Introduction

On the threshold of a new millennium, how should we proceed with the dialogue about art made by African Americans? It is often difficult for many late twentieth-century viewers to recognize how irrevocably informed we continue to be by ideologies of race. This difficulty is exemplified in the controversy surrounding How Ya Like Me Now? (fig. 1), a fourteen-by-sixteen-foot painting on tin by the New York artist David Hammons depicting the political leader Jesse Jackson with blond, curly hair, blue eyes, pink cheeks, and white skin. Sprayed with black paint is the question “How Ya Like Me Now?,” the title of a popular, late-1980s rap song by Kool Moe Dee. Shortly after art handlers from the Washington Project for the Arts (WPA) installed the piece on the corner of Seventh and G Streets N.W., in conjunction with the WPA’s 1989 exhibition “The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism,” ten black men vandalized it. They regarded the work as demeaning and racist and used sledgehammers to attack it and knock it down from its scaffolding.

Hammons, saddened but not surprised, explained that he wanted the work to show “the white community . . . very clearly—basically, how racism in America works.” 1 Jackson, upon viewing the piece a few days later, responded that the image was not insulting and that it should be seen. “It’s the reality behind the picture,” he said. “That’s the insult.” 2 Richard Powell, acting codirector of the WPA and curator of the exhibition, was disappointed, declaring the work to be “an important image that had to be seen, concentrated upon, talked about.” Furthermore, he explained, the provocative painting asked a simple yet profound question: are our likes, dislikes, and expectations of people based on their race? 3

How Ya Like Me Now? is compelling because it is subject to several interpretations. To white viewers, it poses the question, what would it take to vote for a black man for president? Is it possible to look beyond race and see an individual? The painting asks black viewers whether they would support Jackson if he were white. The work also forces us to look at our expectations of artists based on race. If Hammons were white, not black, would the painting’s meaning shift? Would the African American men have vandalized the piece had they known that Hammons is black? Finally, the controversy the painting incited demonstrates the power that images dealing with race can exert over viewers. 4