no.11 aug 2006
+profile. otabenga jones & associates
Otabenga Jones & Associates, We Did it for Love, 2004
An artist collective based out of Houston, Texas, the four-member Otabenga Jones & Associates crew concerns itself with African American identity politics as well as the nature of the art making process. Talented, cynical, and contrarian to a fault, the group questions not only the role of the African American artist in the contemporary art world, but also the sometimes absurd nature of the art scene itself.
The group consists of artists Dawolu Jabari Anderson, Jamal Cyrus, Kenya Evans, and Robert A. Pruitt. In large-scale drawings Anderson uses creative techniques taken from graphic design and advertising to critique the historical narratives of African Americans. Cyrus crafts collages depicting mythologies based on the civil rights movement, while Evans fashions sculptures and paintings exploring didactic histories. Pruitt utilizes sculpture, installation work, and drawings to explore America’s unsettled race relations, doing so with an irreverence and intensity reminiscent of the Dada movement. Together Otabenga Jones blends all of these artistic approaches into installations, happenings, and staged events meant to harass the status quo.
Their “We Did It for Love” piece at the Houston Contemporary Arts Museum’s “Amalgama” show featured a cop car flipped over in the middle of a gallery space—broken glass and metal suggesting rage—augmented by audio recalling the 1965 Watts Riots. They staged a protest during the opening of the African Art Now exhibition at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, accusing the show of reinforcing stereotypes about African art. Pruitt and Cyrus held up signs urging the museum to consider why it had let the tastes of a Swiss curator, Jean Pigozzi, dictate a perspective on contemporary African art. At the DiverseWorks art center in 2005, Otabenga infamously installed a makeshift sidewalk flea market selling bootleg DVDs and designer knockoffs.
The fictional name “Otabenga Jones” is derived from the historical personage Ota Benga, a Pygmy brought from the Belgium Congo to the United States in 1904 by African explorer Samuel Verner and later put on exhibition with animals at the Bronx Zoo. After being freed from the confines of New York’s zoological institutions, Benga wound up in Virginia where he learned English and, it is said, converted to Christianity. Later employed in a tobacco factory, Benga became despondent and culturally isolated. Concluding he would never make it back to his native Congo, Ota Benga shot himself dead at the age of thirty-five.
In a mission statement accompanying the Otabenga Jones & Associates installation room at the 2006 Whitney Biennial the group states of Ota Benga, “this historical reference to the pseudoanthro-pological penchant for exhibiting Africans and other non-Western peoples in world’s fairs and other such exhibitions of the time is an indicator of [our] intent. [Our] pedagogical mission, realized in the form of actions, writings, and installations, is to highlight the complexities of representation across the African Diaspora; establish a cross-generational aesthetic continuum stemming from the transatlantic experience; and to”—here quoting from Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat by the Door— “mess wit’ whitey.”
Otabenga Jones made its New York debut at Chelsea’s Clementine gallery in 2005 with an installation titled “Symmetrical Patterns of Def,” combining sound, sculpture, and “wall structures.” The work explored a fictional narrative concerning an early eighties South Bronx MC who visits a place called “New Liberia.” The collective wrote:
“Moaning like those giant vessels that once crisscrossed the Atlantic in triangles, our protagonist bends in the wind in search of his beginning. Transcending his South Bronx refuge by verbalizing a powerful mathematical incantation (a.k.a. dope freestyle), he finds himself at the fabled crossroads of black lore, treading middle passage waters and visiting ancestral spaces. All the while receiving his lessons on the connection of hip hop’s four elements with various expressions of African logic. This story is one of black Diasporic desire. A cry from all the souls who, disconnected from their roots, long for return.”
The “Symmetrical Patterns of Def” exhibition’s wacky afro-world, made up of graffiti-like murals, ethno-collage, fake pictorials, shrines built with multi-colored curtains (red, black, and green), boom boxes and street athletic wear is mind-boggling installation art narration. It recalls many of the experiential redefinitions of what encompasses art and the alternative-narratives the Fluxus movement and Dadaists explored. It is reminiscent of the installation work of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, whose series of “Parangolés,” “Quasi-Cinemas,” and “Cosmococas” executed in New York in the 1970’s formed alternative ethno-environments that redefined what art is, as well as art’s sociological framework.
For the 2006 Whitney Biennial Otabenga Jones & Associates designed a room featuring a collective work by the group and individual piece’s from each member’s canon. The Otabenga piece, “Exploring the Outer Reaches of the Garden of Pro-Black Sanctuary,” consisted of an entire wall made of bricks with slit peepholes in them through which one looked into an elaborate “African garden.” Pruitt, whose work I first saw in “Splat Boom Pow!” at ICA in Boston a few years back, at the Whitney displayed drawings and sculptures comprised of a KKK robe that looked like a high school sports uniform and a voodoo communion table full of idols. Cyrus displayed very engaging ink drawings—the intricate tiny drawing craze all the rage these days—and collage work filled with familiar black iconography. Jabari Anderson hung large-scale drawings of Afro-American-isms on aged paper that was part of a “Frederick Douglass Self-Defense Manual” which was both humorous and powerfully moving. The consensus is that in a Biennial somewhat abstruse the Otabenga Jones crew “tore shit up,” injecting a well-needed sense of high jinks and thematic purpose—a sort of cornucopia of angry black man environments that were purposely droll, sincere and insightful.
The Otabenga Jones collective is active in Houston’s art community, collaborating with local artists, musicians, and hip-hop MCs, and building a cooperative of artists with similar interests. Pruitt is on the board of Project Row Houses, a neighborhood based art and cultural organization located in Houston’s Third Ward. Project Row Houses attempts to connect the work of artists with the revitalization of a community. Otabenga inaugurated a program in a newly renovated local studio where artists could use one-year residencies to create progressive installation works focusing on African Diasporas, the black aesthetic, and as they put it, “the constant need for cash flow.”
Otabenga Jones’ intention is indeed to “mess wit’” the art world. They sincerely explore African American identity politics and are helping to redefine what it means to create art. In this they are not alone: art collectives such as the Wrong Gallery, Critical Art Ensemble, and Guerrilla Girls, in addition to artists like the outrageous Paul McCarthy, all attempt to shake up the art world by questioning the manner in which art is presented, and by whom while making what are in essence political statements. In the case of Otabenga Jones, the aim is not only to be Public Enemy number one, but also No. 1 Soul Brother.
Douglas Singleton writes film and theater criticism for The Brooklyn Rail and L Magazine, in addition to art reviews for WBAI radio in New York. He has written for Independent magazine and New York Foundation for the Arts Current. His website, www.dispactke.com, features photography, prose, and multi-media.