Untitled (Cotton Pickers) by Rico Gatson, 2021
Highpoint Editions announces its newest release, a print collaboration from Rico Gatson (Brooklyn, NY).
Gatson’s newest print, Untitled (Cotton Pickers), draws from a public domain photograph of cotton pickers. The photo has been rotated, repeated and stretched, creating a large kaleidoscopic, distorted patchwork. The piece is overlaid with bright spotlights in orange, yellow, green, red, black, colors linked to things like Marcus Garvey's Pan-African Flag and other emblems representative of Pan-Africanism.
The colorful spotlights brighten the subjects anachronistically. Images like this exist somewhere in the collective consciousness, but for many people, they exist in the distance. The large black ovoids obscure the image in the manner of John Baldessari, forcing the viewer to peer through them to make sense of the details, the orientation. But they seem not to be shadows but prominently placed black bodies through which to look again, and maybe more closely, at the people and events of our past.
Gatson’s print, along with his first print Harriet, 2018, can be viewed in our Print Study Room.
