2017.41 Michael Armitage, Nyali Beach Boys | DMA Staging Content Management System

GENERAL DESCRIPTION

From the 2013 Westgate Shopping Mall attacks to the #mydressmychoice response to a series of sexual assaults, Michael Armitage responds to current events and contemporary issues that have resonated both in Kenya and around the world. Embedded in his compositions are the rich histories, iconographies, and landscapes of East Africa. Even his choice of materials is imbued with extra significance: Armitage paints with oil not on cotton canvas but on Lubugo, a Ugandan bark that is beaten into a material to be used as ceremonial garments. However, the Lubugo stretched taut occasionally has imperfections, holes, and indentations, lending an additional element of visual complexity to the image.

Nyali Beach Boys recalls both the composition of the iconic Picasso painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and the gestural, “unfinished” brush strokes of Manet’s Olympia (1863). Five nude men, painted fluidly in hues of blacks, yellows, and blues, stand facing forward in the painting’s foreground. In place of the basket of fruit in Picasso’s painting is a black cat, a long-standing art-historical reference to prostitution (seen also in Olympia). The men are known colloquially as “beach boys,” or prostitutes who search the beach for wealthy female European tourists. In this frank depiction of the beach boys, Armitage simultaneously calls attention to both historical and contemporary dialogues between Africa and Europe; apparent is the Western trope of the “primitive” in art, exemplified in Picasso’s interest in African masks, as well as the widespread—yet covert—role of “beach boys” in Kenya’s tourism industry.

Excerpt from

Anna Katherine Brodbeck, ed., TWO X TWO X TWENTY: Two Decades Supporting Contemporary Art at the Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art), 2018, 278.

NOTES

Did not get object file- streamlined process, no provenance. CLC, 11/15/18.

Catalogue essays

Modernism

_TWO X TWO Much More Than Four_

The Territories of Art

Postcolonialism

Artist/designers

Cultures

Geography

Process/materials

Historical periods

Individuals

Subject terms

RELATED OBJECTS

PROVENANCE

AUDIO ASSETS

VIDEO ASSETS

IMAGE ASSETS

WEB RESOURCES

ARCHIVAL RESOURCES

FUN FACTS

TEACHING IDEAS

RULES

Apply to objects where number equals 2017.41

General Description

From the 2013 Westgate Shopping Mall attacks to the #mydressmychoice response to a series of sexual assaults, Michael Armitage responds to current events and contemporary issues that have resonated both in Kenya and around the world. Embedded in his compositions are the rich histories, iconographies, and landscapes of East Africa. Even his choice of materials is imbued with extra significance: Armitage paints with oil not on cotton canvas but on Lubugo, a Ugandan bark that is beaten into a material to be used as ceremonial garments. However, the Lubugo stretched taut occasionally has imperfections, holes, and indentations, lending an additional element of visual complexity to the image.

Nyali Beach Boys recalls both the composition of the iconic Picasso painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and the gestural, “unfinished” brush strokes of Manet’s Olympia (1863). Five nude men, painted fluidly in hues of blacks, yellows, and blues, stand facing forward in the painting’s foreground. In place of the basket of fruit in Picasso’s painting is a black cat, a long-standing art-historical reference to prostitution (seen also in Olympia). The men are known colloquially as “beach boys,” or prostitutes who search the beach for wealthy female European tourists. In this frank depiction of the beach boys, Armitage simultaneously calls attention to both historical and contemporary dialogues between Africa and Europe; apparent is the Western trope of the “primitive” in art, exemplified in Picasso’s interest in African masks, as well as the widespread—yet covert—role of “beach boys” in Kenya’s tourism industry.