The sounds of traffic and passersby, of community and commerce punctuate the noise of three studio spaces overlooking Harlem’s West 125th Street. Measuring 17 by 25 feet, with 15-foot-high ceilings and six-foot-high windows, the open spaces, each separated by a single wall, are the studios of Kira Lynn Harris, Adia Millett, and Kehinde Wiley, this year’s artists in residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem. A cultural landmark, the museum’s mission is to "exhibit, collect, research, and interpret the work of African American artists and artists of African descent locally, nationally, and internationally . . . and to present works that reflect the experiences of people of African descent." In a recent museum-sponsored dialogue with the Studio Museum’s Executive Director Lowery Sims, Senior Curator Thelma Golden observed that the "museum was founded to right the exclusions of the mainstream . . . to right the wrongs of exclusion in the mainstream, and to show artists who weren’t getting opportunities elsewhere."

Begun 33 years ago as part of that founding mission, the Artist-in-Residence Program (AIR) has, over the years, provided studio space, financial and institutional support, and artistic encouragement to a wide range of then-emerging artists, such as Leonardo Drew, Renée Green, David Hammons, and Alison Saar. According to Assistant Curator Christine Y. Kim, who organizes the summer exhibition of work by the artists in residence, the program "gives select artists as much as possible to develop their work." Certainly, the impressive list of former artists in residence bears out the importance of the museum’s function in the support, or rather the nurturing, of artistic production.

The studios of Harris, Millett, and Wiley are filled with pieces in various stages of progress—or process. The work of these three artists reflects a diversity of art-making approaches. Harris, who like Millett and Wiley hails from California, describes her work as being "mostly about light and perception." Interested in the spectator’s physical interactions with her work, she has spent the last five or six years building installations that started off "as pieces that have and are about the sort of destabilizing effect of identity." Harris’ own development as an artist was marked by questions concerning self-identification. Trained as a painter at UC Santa Cruz and Cal Arts, Harris says of her undergraduate experience that "most of the work we were looking at was European art and some Abstract Expressionism. It was formally interesting. However, art is, in part, a personal exploration. And I felt that as much as I enjoyed that work, on a personal level, there was something that was missing for me. . . . I wanted to see where I fit in. My work appears to be very formal, but I think no matter how formal your work, it is very influenced by who you are and where you’re from, what you’re drawn to." Harris began doing as much research as she could in an effort to learn about black artists and create an aesthetic context for herself.

That said, Harris’ work resists the idea that her subject position should be the jumping-off point for any viewer’s experience and understanding of her artwork. Instead, her installations create a disorienting geography that the viewer enters like a tentative Alice. Her medium of choice has long been silver mylar, a material that, like water, reflects and refracts light. The viewer’s uncertain and wavering image reflects back, and some viewers might get disoriented and dizzy. By redirecting the viewer’s gaze toward an inconstant and almost spectral image of herself or himself, Harris incorporates the viewer—and her or his perceptions—into the work. Thus, the locus of meaning shifts from the artist’s intentions to the viewer’s perceptions and the process of perceiving. Because Harris’ imagined geographic spaces repeatedly suggest the constructed quality of meaning and identity, the work complicates any clear shift from one source of meaning to another, from any one fixed identity to another. As a result, both artist and viewer become like specters in relation to the work.

That interest in construction informs Harris’ other work, which is more pointedly concerned with light and the architecture of light. In 96 Degrees in the Shade (2000), an installation she executed for a recent exhibition featuring artists who work with light, Harris used sheets of mylar to reflect shimmers of light along a stone wall. The captured light created magnificent lightscapes that simultaneously suggested the idea of a city skyline and the temporary and tenuous nature of that—or of any—idea. Her photography, an outgrowth of the installations, is, as she describes it, about "minimalism, theatricality, light, and space." Working with polaroids, she enlarges them to four feet by four feet. The resulting images are painterly (Rothkoesque) in their effect while also alluding to Harris’ negotiations across cultural boundaries and traditions. She says that people have often assumed that an Asian artist created her work. They come to the work with particular expectations about the processes and materials that ethnically-defined (read: non-"white") artists use.

Adia Millett, who like Harris exhibited in the Studio Museum’s Freestyle exhibition last summer, makes these and other kinds of expectations an essential part of her art-making process. She creates spaces through which "ideas or stereotypes about others could be challenged." Millett references idyllic, fantasy dollhouses in the scale and size of her pieces, which are scaled at one inch to one foot. She builds dollhouses that the viewer can enter, but are too small to occupy. In these miniatures, "people get to become voyeurs and . . . it’s something they almost have power over." From that position, they begin to write their own narratives onto the spaces and onto the common, everyday objects occupying these spaces.

Because Millett is interested in questioning her own stereotypes and wants the viewer to partake in the same self-examination, she disrupts standard narratives by including contradictory details within the small space of her artwork. In a piece from the series Defining Absence (2000), one of the units in a dollhouse-size, low-rent apartment complex has both a wedding dress and a homeless person’s shopping cart inside it. The stereotypical narratives that we attach to such objects compete and couple in this crafted space. Millett explains that her "idea was to make a space where you might imagine a specific age, race of person, and . . . then to contradict that. Not just for multiple meanings, but so that multiple viewers could have access to that." Millett is firm in her commitment to making artwork that is accessible to as broad an audience as possible. By juxtaposing tiny replicas of objects that might signal ideas about different classes, ethnicities, races, or genders, Millett directs the viewer’s perception toward object-associations as well as narrative and meaning-making processes.

Looking at Millett’s detailed replica of an apartment complex, it’s easy to project one’s own ideas about similar-looking complexes onto Millett’s structures and speculate about the kind of people who might live in them. Of course, because the spaces are miniature, no one lives in them. As Millett explains, "It’s really our ideology and our memory that live in this space. There are never any figures in the space because it’s about absence. . . . The viewer comes and defines what’s missing from the space." Millett directs the viewer’s attention by forcing the viewer to focus on the details, and through the details on her or his own thinking.

To produce her pieces, Millett uses labor-intensive crafts such as needlepoint, cross-stitch, or clay brick-making. Environment and access have everything to do with her work. This all plays a part in Millett’s larger intention to question "binary systems and how they can be broken apart." She creates a contradictory space that follows the edict Stuart Hall identifies with black popular culture in his essay, "What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?" Hall writes,"It is a site of strategic contestation. But it can never be simplified or explained in terms of the simple binary oppositions that are still habitually used to map it out: high and low; resistance versus incorporation; authentic versus inauthentic; experiential versus formal; opposition versus homogenization." Millett incorporates craft techniques, in part because of their "traditional" place as (peripheral and largely functional) woman’s work, describing this use of craft as "a passive way of influencing morals and ethics . . . [but] passive with the power to suggest American culture." She relocates craft to the center of art-discussion and through it suggests the American "home" as filtered through the lenses of individual narratives and object-associations, which are, of course, by-products of, or variants on, public narratives/constructions of class, race, gender, geography, good, bad, etc.

Both Harris and Millett complicate ideas of identity and meaning by engaging the possibility of multiple viewpoints. Their work reflects what curator Thelma Golden described in her museum talk with Sims as the "different way that these younger artists are identifying" and questioning identity. Golden defines as "post-black" the marked ideological shift from the Black Arts movement of the late-’60s and ’70s, which in certain ways delineated political and social parameters and functions for what could be considered black art, to the more boundary-resistant work by black artists in the ’90s. In an article by Aïda Mashaka Croal, Golden explains the term as referring to artists "who are adamant about not being labeled as ‘black’ artists, though their work is steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness." The term, she explains, is a "defining principle in order not to have a defining principle."

In a different but related vein, Kehinde Wiley’s work focuses specifically on the black male body as a construction site of aestheticized masculinity. Part of Wiley’s project is exploring "how the image can critique representation." His large figurative paintings of black men reference both historical traditions in Western (European) art and black (American) popular culture. Wiley describes the pictorial space in his work as "very highly quotidian . . . so everything is quoting something, which is quoting something else. It’s this sort of echo chamber of [cultural] references, calling into question this whole issue of authenticity." By juxtaposing the elaborate ornamentation and hyperstylizations of the French rococo with the excessive qualities of hip-hop "bling-bling," Wiley flattens out history into two-dimensional space and creates a visual context in which "those references interact in an equivalent sense." In this aspect, his work reflects the sensibility of the Studio Museum’s recent Black Romantic exhibit (and, in fact, is included in it), which sought to create a visual context in which figurative "fine" and "popular" art visually interact.

Style is the subject of what’s going on. It’s also the means. Wiley’s interest is "in creating a hybrid moment that is neither the originating moment nor the other but where the combination creates this odd sensation that’s new." His work generates a hybrid moment across cultural boundaries: braided hair and pieces of fabric with elaborate French designs exist in the space as equals. Wiley outs the references as signifiers of a singular aesthetic impulse.

In Wiley’s painting Conspicuous Fraud, Series 1: The Committee, corporeal bulk is extended by massive puffy jackets and protuberant hair. Three images of the same model dressed in a large orange jacket with no pants face different directional positions, his hair in various stages of overgrowth. Historically, head hair is connected to ideas of spirit and reason. In African American culture, hair has long been codified as an indicator of both spiritual and political position. In both Conspicuous Fraud, Series 1: The Committee (2001) and Conspicuous Fraud, Series 1: Eminence (2001), the latter on display in Black Romantic, the subject’s hair suggests the arabesque movements of rococo decorations. In these two paintings, hair, which typically indicates a synchronicity between physical and spiritual virility, becomes a living, weaving extension of the corporeal that is so powerful it threatens to take over. Outgrowing/overreaching all reasonable limits, the hair becomes a sort of body on the body, even taking on a body’s creative aspects, combining a potent sexual force (and its phallic shape) with focused aesthetic concerns. It seems to loop itself. (Visually, the male figures are almost overwhelmed by these phalluses.) In other pieces, the hair is so hyperstylized that it becomes a clear object of value, an object d’art. Wiley presents this theatrical and artificial aspect of masculinity, thereby creating a sense of what he describes as "the pathetic within the heroic." At the same time, he calls attention to "the pageantry in the absolute fake" (in marketable masculinity and blackness) in order to critique (and to poke fun at) it.

In an interview with Lowery Sims, performance artist William Pope L. explains the problems of canonical blackness that Wiley’s work resists. He writes: "Blackness has always been a kind of rabbit’s hole—an uncertainty of someone else’s making. Black People are always the Alice with the question. For a long time, for many black folk, choosing to be black meant choosing the hole of disenfranchisement and thus one’s fate at the bottom of the political and ideological hierarchy. But embedded in this lack was an active opposition. Be that the Black church, black revolutionaries, black teacher, licorice patriots of all stripes and genders. Still, black people, no matter how strong the ideological chains that held them, always found a way to re-make themselves. Sometimes they made themselves into images of their makers. Sometimes they made themselves into anxious fantasies of what they thought black was supposed to be. Making is an important risk, not to be missed, even if it means making a mistake."

Making (and unmaking) and the dialogic are where Harris, Millett, Wiley, and the Studio Museum in Harlem seem to locate authenticity. The appeal of a "post-black" ideology is its rejection of essentialized "blackness," which is often about being the observed object as well as being put in the position of reacting against and within the parameters of limiting cultural hierarchies. One question is whether or not that position can ever be escaped. Identity and the self are, after all, social inventions—and impositions. It’s interesting that the impulse of Harris, Millett, and Wiley to articulate and critique their own ethno-aesthetic contexts—as well as the Studio Museum’s continuing mission to exhibit, collect, research, and interpret the work of artists defined as African-American and of African descent—suggests both the inescapability and the appeal of certain kinds of definitions and associations. Because social and political realities have not kept pace with aesthetic and theoretical explorations, the Studio Museum is forced to simultaneously bear and challenge traditions.

The work of these three artists and work that has appeared in recent Studio Museum shows such as Freestyle and Black Romantic suggest that within this particular context the tradition of challenging definitions of blackness and the individual, group, and institutional identities that limit the range, context, and visual language of black experience is alive and kicking.

An exhibition of the work of Harris, Millett, and Wiley will take place at the Studio Museum in Harlem from July 10-September 22, 2002.

Tonya Foster teaches at City College of New York’s Bridge to Medicine Program and Cooper Union’s Saturday/Outreach Program. She is a poet and the co-editor of Third Mind: Creative Writing through Visual Arts (2002), an anthology of essays.