Sharpe gave me a tour of the artwork in her home, much of which is the by-product of a collaboration. She is an art critic and has contributed to the monographs of some of the most important artists of our time, including Leigh, Jafa, Dawoud Bey, Alison Saar, Jennifer Packer, Martine Syms and Theaster Gates. There was a drawing by Saar and a painting by Cauleen Smith. A framed print called “Vanishing Act” by the artist Kara Walker caught my eye. In her first book, “Monstrous Intimacies,” Sharpe writes extensively about Walker’s work to reveal how society is programmed to tell racist stories by default. Sharpe and Walker are bound together by their mutual desire to understand the “disfigurement of blackness and whiteness” and the consequences of denying our shared complicity in the way the past continues to shape the present.
In Walker’s print, a woman kneels before a delighted audience as she devours a small child. The title refers to a sleight of hand, a magician’s trick, but disappearing in this image implies cannibalism. The setting – a stage – and their dated clothing – petticoats and stockings – are reminiscent of minstrelsy. The hands of both figures, even the person being eaten, are relaxed, complicating the relationship between exploiter and exploited. The work in Sharpe’s office, like many of Walker’s famous prints and sculptures, is colourless. One could make assumptions about the figures and their respective races, but the only clues are taken from historical characterizations of black people (the older woman wears a headscarf). Over the past two decades, Walker has been attacked by critics for reproducing racist tropes, but that outrage has been misdirected. It’s the presuppositions that bring viewers to the work that are so repugnant, not the figures themselves. In “Vanishing Act” it is impossible to say who is the winner and who is the victim. Only their acceptance of what they do, and perhaps the enjoyment they derive from it, is truly readable.
The more time I spend with Sharpe’s work, the more it affects my view of the world. Blackness, according to Sharpe, is anagrammatic, meaning that the structures that organize language, thought, and society become disordered—if not completely destroyed—when they encounter Blackness. “Her work has shown that we, as black people, are the foils of humanity,” Frank B. Wilderson III, author of “Afropessimism,” told me. “If humanity defines itself against us, what does it mean for us to live every day as the anti-human?”
In my daily life I interrogate headlines, interactions, film, TV and visual arts with a radar tuned to Sharpe’s frequency. Kansas City police didn’t immediately take Andrew Lester into custody after he shot Ralph Yarl in the head for ringing the doorbell — the wake; watching Justin Jones and Jim Pearson get pushed out of the Tennessee House of Representatives – the hold; Angel Reese, a Division 1 college basketball player for Louisiana State University, who is vilified in the media for her behavior on the court, but still pulls down 10 rebounds, leads her team to victory with full whiplashes and painted nails – the hold, the ship and wake work; companies using artificial intelligence to create black music and black models for free labour: the ship, the hold and the wake.
1948, Sharpe’s parents, Ida Wright Sharpe and Van Buren Sharpe Jr., moved from West Philadelphia to Wayne, Pa. “They wanted what they both imagined and knew they didn’t have,” she writes. A house big enough for the family that eventually grows to six children, a garden, access to good schools and proverbial opportunities. Her mother worked in a department store and her father was a mail sorter and cook. Sharpe was born in 1965. Her eldest sibling was almost 22 years her senior, and by the time her closest-age brother started college, she was 11. It was lonely. “Most of all, I felt like an only child,” she said.
