Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Black Lives Paintings

Mass society often struggles to consider the lives of black folks as just folks, living somewhere in between the world of very real injustice decried by Black Lives Matter and the mythological kingdom of Wakanda. The American TV show Black-ish is one attempt to do that. In a great feature at Vogue we learn that the figurative paintings of the British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye seek "to make black people visible and to make that seem normal, not celebratory." Well, if the works aren't celebratory, they are energetic and beautiful. The colors are spectacular; the brush work in that sweet spot between pure figuration and abstraction. The article tells us she composes the pieces right on the canvas without preliminary sketches and completes them in a day or so. They are large. And maybe they are celebratory after all, IMHO.