Blak Origin Moment (Noel Anderson)

Blak Origin Moment is the first major monograph from the Louisville, Kentucky-born, New York-based artist Noel Anderson, coinciding with a career landmark exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. The book delves into Anderson’s ongoing exploration of an evolving black consciousness as he wrestles with both the physical and psychological legacies of images, events and materials.

In a practice that continues to gather momentum, Anderson has become known for circuitous investigations into the evolving make-up of black male identity via the medium of textiles. From tattered old rugs to mechanically-produced tapestries, he embeds a spectrum of fibers with found images and physical usage just long enough to fray their edges and challenge their legibility.Blak Origin Moment continues this course as Anderson pushes his study into the fraught post-Ferguson era of Black Lives Matter and heightened racial tensions in the United States. Prompted by the provocative question, “when did you know you were black?” he collects oral, artifact-based and visual histories to ultimately restructure the origin and genealogy of black consciousness. His works attempt to locate an elusive black essence by way of images, sound, and objects which, for Anderson, “evoke moments where racial recognition is heightened”, but resolution is deferred.