The prolific artist knows that contemporary Blackness, made and unmade on the stage of capitalism, is as much defined by its spiritual reckonings as it is by the elemental stuff.
The inclination came to the child during punishment. A young Awol Erizku got kicked out of class for pulling a prank. Limbo was an art room. Waiting for whatever repercussions, the child looked around and began to get ideas. Erizku has in the past offered this memory as an origin story for his practice. And it gains drama, a sense of the life scaled down to the miniature, when we consider how that practice has unfolded: a wit introduces himself, deconsecrates the canon of the West, and grows far enough from that canon, which is to say history, only to construct his own spiritualized view of history, which he now calls Afro-Esotericism.
June 7, 2023
