What is my work about?
I am exploring the possibilities of black male personhood and becoming in the historic and constant devaluation of black life via slave ships, plantations, Jim and Jane Crow, mass incarceration and assassinations via police shooting. Through my work in performance, video, installation and sound I aim to construct an emancipated self through the ruins of the US white supremacist empire. I am aiming to construct a NEGROGOTHIC devil worshipping free black man in the blues tradition. That man is me and my work documents my fictional and literal becoming.
Artist Statement
My work exists to re-member and pre-figure the black subject within landscapes of longing and dehumanization endemic to imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
And to mourn… always to mourn…
More specifically, I represent and manifest — by unearthing, archiving, and imagining — visions of black male personhood, embodiment, and subjectivity. Prevailing representations of blackness in U.S. culture offer only narrow historical accounts of subjugation and resistance, and anemic visions of freedom. Central to these are (in bell hooks’s words,) “images of black males in popular culture that represent them as not only eager to ‘do it for daddy’ but, even more, as individuals tortured by… ‘unrequited longing for white male love.’”
In creating spaces of trauma, recovery, and transformation, my work combines video, sculpture, photography, sound, and performance. My uses of multiple media cross several genres and styles: horror, romanticism, surrealism, and pornography.
In so doing, I consistently construct emancipated figures standing against the rot and ruin of white supremacy — a devil worshiper in the blues tradition, a deathless avenger, an apocalyptic prophet, a free black man. That man is me. My work — whether in exhibition, installation, performance, or process — both creates and records my perpetual fictional and literal becomings… and my becoming free…
Freedom requires a decolonizing exorcism and consorting with the dead. From the slave ship to the pillory… on plantations and lynching trees… within and beyond the prison and the grave… my work binds archive to myth, merging bodily properties with supernatural possessions.
Recent projects fuse performance, animation, and video projections to interrogate the constant violent sexualized surveillance of black male bodies. My current works in progress draw on the themes of apocalypse, rapture, and judgment in Negro spirituals to envision a future past a revolutionary, revelational reckoning in the face of the persistence of unjust black death. At the level of content, this work connects historic trauma embedded and occluded in our society to contemporary struggles for social justice in Ferguson, Baltimore, Charleston, and elsewhere. This work is — as always — mourning, but also — uniquely — morning: a psalm of woe and a call to action.
CV
www.mlamar.com
Education
Classical Voice – Private Instruction from Ira Siff, 2006-present
Yale School of Art – M.F.A., Sculpture (did not graduate)
San Francisco Art Institute – B.F.A., Painting
Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture
Alabama School of Fine Arts High School, Painting (did not graduate)
Selected Solo Exhibitions and Performances
2015
Surveillance Punishment and the Black Psyche
FUNDarte Out in the Tropics Festival, Miami
Wesleyan University, Queer Poetics Conference
Human Resources, Los Angeles
San Francisco Art Institute
NEGROGOTHIC: A Manifesto
The Walter and McBean Galleries, San Francisco Art Institute
2014
NEGROGOTHIC: A Manifesto
Participant, Inc., New York City
Surveillance Punishment and the Black Psyche
The Bone Festival, Bern, Switzerland
La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, New York City
The Wild Project, New York City
Speculum Orum: Shackled To the Dead
Jeter Son Corps dans La Bataille, Geneva, Switzerland
Erika Presents: Episode 6: Make a Way Out of No Way, Glasgow, Scotland
2013
Surveillance Punishment and the Black Psyche
Queer New York International Arts Festival, New York City
The Lynching Tree Concert Tour 2013
Södra Teatern, Stockholm, Sweden
Warehouse 9, Copenhagen, Denmark
Nacht Boulevard, Potsdam Germany
Färgfabriken, Stockholm, Sweden
Pustervik, Göteborg, Sweden
Debaser, Malmö, Sweden
John Dee, Oslo, Norway
Loophole, Berlin, Germany
Speculum Orum: Shackled to the Dead
Performatorum, Regina, Canada
Queer-Feminist Anti-Racist Performance Festival, Stockholm, Sweden
2012
Speculum Orum: Shackled to the Dead
The African American Arts and Culture Complex, San Francisco
Dixon Place, New York City
The International Theater Festival, Donzdorf, Germany
Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York City (World Premiere)
2011
Negro Antichrist
Dixon Place, New York City
2010
Darkness Descend
Abrons Art Center, New York City
Souls on Lockdown
Galapagos Art Space, New York City
2009
Dirty Dirty Nigga
Center For Performance Research, New York City
The Black Death
The Chocolate Factory Theater, New York City
Selected Group Showings/Guest Performances
2014
Under the Radar Lounge, The Public Theater, New York City
Justin Vivian Bond: 20 Years in New York, Le Poisson Rouge, New York City
2010
Avant-Garde-Arama, Performance Space 122, New York City
2009
Our Hit Parade, Joe’s Pub, New York City
Low Standards, Joe’s Pub, New York City
2008
Luster, Performance Space 122 and Abrons Art Center, New York City
2005
No One Passes, Counter Pulse, San Francisco
Awards
Mr. Lamar is a recipient of the Franklin Furnace Fund Grant 2013–14 and a Harpo Foundation grant 2014-15