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 organisation 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 centres 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 neighbourhood. 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 (b. 1925 — d. 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.'
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 colonisation weaponised 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 haemorrhage' 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 analysing it to destroy it.'
SKIN + MASKS will centre 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:
HEBRU BRANTLEY
SHERMAN BECK
ANDREA COLEMAN
MIKEY COLEMAN
JOSHUA DONKOR
NDIDI EMEFIELE
JEWEL HAM
ARMANI HOWARD
DADA KHANYISA
MIA LEE
MUNA MALIK
KENRICK MCFARLANE
JOSIE LOVE ROEBUCK
JAHLIL NZINGA
FOSTER SAKYIAMAH
TROY SCAT
ELIZABETH SEKYIAMAH
SYDNIE JIMENEZ
TERRON COOPER SORRELLS
EROL HARRIS
THELONIOUS STOKES
NIKKO WASHINGTON
JAKE TROYLI
DARRYL WESTLY
GERALD WILLIAMS
Press release courtesy Kavi Gupta.
219 N. Elizabeth Street
Chicago, IL 60607
United States
www.kavigupta.com
+ 1 312 496 3552
Thursday – Friday, 11am – 5pm
Saturday, 12pm – 5pm
And by appointment