Dressed in an ivory white leotard and tutu, a tall Black figure poses in retiré. Arms and legs angular, chest turned towards the light. It’s a traditional oil on linen — the frothy movement of the ballerina skirt almost like an Edgar Degas.
The image, a self-portrait of Chicago-born figurative painter Thelonious Stokes, is haunting and formidable. The composition appears split in two: In the dancer’s right hand extended towards the shadows, he holds two thirds of watermelon, while a chicken stands at his feet. His face, turned away from the light, is painted coal black — a recurring reference throughout Stokes’s work to the racist practice of blackface. As the dancer’s body lifts up elegantly towards the top left of the painting, the figure seems torn, metaphorically snatched backward by this constellation of racialized tropes.
Two of Stokes’ oil paintings — “Tired of Being a N*gger; Champion of A Fowl; Crossroads red ribbons and chalk lines” (2023) and “The Cry” (2023) — are on display at a new London exhibition exploring the boundaries of Black figurative painting. “The Whole World Smiles With You,” a group show curated by Alayo Akinkugbe at Opera Gallery, offers a more complex view of the genre often overridden, said Akinkgube, by the market’s collective preference for work that expresses “Black Joy” — a phrase used to define resistance and liberation through celebration. The show takes its name from the second half of the 1928 song, “When You’re Smiling (The Whole World Smiles With You),” made famous by Louis Armstrong.
“It’s this idea that if (a Black person) is happy, then all is good,” Akinkugbe told CNN during a preview of the exhibition. “These bright, vivid, happy, palatable paintings did really well post-2020,” he said, referencing the killing of George Floyd on May 25 by then-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. “These were the images that were easy for the art world to engage with. But what happens if you don’t make work that’s so overtly Black, joyous or positive?”
Split into three themes, Akinkugbe has sought out artists whose work escapes a neat definition. In the bright yellow-green gallery, viewers are first welcomed with giant, sunny portraits by Adjei Taiwah and tall, sumptuous musings on flesh by Amoako Boafo. These are the “bright, vivid” works Akinkugbe notes have been leading the charge.
Later, the Black figure is extrapolated completely — a comment on the racist history of Black caricatures, what happens when the Black physicality is changed according to a political narrative. Faces are obscured by drifting loose threads as in Noel Anderson’s woven image; or, as is the case with multimedia artist Jazz Grant, the vast plains of personhood are rendered literally in collage-style cuttings of clouds, horizons, terrains and textures. “When we think of figurative art, it can be quite limited,” said Akinkugbe. “I hope this exhibition shows how sprawling it can be.”
Technically, the definition of figurative art is broad — it’s only prerequisite being that it must depict the human form — yet it has historically been defined by white painters such as Leonardo da Vinci, Vermeer, David Hockney, Lucien Freud and Jenny Saville. In 2013, two years after his death, Francis Bacon’s 1969 figurative triptych “Three Studies of Lucian Freud” broke the world record for the most expensive painting ever sold at auction.
But what happens when your reflection is missing from the gallery walls? You simply paint yourself into the picture. That idea of active representation, of grabbing back the mirror, is Akinkugbe’s final theme. “I’ve always found that very interesting,” she said. “The ways that artists try to usurp the canon. Either supplanting white figures or bringing them to the fore, adopting tropes of European portraiture but using a Black figure.”
‘I paint for the Black grandmas of the future’
Stokes calls his penchant for painting classic European Judeo-Christian scenes of Anunications, cherubs and Jesus on the cross using exclusively Black forms “Blackwashing.” “It’s giving people something to have, something to hold,” he said. “When I was riding through Ghana for the first time in West Africa, I saw a lot of depictions of the Anglo Saxon Christ. It was a little disheartening.”
These are not, he insists, reimaginings, as some might be tempted to call them. “The term reimagining is to neglect so many genuine narratives,” he said. “I like to say we’re reclaiming.” But challenging art history is less interesting to Stokes, whose primary aim is empowerment within his community. “I paint for the Black grandmas of the future,” he said, “For them to have something in their house. I want those Judeo-Christian images to be bootlegged, re-copied and printed. I want people to have those pictures in their homes.”
While public and institutional interest in Black art has been increasing steadily since 2008, attention and engagement is often inextricably linked to the news cycle. According to a report published by ArtNews and Morgan Stanley earlier this year, sales of works by African-born artists (born after 1974) jumped from $16.2 million to $40.6 million in 2021. However by 2023, the total had dropped from $52.1 million down to $17.9 million.
“I do think that in the art world, there was a huge reaction to 2020. So I guess the question is, where are we going from here?” said Akinkugbe. “It’s not that this hasn’t happened before, with the Black Arts Movement in the US and the UK in the ‘80s, also with the Harlem Renaissance (in the 1920s.) We’ve had these movements where there’s been a peak in interest, almost like Black creators have become a trend, then it passes.”
Could exhibitions like “The Whole World Smiles With You” ever make a dent in the pervasive white syllabus of art history? “I would love for someone to see these paintings and have their gaze challenged,” she said. “I think it could broaden someone’s idea of what Black art is. That’s what I hope will happen. But in terms of changing the way art history is taught, I don’t know.”
