Sharpe gave me a tour of the artwork in his home, much of it the byproduct of a collaboration. She is an art critic and has collaborated on the monographs of some of the most important artists of our time, including read, jaffa, Dawoud Bey, Alison Sarre, jennifer packer, martin sims and theater doors. There was a drawing by Saar and a painting by cauleen smith. A framed print called “Vanishing Law”, by the artist. kara walker, He caught my attention. In his first book, “Monstrous Intimacies,” Sharpe writes extensively about Walker’s work to reveal how society is programmed to embrace racist narratives. Sharpe and Walker are connected through their mutual desire to understand the “disfigurement of black and white” and the consequences of denying our shared complicity in the way the past still shapes the present.
In Walker’s engraving, a woman kneels before an enraptured audience, devouring a small child. The title refers to sleight of hand, a trick performed by a magician, but the disappearance in this image implies cannibalism. The setting, a stage, and her old-fashioned clothes, petticoats and stockings, are reminiscent of minstrelsy. The hands of both figures, including the devoured person, are relaxed, complicating the relationship between exploiter and exploited. The work in Sharpe’s office, like many of Walker’s famous prints and sculptures, lacks colour. One could make assumptions about the figures and their respective races, but the only clues are drawn from the historical characterizations of black people (the older woman is wearing a headscarf). For the past two decades, Walker has come under fire from critics for playing up racist tropes, but that outrage is misdirected. It is the presuppositions that viewers bring to the work that are so repellent, not the figures themselves. In “Vanishing Act”, it is impossible to know who is the victor and who is the victim. Only their acceptance of what they are doing, and perhaps the pleasure they are taking in doing it, is truly readable.
The more time I spend with Sharpe’s work, the more it influences my way of seeing the world. According to Sharpe, Blackness is anagrammatic, meaning that the structures that order language, thought, and society are thrown into disarray, if not completely destroyed, when they encounter Blackness. “His work has shown that we as black people are the foils of humanity,” Frank B. Wilderson III, author of “Afropessimism,” told me. “If humanity is against us, what does it mean for us to live every day as anti-humans?”
In my daily life, I’ve been interrogating headlines, interactions, movies, TV, and visual arts with a radar tuned to the Sharpe frequency. Kansas City police did not immediately take Andrew Lester into custody after he shot Ralph Yarl in the head for ringing the bell – the wake; looking Justin Jones and Justin Pearson are ousted from the Tennessee House of Representatives – the cellar; Angel Reese, a Division 1 college basketball player from Louisiana State University, being maligned in the media for her behavior on the court, but still pulling down 10 rebounds, leading her team to victory with full eyelashes and polished nails: the hold, ship and wake work ; companies that use artificial intelligence to create black music and black models for free work: the ship, the hold, and the wake.
In 1948, Sharpe’s parents, Ida Wright Sharpe and Van Buren Sharpe Jr., moved from West Philadelphia to Wayne, Pennsylvania. “They wanted what they both imagined and knew they didn’t have,” he writes. A house big enough for the family that would eventually grow to six children, a yard, access to good schools, and proverbial opportunities. Her mother worked in a department store and his father was a mail sorter and chef. Sharpe was born in 1965. Her older brother was almost 22 years older than her, and when her brother, who was the closest in age, went to college, she was 11 years old. she was alone. “I felt mostly like an only child,” she said.
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