Modern Primitive (2020–Ongoing): Ink and Pencil Crayon on Paper

Abstract

Modern Primitive (2020–Ongoing)Ink and Pencil Crayon on Paper Abdi Osman (bio) The COVID-19 pandemic represents a period in time in which people all over the globe witnessed the hypervisibility of white supremacist violence, anti-Black racism, and Black activism on a global scale. Inspired by this, Modern Primitive (2020) is a new series of drawings I began in March 2020 that features colorful portraits of individuals who are both known and unknown to us. Using familiar cultural tropes like “Karens/Kevins,” “Anti-Maskers,” and “Anti-Vaxxers” as character studies, which are also invoked in/by each individual work’s title, Modern Primitive offers intimate glimpses of what living together as well as apart looks like and means to/for different people in a/our shared world(s) yet with diverse and distinct realities. Resisting traditional art histories and notions of “primitivism” that are based on Eurocentric, modernist constructions of other cultures as “exotic” and “Other,” these images portray popular subjects in rough figural poses and gestures akin to how “non-white” cultures have been historically misrepresented as less sophisticated and “civilized” than white artists and “modern” cultures. Here, the white gaze and its logics that have for so long defined ethnographic portraiture and visual culture are subverted and replaced with/by a critical, contemporary, queer Black lens and gaze. [End Page 151] Click for larger view View full resolution “Road Trip” (2020), part of the COVID drawings. [End Page 152] Click for larger view View full resolution “Scored Club Vaccine tickets, after waiting for hours” (2021), part of the COVID drawings. [End Page 153] Click for larger view View full resolution “Slaying for the Lord” (2021), part of the COVID drawings. [End Page 154] Click for larger view View full resolution “Self-Portrait” (2020), part of the COVID drawings. [End Page 155] Click for larger view View full resolution “You Better Put Some Respek” (2021), part of the COVID drawings. [End Page 156] Abdi Osman abdi osman is a Somali-Canadian multidisciplinary artist whose work focuses on questions of Black masculinity as it intersects with Muslim and queer identities. He has shown across Canada and internationally, including the 2022 Berlin Berlinale; the Art Museum at the University of Toronto; Gardiner Museum; Art Gallery of Mississauga; Thames Art Gallery; The National Museum of Kenya (Kenya); Goethe Institute, Johannesburg (South Africa); and Iwalewahaus, The Centre for African Contemporary Art and Culture (Germany). Osman was a community leadership resident at the Queer and Trans Research Lab (QTRL) housed at the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto in 2021–2022. Copyright © 2023 Frontiers Editorial Collective, Inc