And don't forget Toyin Ojih Odutola, also Nigerian-born, Alabama-raised and New York-based, whose most recent exhibition of Nigeria's beau monde (a sort of sampling/mash-up of Marshall and Amanze) graced the Whitney Museum of American Art in a form of African utopia last year. Ojih Odutola takes on black aristocrats and princelings, barons and baronesses with country estates and accessorial African It-girls by their side. It's Afrogra m for the turbo-charged spending set, yet oddly nostalgic - more Victori-Afrogram. This newly wealthy, energized and globally cultivated set are coming; make way for the blackstocrats. Singer and performance artist Solange (Beyoncé's younger sister) even occasionally models and collaborates with Ojih Odutola.
This new art and creative elite has its tentacles everywhere. It's in Kehinde Wiley's regal depictions of Barack Obama and Michael Jackson. And it's in the ruling hip-hoppification of luxury brands and products which has blinged, blanged and blunged the bottom lines of every artisanal-yet-global player, from Louis Vuitton to Chanel. If you think that's a "yes we Kim and Kanye" or a Pharrell too far, you ain't seen nothing yet. To wit, it's also in Wakanda, the nation-state of great wealth and advanced technology in the blockbuster movie Black Panther, and the rise of technology from Silicon Valley in California to Silicon Savannah in Africa. From slavery to freedom and now with dreams transcending liberty and wealth, it's the Afro-garde, the Afroternative, Afronauts and Afrotech.
Last but not least, let's highlight Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga, born in 1991 in the Democratic Republic of Congo, whose pastoral, gilded artworks meld motherboard-like patterns into the multi-texture of black skin, marking a contrast between the digital world and African tribes. Bizarre but amusing, and familiar yet foreign, Ilunga may be the most on-brand for contemporary culture. If earthlings were simultaneously androids and aristocrats, he has cultivated a brave new world of blurred humanity. Beyond the black and white, it's the iridescent glow and blur of trans-human narrative.
And that's something we should all get behind.
