The person behind the portrait is Los Angeles-based multimedia artist Awol Erizku. Erizku confirmed the news of his involvement over text, according to a source close to Miami’s Nina Johnson gallery, where Erizku had a show in 2016, Art News reports.
Erizku works in photography and conceptual art, and has recently focused on the way art and music intersect.At his I Was Going To Call It Your Name But You Didn’t Let Me art show at Nina Johnson gallery in December, Erizku created a mixtape to go along with his works, as he does for every one of his exhibitions.
“Each and every one of these paintings are titled after a song that makes up the tracklist, checklist, and mixtape that we are hearing now,” Erizku told The FADER at the show.At a previous show, in 2012, the Erizku collaborated with DJ Kitty Cash on a mix, which included a snippet a Kerry James Marshall lecture about beauty in the museum and a chopped-and-pitched version of Beyoncé’s “Drunk In Love.”
The 28-year-old artist was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and raised in the Andrew Jackson Houses in the South Bronx, but his influences were clear from an early age. In art school at Cooper Union and later at Yale School of Art, where he received his MFA in photography, Erizku was heavily impacted by rappers like Nas and Rakim, as well as the artists David Hammons and Marcel DuChamp.
Trying to distill notions of black beauty and “update” key canonical and contemporary works in Western art, Erizku’s first set of photography replaced renaissance figures with fresh-faced black subjects (imagine Kehinde Wiley with a camera). In one such photograph, he repurposes Leonardo Da Vinci’s 15th Century portrait, Lady with an Ermine, as a twentysomething B-girl with faint highlights.
The expressionless figure’s pink, blue, and white striped French manicure rests gently on the back of a baby pitbull she cradles in her arms. It is one portrait in a world of imagery that seeks, according to the artist, to “bring my generation into the conversation surrounding ideals of beauty.”
Awol Erizku Is The Artist Behind Beyoncé’s Incredible Pregnancy Announcement Portrait
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