Understanding Belonging

A Critique of the Art of Identity

Today, 2026 in California, African American visual artists are no longer strangers to galleries or large audiences. But this is true partly because it is 2026, and we have the internet and smartphones as distribution channels for self-publishing. It means that images can "premiere" everywhere all at once without gatekeepers. So as part of normal visual culture, the level of familiarity with whatever styles from whatever sources is exponentially higher than when getting exposure meant earning real estate -- whether literally or virtually -- belonging to editors and curators.

In this environment of visual proliferation, another important effect is the fast, widespread discovery of like-minded and like-sighted people. With that facility, it is never surprising when one kind of "identity" emerges as being very common, but no more than do very unexpected exceptional identities surface in plain view too without warning.

Art exhibits that intentionally survey works done by any subset of the BIPOC/LGBTQ+/GENDER orientations are also now commonplace, and have powerfully confronted the historical habits of othering or marginalizing that still had strength in many of the conventional channels of production or presentation in art. But we can't ignore that audiences earlier latched on to entertainment and marketing as a huge source of exposure to artistic creativity, independent of institutions like magazines, galleries, or museums. Meanwhile commerce tirelessly uses consumer profiling to scientifically optimize "identity" as "personalization" -- the lead attractor to real life experiences.

Those various influences are both pervasive and concurrent, which makes the pursuit and promotion of identity in art as well a no-brainer expectation. But then, as identity generally becomes more and more commonplace as a subject, making that subject special requires an additional effort that in some way is exceptional.

One line of thought is that "fine" art is the exceptional way. Invented in the 1700's, the idea of fine art primarily intended to elevate attention to the creative labor beyond the goal of manufacturing or utility, and to the level of aesthetic contemplation on par with that held for Nature. With that, refinement in effort aimed for the aesthetics. (Borrowing ideas from philosopher Charles Batteux.)

A different line of thought is about the idea of Identity being the subject of contemplation, beyond just of recognition. This makes for the occasion of making art being itself a way of doing that contemplating. Expression as thinking. Identity, but identity as Self.

And finally, the physical venue of art presentation, like any theater or church, intentionally promotes a set of conventions that shapes the audience's appreciation as a kind of positive cognitive bias.

BY THE PEOPLE, OF THE PEOPLE

From there, what is most notable is why this subject might predominate in the efforts of a group or medium or time period. A cult of personality. What do "I", the product of some nurture, manifest of my culture, the people side of nature? Does my culture legitimize who I am?

While identity has emerged as a dominant subject in social, political, and artistic discourse certainly in the most recent 25 years, the "identifying as" phenomenon does not and cannot impose a "standard" for any given group beyond stereotyping.

Art audiences are no more immune to cultural politics than they are to love stories or rock&roll rhythms. These things are virtual gateways into the fuller experience of the art work that comes with them.

We reach back to obvious periods such as the 1960s "counterculture", the 1970s Black is Beautiful movement, the first three waves of feminism, and the Gay Pride movement - each yielding archetypes meant to be enlightening, models meant to be aspirational. But those examples are also overtly oppositional to caricatures and biases that came before them. They emerged in environments that fueled specific experiences and ideas relevant to identity being a handicap or an attraction, a risk or a benefit.

It is the diversity of those experiences that also accounts for what is now idiomatically called "a thousand ways to be Black" (attributed to Henry Louis Gates). Summarizing the roots of that diversity, we have unique life experiences, perspectives, and backgrounds, shaped by generational history, personal circumstances, and cultural expression. They form individual stories involving economic status, location, family dynamics, and personal triumphs and challenges. Then those are each displayed by diverse forms of art, music, literature, and community practices across various regions.

But it is just as important to not reduce all expression to the type "story". This is because aesthetic reiteration and knowledge through art refers to conditions not just to narratives - to interpretation not just to progression. To image, not just to course. And because there is no experience without an environment of conditions, the representation of environments is no less profound than the surveying of identity.

That is how a show by a self-selecting group fuses the unifying distinction of the group's difference with the diversity of its presence. And by doing so in physical locations, convening the participants amplifies that the group, in all of its heterogeneity, is a community.

ART IN MOTION

Annually, in the East Bay region of California opposite San Francisco, an area-wide set of curated exhibitions takes place as The Art of the African Diaspora. Works are accepted from artists in the East Bay whose family tree branches within the African community's migration across the US continent, such as in the paths here:

[Gemini Pro rendering based on the title of the illustration]

or here:

Source: https://lawrencemigration.phillipscollection.org/culture/migration-map based on: William H. Frey, Brookings Institution, analysis of US Census Bureau’s Decennial Censuses, 1920-2000, and 2008-2012 American Community Survey, drawn from IPUMS-USA, University of Minnesota, www.ipums.org and American Community Survey Public Use Microfiles.

My perspective on the overall exhibit encompasses the movement of culture from the Past to the Future.

It relies on seeing the features and impacts of displayed works as the effects of environment and purposeful expression shaping each other. It is an analysis of the simple and universal artist's question, "why am I going to express something, and how am I going to express it?"

(c) Malcolm Ryder / Artdotdot

In examining the works in The Art of the African Diaspora, I use what I propose are the three most characteristic representations of diasporic "culture" -- tradition, soul, and consciousness. As shown here, this is a reflection of the overarching theme of Belonging -- with special attention to how it is cultivated, transmitted, and preserved.

(c) Malcolm Ryder / Artdotdot

With those ways of accounting for the description of any work in the exhibit, we can grasp the relations of the artist's choices in what to make, why, and how.

(c) Malcolm Ryder / Artdotdot

ART EN SITU

Organized by and at the Richmond Art Center, the 2026 edition of Art of the African Diaspora takes place in dozens of art venues across the East Bay region from January through May.