Noel W Anderson, Black Joy: Curry Caught Spirit, 2024-26
You will likely recognize many of the faces of the Black men and women depicted in Noel W Anderson’s exhibition “Courtside Sermon,” among them Paul Pierce, LeBron James, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Nina Simone and James Brown.
The inclusion of Simone and Brown, along with the show’s title, suggests that Anderson regards all of these figures not just as superstars, but also more significantly as performers within similar fields of play. The basketball court, the bandstand, and the preacher’s lectern are all arenas in which a kind of spectacular kind of Blackness gets put on display.
Anderson, 44, works primarily with images taken from media archives, digitally manipulating them before a machine weaves them into cotton tapestries. The textiles are then further manipulated by his hand: He abrades the fabric with wire brushes and picks out individual threads. This process can be seen in “Deep in Thought at?” (2022-26), a rendering of Magic Johnson’s head in which a rainbow of underlying threads pock his face to the extent that he seems to be wearing a mask. In this way the artist makes literal what he sees as the warping effects of sports and entertainment media on the public perception of Black people.
In “Black Joy: Curry Caught Spirit” (2024-26) several images of the basketball player Stephen Curry overlap, making him seem like a wraith moving in and out of states of corporeality as fans clamor to capture images of him with their devices.
The astronomic sums paid to athletes and performers, for playing games that are simply meant to entertain, occasionally stoke public outrage. But it’s through these performances that we catch glimpses of how we too might learn to fly—Seph Rodney