Looking for Ernie Barnes

A young man stands in front of a radio in a spare room, his feet together and turned out, arms extended in a “V” shape above his head, hands horizontal, holding a conductor's wand as if he were leading a symphony. The painting by Ernie Barnes titled The Maestro, 1978, is featured on The Crusaders’ 1984 album Ghetto Blaster. That album, along with various paintings and sketches from across the oeuvre, is part of an expansive retrospective of the late artist that opens at Ortuzar Projects this week in New York.

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“Whenever I look at it, I think he's about to take off,” says curator Derrais Carter, as he recalls his own childhood fantasies of conducting along to a pre-recorded track. “This kid being a maestro helps me center the possibility for this Black child without saying: This child has to bear the weight of an industry that doesn't look at him as a potential.”

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“Ernie Barnes: In Rapture,” in collaboration with Andrew Kreps Gallery, is Ortuzar Projects’ first exhibition of the artist and spans his five-decades-long practice leading up to his death in 2009. There are paintings Barnes made during his time as a professional football player, sketches that give a peek into his process, works popularized on album covers, T.V. shows, and movies. There is a nail set by Victoria Aesthete that features scenes from his iconic painting Sugar Shack, 1976, and a poem by John Murillo based on the painting, too. 

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‍“The idea of the show is not just about how he's in rapture or how his painterly subjects are in rapture, but how we continue to be in rapture because of him, how we generate our own creative practices,” adds Carter.

Barnes was born in 1938 in Durham, North Carolina. As a child, when segregation kept him out of museums, he discovered art by reading books when his mother would bring him to her work at a prominent local attorney’s office. In grade school, the painter was an incredibly shy child. He found refuge from bullies in his sketchbooks until he began playing sports. “Sports helped him with confidence, but to me, art is the thing that steadied him in the world,” says Carter. At North Carolina College, Barnes played football on scholarship and studied art under the sculptor Ed Wilson who imparted lasting advice to the painter: Look at the world around you for inspiration.

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‍Following college, Barnes spent five seasons as a professional football player. During his time as an athlete, he would sketch his teammates. He was also deeply critical of the violence and physical aggression in football and wrote a column called “I hate the game I love.” In Fumble on the Line, 1990—on display at Ortuzar Projects—a game play is at once dancerly and war-like. Taut muscles and clenched fists crowd the frame. 

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In the late ‘70s, living in Los Angeles and inspired by the "Black is beautiful" movement of the ‘60s made popular by the late photographer and activist Kwame Brathwaite, Barnes asked himself: What is there to be proud of? The answers flowed out of him, cascading into a series of 35 paintings and an eponymous exhibition titled “The Beauty of the Ghetto,” which traveled across major American cities from 1972 to 1979. Barnes’ tender and effervescent portraits animated snapshots of everyday life, from jump roping and shooting hoops to reading and resting to simply existing. Now a selection of these works are given a second viewing, including Street Song, 1971, in which four hip young men sporting newsboy caps and afros leisurely slouch against a wall, bodies swaying to the rhythm mid-song, hands snapping, mouths forming “O” shapes in a soulful croon. Music followed Barnes everywhere.

Barnes approached the oppression, power dynamics, and racism within America with a deft and tender eye that centered the beauty and perseverance of his community. “He was making a critique of systems and structures without making the Black people in his paintings the ones responsible for that,” says Carter. “When I look at Barnes' work, so much of what he's doing is giving us renderings or visions of Black sociality that don't enact the work of explaining structural oppression.” 

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‍While Barnes' work is clearly of and for his community past and present, the fact that a majority of his subjects’ eyes are closed, is a complicated one, one that Carter himself is still sitting with. The painter once said his choice reflected “how blind we are to one another's humanity.” Maybe Barnes closed the eyes of his subjects to protect their souls, to render something personal and private and sacred, knowing that one day they would be displayed across white walls for the world to see. Across paintings eyes are closed in defiance, states of relaxation, bliss, ecstasy, contemplation, concentration. The dual vulnerable and protective choice can mean many things, but in an if-you-know-you-know sensibility, those who look at the figures and see themselves can easily imagine the multitudes of emotions at play.

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 “I can't even tell you when was the first time I saw one of his pieces,” Carter reflects. “His prints are in living rooms, dens, dorm rooms, cafes. I've really lived with his style in my mind and heart for over 30 years.” But it wasn’t until he saw a retrospective of the artist’s work in 2019 at the California African American Museum that Carter came face-to-face with Barnes’ original paintings. He spent two days taking in the sheer magnitude and pulsating energy of the large scale works.

S​​omething felt strange about encountering them in this space because I was so used to hearing people in noise and living all around,” the curator recalls. So he put on his headphones and listened to the entirety of Marvin Gaye's 1976 album I Want You while standing in front of Sugar Shack (which appeared on the record’s cover). The swaying, sinewy bodies rendered in warm colors against textured wood began to come alive. Hips shaking, arms in rapture, bodies bumping to the beat, Barnes painted like a composer, conducting a symphony, a rhythmic rendering of life. “It broke me open in the best possible way,” says Carter.

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Jump to five years later, and Barnes’ star is still posthumously rising. His works went from being cherished by long-time collectors and the Black community at large to being sold for millions with a forthcoming documentary by Coodie and Chike, the director duo behind the three-part Kanye West documentary Jeen-Yuhs.

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In recent years, Carter has centered Barnes’s work in his own creative practice, too. He has produced an experimental artist's book titled Black Revelry, 2021, and an accompanying exhibition and record inspired by Sugar Shack, a forth-coming biography aptly titled Infinite Motion, and now the exhibition at Ortuzar Projects dedicated to the artist and his enduring influence. He is also searching for other Black artists of Barnes’ generation who were similarly ignored by the art world. “I feel like professionally I'm stretching,” says Carter, “and stretching in a way that helps my lungs expand. Helps me feel a lot more at home. Helps me feel like I'm stepping into a different kind of purpose.”

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“Ernie Barnes: In Rapture” is on view from April 25 to June 15, 2024 at Ortuzar Projects at 5 White St, New York, NY 10013.