Fade

Meg Whiteford Let’s talk about the title.

Kiki Teshome The word “fade” reminds me of something on the precipice of disappearing. A lot of these artists are grappling with what it means to be making in a moment when so much is changing, and the context they’re stepping into is markedly different than the one that they were brought up in. The word offers multiple ways to think through artists working within this transitory moment of their careers, as well as in the world at large.

Yelena Keller I think of “fade” like a flow state. For me, this word brings up a feeling of movement and implies a sense of time that is blurred or stretched. Time plays such an important role in the work of so many of these artists, whose practices reference ancestry, material histories, and an elongation of temporality that reaches into the past as a way to understand the present.

Habiba Hopson I think of anti-disciplinarity— artists who are perhaps labelled as painters or sculptors, but who are at heart, assemblage artists or work across multiple media. There’s a desire to not remain fixed within a single medium. In that sense, “fade” feels like a loosening of boundaries between disciplines and categories that have historically structured how artists are understood.

Jayson Overby Jr. It leans into something colloquial as well: what could fade mean in a really Black space with Black thinking? Shanta Lawson, our Senior Director of Learning and Engagement, mentioned the fade haircut and the basketball move known as the fadeaway. I’m thinking about someone saying “catch this fade,” which is synonymous with getting checked.

HH I also think of the cinematic gesture of fading into black. When that appears in a film, it can signal an ending of a scene, but it also creates this pause where the viewer has to fill in the gaps. So, the word is capacious—it holds
disappearance but also transition.

YK From a curatorial perspective, our goal was less to curate a show around a specific theme and more to create a show that exemplified what we saw out in the world. While the artists and their work are very diverse, there were some clear throughlines that intrigued us like the resistance to being overly didactic or an approach to material that is both deeply researched and experimental. With the desire to be ungraspable, I think these artists are in many ways tapping into a long history of Black artists, poets, and musicians who have used coded language and references as a way to connect directly with specific audiences.

Adria Gunter “Fade” also held a particular resonance when we said it out loud and in sequential order with the previous “F” shows: Freestyle, Frequency, Flow, Fore, Fictions, Fade. It sounded right. Conceptually, “fade” suggests going in and out of a state of being, which, speaks to an in-between-ness or a resistance to permanence that we observed in many of these artists’ practices.

MW You can say you’ve observed connections between artists, but perhaps you were looking for them or finding them by seeing what you wanted to see there. How did you bring your different backgrounds and experiences to your studio visits and how did you approach bringing the individual into this collective endeavor?

KT I find your question to be difficult because, coming into this process, I had to eliminate some of my own ways of working and thinking to be able to receive what we were observing. That could be said for everyone at this table. We entered this process with ideas about what emerging artists might be considering in this present moment but were continually surprised to see the range of issues and imagery that appeared across artists’ works.

MW With the opening of this exhibition, the history of the “F” show will have spanned twenty-five years. What have you learned from researching past shows? Were you thinking about this lineage when you were putting together this group of artists or on your studio visits?

AG The weight of the legacy of “F” shows was something I was feeling quite intensely. This is an incredible moment and one that we should all feel empowered to seize alongside these amazing artists. This is but one show in all of our careers. There will be many to come. This is one moment. It’s not the moment. I hope that these artists also feel that too.

Learn more about Fade with Unpacking: Fade, an audio series by the Studio Museum in Harlem produced that invites listeners to dive deeper into Fade by hearing from current and past curators of the “F” shows and the artists in this exhibition. New interviews will be released throughout the course of the exhibition. Unpacking: Fade is produced by SOUND MADE PUBLIC and is available on Bloomberg Connects.