“What I really like about this piece, aside from the fact that I like art that places BPP culture and history in public and educational collections, is that it is sort of a Trojan horse. At first glance, the piece appears to be a one-liner, but I feel it’s actually far more layered conceptually and offers a fairly trenchant commentary and context regarding the issue of the ‘authority’ of cultural icons, radical Black Power politics, and photography. The piece exemplifies what is often defined as a primary component of most artists’ books, the presence of self-referential, and in this case critical, subjectivity. This ‘meta-subjectivity’ amplifies, interrogates, integrates, or contrasts, the artwork’s material form with its subject matter. In the case of most artists’ books which are usually a codex or scroll, the form is a ubiquitous cultural icon of knowledge and/or religious practice. In this particular piece, a box set of postage stamps, the form embodies the concepts of communication, travel, and state authority and bestows the prestige and functionality of those concepts to the piece’s liberatory subject matter. Furthermore the piece functions as a conceptual artwork in (at least at this moment in history) it is a suggestion of objects (in this case, a stamp) that doesn’t actually ‘exist’, if that’s not a conceptual gesture I’m not sure what is. The piece also has obvious connections to the genres of actual stamp art and the vast imaginative practice of mail art. — Marshall Weber, Directing Curator, Booklyn, inc.

Ref: GB/30410