Afro-esoteric Knowledge in New Visions For Iris
Afro-esoteric Knowledge in New Visions For Iris by Awol Erizku
We are gifted flowers for mourning, celebrating birth, and celebrating those around us. If we want to create a lasting gift for people to enjoy for years to come, we create gardens. Gardens are a place we can go to escape the horrors of the world. Additionally, they inhabit an interesting intersection between public and private. While they are ostensibly on private property, to be appreciated by those cultivating the land, their beauty cannot be fenced in. Much like the flowers found blossoming in a garden, the works in New Visions For Iris operate within a similar duality. In this case, the bus stop acts as a garden of Afro-esotericism. Los-Angeles-based Ethiopian multimedia artist Awol Erizku (B.1989 Gondar, Ethiopia) debuted New Visions For Iris on February 24, 2021. The photo series is a visual exploration of multimedia artist Awol Erizku's Ethiopian American identity and explores religion, capitalism, and America's current problem of police violence against Black communities. It is dedicated to his young daughter Iris. The theme of the exhibition is rebirth, as new ideas are being born. Erizku presents his newborn daughter a portal to alternative futures and plants the seeds for Iris to propagate.
Erizku’s work strives to make Black aesthetics as universal as European aesthetics. Erizku, who was born in Gondar, Ethiopia, and grew up in the Bronx now lives between L.A. and New York. He received his BFA from Cooper Union and his MFA from the visual art program at Yale. While attending Cooper Union, he worked under David LaChapelle, Lorna Simpson, and Margaret Morton, and their influences can be found throughout his works. Erizku first achieved international acclaim after his first solo exhibition Black and Gold, debuted at the Hasted-Kraeutler gallery in 2012. In the exhibition, Erizku portrays Black women in the manner of European classics (Marshall, 166). The most well-known of the works is "Girl with a Bamboo Earring," which is inspired by Johannes Vermeer's famous "Girl with a Pearl Earring" and features a Black model.
After collaborating with Beyonce and photographing her internet-breaking twin-pregnancy reveal, Erizku gained even more notoriety. The portrait depicting Beyonce channeling Venus and Madonna received 11 million likes, earning the record as the most-liked Instagram photo ever (Wall Street International, 2017). His practice which incorporates photography, mixed media collage, painting, and sculpture, is shaped by his upbringing in a Muslim household. He has spoken about the influence of New York rappers like Nas and Rakim on him, as well as his respect for and lineage with Duchamp and David Hammons, whose work like Erizku, deals with race in America through a range of mediums and methods. His sculptural installations and photography meld “canonical Western artworks with assemblages lifted from African culture, gang markings, and vernacular objects” (Artnet).
His latest exhibition, New Visions For Iris, is a collection of 13 portraits, commissioned by The Public Art Fund, is projected on digital billboards across over 350 JCDecaux bus shelters in New York and Chicago. The series of 13 still life images were created in early 2020 at Erizku's studio in Los Angeles and a local park, and include meditative portraits of men praying and a melange of icons and artifacts such as African masks, East African symbols such as Egyptian motifs, and sacred Islamic texts juxtaposed with everyday things such as flowers and candles. Erizku’s bold body of art, which fuses vivid and heavily saturated hues with playful iconography, has made him a household name. As he discusses the Black experience and alludes to art historical references and cultural trends, his vivid artworks make thought-provoking comments. Located in high-traffic areas, the bus shelters are visible 24 hours a day to vehicular and pedestrian traffic (JCDecaux Image). The still-life images in New Visions For Iris are displayed in JPEG format on LED screens with a resolution of 150dpi and 1080 (w) x 1920 (h) pixels in portrait orientation. I did not have the opportunity to see images in person but I was able to view the works on the Public Art Fund website. While waiting for the bus, visitors can enjoy the artwork or take a selfie in front of the screen. Since bus stops are often directive tools for advertising, the JCDecaux bus shelters in New York and Chicago remain widely visible to the public during the pandemic. Additionally, many people remain hesitant to visit museums or galleries in person, therefore Erizku's free public outdoor installation helps visitors safely enjoy and engage with the artworks. The images are located in predominantly Black neighborhoods, and in a way, Erizku is turning the camera onto the Black community. By placing these still-life portraits at these bus stops, Erizku creates self-referential visions of Blackness, breaking from the canons of conventional Black portraiture photography. He states ‘I think about how to raise a daughter in this world and explain cultural parameters and grey areas; I want my daughter Iris to grow up with these images so they’re the norm for her. I want to reflect a less fixed, rigid, institutional understanding of the spaces we occupy’ (Artnet). Erizku successfully achieves his goal of explaining Ethiopian culture to his daughter, although audiences that aren't familiar most likely won't understand what the items in the collage represent. Regardless, I personally believe it's the most powerful image in the series because it succinctly depicts Ethiopian culture in an aesthetically pleasing and accurate way.
As Erizku's worldview reflects a strong influence of African aesthetics in the still-life photographs, the images he tackles deal with fatherhood, identity, capitalism, and spirituality. Inspired by ‘pre-colonial and oral African culture' (Public Art Fund), he uses African masks and other artifacts and symbols to construct a visual manifesto of the Ethiopian-American diaspora experience. Cowrie shells, which have long been used as decorative objects in Ethiopia, Ethiopian Ge'ez script, which transcends the limits of Western language, and Nefertiti busts, are also all included. Toys, which embody his connection to fatherhood and his daughter's newborn identity, are present and reference his own generation and experience. For example, in the portrait “13 Months of Sunshine”, he presents a visual manifesto of Ethiopian culture for his daughter Iris, with a title that refers to Ethiopia's iconic tourism slogan. The photo depicts a shrine featuring cowrie shell decorations scattered across a glossy red surface. Cowrie shells are symbolic of womanhood, fertility, birth, and prosperity in Habesha culture. Bright and bold rainbow-colored plastic Amharic alphabet tiles are also mixed into the shrine with the cowrie shells. Erizku explains “these magnetic Amharic alphabet tiles are Iris’s. I bought them for her when she was still in the womb because I knew she would learn from them at some point. My mother sent a poem [in Amharic] to Iris and I tried to translate it, but I couldn’t capture the essence. I thought: I am just going to leave this poem as is so she can learn the language and decipher it herself”(Knight, Curbed).
In the portrait “Zuhr”, a Muslim man is depicted praying in a park wearing a Kobe Bryant Lakers jersey and a kufi hat, representing modernity. The genre-bending photograph is a tribute to his adopted forefather, Kobe Bryant while capturing a contemporary portrayal of Black life. Erizku states “I’ve been thinking a lot about the ethical way to memorialize someone. Kobe passed away around the same time my daughter was born. I remember how gloomy it was that day and talking to my sister about how it felt like losing a family member. The last time I went to pray before lockdown, the person in front of me was wearing a Kobe jersey. This made sense as a sort of memorializing for Kobe (Knight, Curbed). In several of the portraits, including Zuhr, Erizku symbolizes the quest for freedom by depicting falcons, which are allegorical symbols for democracy. The frequent appearance of falcon seems slightly cliche as it's one of the most overt symbols of freedom ever. But I do believe Erizku renders Blackness in a way that can only be accomplished by someone with a lifetime of lived experience and captures the penetrating perspective and comprehension of his kin. In a way, he is creating a new way to look at race and establishing a new canon in favor of his daughter Iris.
New Visions For Iris was released during a year marked by a deadly pandemic, climate disasters, political turmoil, and widespread demonstrations against police brutality. However, the secret blessing of having a newborn baby during the pandemic has cultivated a spiritual and artistic reset for Erizku in the midst of the turmoil. The exhibition focuses on coming to terms with fatherhood and creating and reimagining Black futures by showcasing the present while pointing to the future. In comparison to his previous works, New Visions For Iris feel a little flat. New Visions For Iris is much more somber in nature, whereas Erizku's previous works juxtapose contemporary faces with familiar western art historical imagery (Marshall, 167), in fun and playful ways. However, in New Visions For Iris, Erizku's work appears much more mature, and continues elevating Blackness in the canon of art history through his afro-esoteric portrayals of Black people, which he captures “in a serious and an artistic way” (Pasa, Photo 2021), thus shifting the narrative and contributing to Iris’ alternative future. It takes a lot of time and effort to plant, harvest, and sow the land to produce a beautiful garden. Erizku makes the land more hospitable to these plants, such as for his daughter Iris, by planting the seeds for future conversations.
Sources Cited
Art-Centered Learning across the Curriculum: Integrating Contemporary Art in the Secondary School Classroom, by Julia Marshall, Teachers College Press, 2014, pp. 166–167.
“Awol Erizku.” Artnet, www.artnet.com/artists/awol-erizku/.
“AWOL ERIZKU's Beyoncé Portrait Becomes Most-Liked Instagram Post Ever!” Ben Brown, 26 Feb. 2017, www.benbrownfinearts.com/news/78-awol-erizku-s-beyonce-portrait-becomes-most-liked-instagram-post
“Awol Erizku: New Visions for Iris.” Public Art Fund, www.publicartfund.org/exhibitions/view/new-visions-for-iris-awol-erizku/.
“Bus Shelters.” JCDecaux Image, www.jcdimage.com/en/bus-shelters.
“Make America Great Again.” Wall Street International, 8 Apr. 2017, wsimag.com/art/24950-make-america-great-again.
Nicholas Knight, Courtesy of Public Art Fund. “Awol Erizku Brings His Afrocentric Symbolic Universe to NYC's Bus Shelters.” Curbed, 23 Feb. 2021, www.curbed.com/2021/02/awol-erizku-public-art-fund-new-visions-iris.html.
Pasa, Guido. PHOTO 2021, 6 July 2020, photo.org.au/channel/essay-the-new-black-vanguard.
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