"B IS FOR" SHAINA MCCOY: Brussels

If one of the aims of ‘Portraiture,’ writ large, is to capture the subject—to freeze-frame something of their individuality—McCoy excels at this with a startling simplicity of means: fields of flat color and blank, featureless faces. Despite this, the seven portraits that comprise ‘B is For’ are evocative of their subjects, of their personalities, and a host of other ineffable characteristics that amount to the truest, deepest kind of likeness.

 

The kind of representation McCoy is after, though, exceeds this personal scale. What is really represented in these portraits of Mae Mae, Sophia, Ash, and others is not selfhood but Black girlhood in America. ‘B is For’ bobbles, barrettes, and bows, the hair accouterment of her subjects, and some of the most salient features in these otherwise understated portraits. Here is a celebration of these enduring artifacts and icons of Black childhood. Bobbles, barrettes, and bows evoke not only the grooming rituals associated and with them but the participants in those rituals. The portrait of Sophia, for example, is also an implied portrait of her mother and a document of her tender care. First Day, against the gray brushwork of a studio photographer’s backdrop, feels like a family production; the sweater, the details of her hairstyle connote aunts and grandmothers—an entire production line of caregivers and community. McCoy, in her ability to capture the particular, comes to represent a lineage, a collective, a shared experience. There is a sweet nostalgia to these images and a joyful embrace of the Black experience in America despite the hurdles and hazards posed by being born into that very condition. Look closely and you can make out a halo around the subjects’ heads, rendered texturally by a different rhythm and direction of brushwork. McCoy performs a kind of canonization on her Black subjects, one that must be considered against the impulses of society to strip such subjects of their dignity. Portraiture as a form, though, ennobles the sitter, confers importance upon them, granting them permission to take up space and endure long after they are gone. In McCoy’s portraits, her signature facelessness is not an erasure but an affirmation. And with that, the artist herself is inscribed in the same lineage of care she describes.

 

 

Text by Danny Koppel