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An artistic hypothesis by Max Eternity
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This newly created art genre, Negro Electro, provides a well-defined forum for the mural, craft and color field derivatives that Afro-Artists have contributed to the overall aesthetic of the Euro-American modern arts movement. Negro Electro succinctly orients the forward-thinking within the context of global advancements in electro-digital, fine art arena.
Predecessors that have inspired this genre range from Harriet Powers, Aaron Douglass and Wilfredo Lam, to Sam Gilliam and Henry C. Porter. And in a parallel vein similar to the “Post-Black” aesthetic, Negro Electro represents a sector of the new Black. Though unlike the “Post-Black” art genre, which found a home by affirming its assimilation into contemporary art via a default rejection of the Negro or Black label while also poking fun at “Whiteness”, Negro Electro articulates Blackness as a graciously inherited, liberating force — having a potent, formidable, artistic pedigree — accepting Whiteness as a part of Blackness, yet maintaining an impersonal intimacy to archetypal imprints.
In the abstract, Negro Electro is a conscious physicality that is largely defined by bold use of color or galvanizing monochromatic scales, lyrical composition and ‘coded’ African-American themes. Yet in its representational or figural manifestation, the genre presents a more quilt or mural inspired narration. From this vantage point, symbols and graphics are used to reveal a direct lineage to the simplistically elegant, yet primitive, pre-emancipated Negro who would most likely have been creating in an arts and crafts style reminiscent of pre-colonial Africa. Thus in effect Negro Electro, like the Black experience in America, is dichotomy of the ancient and the present, the primitive and the modern. Yet, however minimalist or simplistic, Negro Electro is the embodiment of a sophisticated, multi-faceted expression of creativity, which mirrors the complex connections that Blacks have with both Africa and America; all this set in our post-digital millennia.
Negro Electro and its twin, Bauhaus Evolution, are only part of what is known as TADAE, a moniker for the Traditional And Digital Artist-Engineer
- Max Eternity © 2007 - 09