artist, activist, NAACP Image Awards nominee, and founder of SaveMoneySaveLife, a Chicago-based, philanthropic non-profit organization operating at the intersection of art, entertainment, and sustainable social change.
Operational since 2018, SaveMoneySaveLife has forwarded initiatives in violence prevention and supported youth arts programs in response to evolving community needs. Kavi Gupta will donate all proceeds from SKIN + MASKS to SaveMoneySaveLife for use in creating infrastructure and providing resources for young artists in Accra, Ghana. "Ghana is the hub of fine art in West Africa right now," says Mensa, whose family is Ghanaian. "What's needed is resources."
Mensa’s creative and political work centers the need for critical thinking, honest self-expression, and public truth-telling. He first became aware of the disparities that exist between the rich and poor in America while growing up in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. He learned to express his thoughts and feelings through the arts.
“As long as I can remember, I’ve been an artist,” Mensa says. “Drawing, singing, painting, rapping, you name it. It’s my lifestyle, my method of self-expression.”
For his curatorial debut with Kavi Gupta, Mensa deploys a seminal text by Antilles-born author Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) as a foundation for a group art exhibition aimed at decolonizing Black art beyond the politics of visibility.
“Before it can adopt a positive voice,” Fanon writes, “freedom requires an effort at disalienation.”
Nikko Washington, Swing on 'Em, 2021. Oil on canvas, 60 x 48 in. Courtesy of the artist.
Fanon wrote brilliantly about the ways that the barriers of race impede our ability to experience humanity. Published in 1952, his book Black Skin, White Masks is a psychoanalytical tour-de-force, exposing how colonization weaponized skin as an agent of alienation, imposing an existential divide on people, Black and White.
“The White man is sealed in his whiteness,” Fanon Writes. “The Black man in his blackness.”
The supremacy assumed and projected by the European, colonial White gaze causes Black people to experience what Fanon calls “an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage” that separates them from the development of an individuated self image. This prevents Black people and White people alike from experiencing anything close to true freedom.
“I believe that the fact of the juxtaposition of the White and Black races has created a massive psychoexistential complex,” Fanon writes. “I hope by analyzing it to destroy it.”
SKIN + MASKS will center work by a range of contemporary artists who, like Fanon, are striving to understand and express the meaning of Black identity not from the vantage point of White gaze, but from the perspective of individual realities, including:
ARMANI HOWARD
Erol Harris
Kavi Gupta | 219 N. Elizabeth St. Chicago, IL. 60607
