How Bad Do You Want It? - On Andrew Gray, Surface Tensions, and Self-Reflection
My May 2023 profile and review of Baltimore-based artist Andrew Gray.
Our current decade kicked off with a devastating blow: enter global pandemic. A seemingly never-ending onslaught of death, grief, and forced isolation racked the world. However, the United States federal government announced that the Covid-19 pandemic will officially end on May 11, 2023, nearly three years and two months to the day of its official start on March 11, 2020. While some sense of routine normalcy has been restored, millions of Americans are still grappling with the repercussions of social distancing, financial loss, racial reckoning, and the introspection resulting from a trying three years. Though artists tend to naturally be an isolated bunch, the restrictions imposed by quarantine and the pandemic were, paradoxically, counterintuitive. There is an implied sense of freedom within the profession that affords artists an unhindered state of being, but when the fate of millions was dependent on the cooperation of global citizenry, isolation became a humanistic duty, where it was once volunteered. Baltimore-based painter Andrew Gray spent his year in isolation “daydreaming of all the traveling [he] had done prior to the pandemic.” His studio mantra of promoting “a sense of prosperity contradicting the common societal narratives of black people shown in our community” took on charged meaning amidst the unprecedented restrictions, protests, and deaths caused and exacerbated by Covid-19. Gray’s focus shifted to a world he technically couldn't participate in but was desperate to see: Black people outdoors and at play.
The piece titled A Blue November, created in November of 2020, marked a stylistic shift for Gray and demonstrates a matured point of view in the artist’s young career. Centered on the canvas is a young Black man sporting a high top fade, wearing a tailored motorcycle jacket and coordinated gloves. The young man is posed for the viewer with his helmet tucked under his arm, and a stoic relaxed face. Background mountains and grassy plains suggest the motorcyclist was riding through a countryside when they stopped to pose for the image. Gray continued situating figures at sites uncomplicated by social distancing guidelines, and spaces that lend themselves to cushy solitude and exude access to resources. Cliffed parks, exotic beaches, and construction sites are some of the environments that populated Gray’s pandemic paintings.
Fast forward to 2023, Gray’s newest body of work further explores the idea of Black people enjoying luxurious leisure. The group show titled Unveiled, on view at Band of Vices gallery from March 24, 2023 to April 22, 2023, showcased four paintings by Gray, each of which situate Black figures in and around swimming pools. Note that public pools were amongst the first places to close and the last places to reopen under Covid-19 restrictions. Those with access to pools during the pandemic's peak had access to private pools, a long-time wealth marker. Several Covid restrictions magnified existing socioeconomic inequities, and for Gray, positioning his figures at swimming pools was an equal part reaction to the dominant narratives of the Black Lives Matter movement and an assertion of his personal desires for wealth. While this body of work deserves a contextualization within the Black arts canon, specifically the portion of the canon that has grappled with our relationship to water for decades, the tone and texture of the work is deserving of it’s own interpretation, in line with Gray’s intentions for this body of work.
Stillness, a stand out piece from Gray’s contributions to the show, depicts a Black woman wearing a green swim cap and white one piece in mid-diver’s pose. He depicts the brief moment where her forearms are almost parallel with the water, and she can see herself in the water, just before she dives in. The woman’s reflection barely escapes the bottom edge of the canvas, revealing just enough of her face, arms, and chest to the viewer. This particular composition reverberated the one thing that allured me to Gray’s work. His textured style was less about the background-foreground relationship, which deserves its own rhapsody for the Baltimore album quilts allusion, than it was his use of color and application of paint.
The self-referential use of muted tones and empathetic soft textures speak to Gray seeing himself in his community, in each figure, and a longing to will another reality into existence. Quite literally, as a Black person with the last name Gray, and figuratively through shared experiences on the basis of Blackness and wealth aspirations. Where brush meets canvas becomes his personal communion with Black people, over the desire to escape the economic gridlock caused by Covid-19. Each puddle of patchworked paint pillows off the canvas, nodding to Black America’s pioneering quilters - from Harriet Powers to Faith Ringgold to Bisa Butler, who all use quilting as a means of passing down generational information. He thus situates himself within a canon of painters who use color coding to achieve brilliant works and financial success.
Gray’s shift towards color coding - and the reverential portrait of a cop in the piece titled BC10 - announced an intention for the artist’s practice which is likely unpopular amongst leftist-leaning Black Lives Matter supporters.
The vocabulary of social media’s Black generational wealth discourse typically triggers vehement critique from young leftists, most of whom envision a world free of capitalism, centered on collective care, mutual aid, and the redistribution of resources. What, then, does the redistribution of resources look like? Gray states his case by following in the footsteps of his color-coding pop art predecessors, like Takashi Murakami, Derrick Adams, and Andy Warhol, who often made the move to systematic output with the intent of hiring assistants to paint for them, freeing the artist of their hand and their time, increasing their studio output and therefore their profits. Perhaps this line of thinking is preemptive, but surely there’s a correlation between Gray’s yearning for luxurious leisure and his stylistic shift. A political coming out, if you will. To openly declare, at the height of America’s most contentious point in contemporary race relations history, so informed by class consciousness and solidarity, desires of individual wealth, is a quite bold and honest articulation, yet could easily be misconstrued as a selfish desire, standing in direct opposition to the collective conscious-raising progress up to 2023. Where pandering to left-leaning audiences by regurgitating trending ideology and espousing quintessential liberalisms are the typical behavioral displays we see from those desiring wealth, in laudable efforts to maintain the loyalty of a monetizable audience, Gray apologizes to no one by illustrating how he feels. It's as if he’s challenging a young, desperate, and politically spirited Black audience by saying, “I know you want this life, too.”