The grotesque head, most notably, recently, on the University of Oklahoma frat bus. The paradoxical head in pop culture rap music, in particular. The sarcastic head in African American visual art.Īfrican American visual artists have probed a “nigger” concept burrowed so deep in the American collective consciousness that it may never be completely expunged unless we become a totally racially amalgamated people - obliterate every trace of 'otherness.'
Most African American artists create nigger imagery as a form of satire or protest - for example, painter Robert Colescott’s coon caricatures, Camille Billops’ 'Minstrel' series bead artist Joyce Scott's 'Nanny Now and Nigger Later' series and Nigger Lips neckace and Michael Ray Charles’ and Kara Walker’s career body of work.Ĭommenting on the nigger in the psyche shufflin' down to the nigger in African American visual art in the mid-to-late 1990s, cultural critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
