CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/7/2024

Visions of the Black figure in ‘The Time is Always Now’

Kerry James Marshall’s 2009 “Untitled (Painter)” is reproduced from new release The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure, published to accompany the critically acclaimed survey on view now at National Portrait Gallery, London. Called “tremendous” and “stunning from first to last” by The Guardian, this must-see exhibition brings together 22 contemporary African diasporic artists, including Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Jordan Casteel, Noah Davis, Lubaina Himid, Titus Kaphar, Wangechi Mutu, Lorna Simpson and Henry Taylor, to name a few. “Through the arts, we are dignified with the entire range of emotions experienced by every other human being on the planet, when we have often been treated as less than fully human because demeaning and reductive concepts of Blackness have been constructed, categorized, perceived and perpetuated in majority white societies for centuries,” Bernardine Evaristo writes. “Through the arts, we throw it all up into the air. We write our poems, plays, scripts. We dance, design. We compose and create music. We make art from our cultures, communities, individuality, imagination. Our creativity strives to burst free from the edicts of those who police its borders, because our aliveness recognizes no borders. It is its own free state.”