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FIRST FLOOR
Noel W Anderson: Black Excellence
Spanning 15 years, Noel W Anderson: Black Excellence is the artist’s most comprehensive exhibition to date and features stretched and suspended cotton Jacquard tapestries, video, prints, and works on paper. Anderson digitally and physically alters archival and media images from the 1960s to the present centered on Black identity, labor, and performance. His processes of abstraction and erasure allow him to go deeper into the meaning of these images and explore their relation to longer arcs of history and art history.
The exhibition specifically reflects on Black excellence—a term whose current usage grew out of the Civil Rights movement but whose underlying concepts have been debated in Black thought and education since the nineteenth century. Anderson looks at the extraordinary performance of Black individuals—the necessity to go above and beyond white peers’ achievements to receive recognition in academia or other professional fields highly valued within the American system. Conversely, archival police images in the exhibition reveal a system that simultaneously contests the pursuit of excellence. Suspended between the demand for exceptional effort and institutional opposition, the pursuit of Black excellence becomes entangled with exhaustion and erasure for Anderson—ideas he expresses by distressing his tapestries and literally erasing images.
Underscoring Anderson’s exploration of performance, the two-story, open-floor plan of the museum, designed by Edward Durell Stone, creates an arena-like space for the exhibition to unfold. It offers vantage points to experience his work from above and below, compelling the viewer to reflect on their role as participant, observer, or witness.
Athletes and Spectators
In the tapestries on this floor, Anderson appropriates images of Black athletes and spectators from media sources: television broadcasts, sports photographs, even pages from a 1970s coloring book of the Harlem Globetrotters, the virtuosic and comical all-Black basketball exhibition team. Some images are digitally manipulated through wavy patterns that recall moments of poor reception in the analog 1980s television broadcasts of Anderson’s youth. In others, superimposed images create shifts in scale, making athletes larger than life, or move the action of the basketball court into the stands.
Mechanically reproduced as Jacquard tapestries, the heroic scale of these images recalls the privileged role of tapestries in the medieval era and echoes the legacy of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history painting. The medium, cotton, ties the labor of athletics to a longer history of Black labor, also mirrored in Anderson’s own labor as he works to undo the images and the weave of the tapestries: picking them apart thread by thread, scuffing their surfaces with steel wire brushes to create a fur-like texture, and sewing objects into them. Anderson’s manipulation of the material allows the tapestry, in his words, to become “an open and expansive (cotton)field of possibility.”
The relationship between Black athletes and their spectators is a central theme in these tapestries, which challenge the roles mass media and athletics have played in defining Black excellence. In many instances, Anderson shifts our focus to the fans, making them the center of the spectacle.
Suspension
Two of Anderson’s suspended tapestries unfold in the arena-like space of the museum, designed by late modernist Edward Durrell Stone (1902–78). They pay homage to Sam Gilliam (1930–2022), the renowned American abstract painter from Anderson’s hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, who, in a revolutionary act, suspended and draped his canvases in the 1960s and 1970s to activate the relationship between painting and its environment, as well as blur the boundary between painting and sculpture. Like Gilliam’s paintings, Anderson’s tapestries, bundled, bound, and billowing through space, challenge the flatness and regularity of the modernist grid, a compositional device central to modern painting and architecture.
The tapestries pair together two images of spirituality and Blackness that frequently recur in Anderson’s work: a fourteenth-to-seventeenth–century wooden Dogon (Mali) statue of a priest with arms raised in prayer, a gesture that today evokes the hands-up position of an arrest, and a film still of R&B and soul singer James Brown playing a preacher in The Blues Brothers (1980). Anderson digitally altered the images, had them machine-woven, then distressed and dyed the tapestries. By folding and curving the tapestries, Anderson alternately conceals and reveals their images, suspending the certainty that comes from viewing a flat image. Hanging in a state of limbo between the museum’s upper and lower levels, the tapestries simultaneously evoke the sense of bodies suspended in space and a disembodied experience beyond the material world.
SECOND FLOOR
Blues
Anderson uses archival police photographs for many of his tapestries and works on paper on this floor. Anderson’s digital and physical abstraction of the images suggests how the subjects of the photographs were abstracted by a criminal justice system. In the context of the exhibition, the works seem to ask what limits and checks are placed on Black achievement? The physicality of the materials and Anderson’s processes of disrupting the surfaces begin to reveal the unreality of these types of images, which all too often play a defining role in the construction of Black masculinity through their proliferation and repetition in mass media.
Abstraction as a tactic for challenging these images comes in several forms. Nested rectangles on a mug shot reproduced as a tapestry recall the abstraction of American painter Frank Stella (1936–2024). Distortions, inversions, and staining in works like (Hor)Rorschach (Downward Dog) (2019–23) alter the meaning of the original photograph of a man under arrest with his hands on the hood of a police car. Digital waves ripple through many of the blue paper prints, distorting the original photographs, including those of the feet of Fred Hampton (1948–69), the civil rights activist and Black Panther Party leader targeted by the FBI and killed by police in his Chicago home in 1969. In the tapestry Pleas-e Please Pl-ease (2022–23), the words stained across a scene of police brutality come from a song by soul and R&B singer James Brown (1933–2006), breaking the surface of the image with the evocation of a vocal plea.
Performance: Excellence and Exhaustion
Anderson’s tapestries, which utilize appropriated images of performers and other figures of Black male exceptionalism, challenge conventional narratives surrounding Black excellence. Two recurring performers in the tapestries on this floor are soul and R&B singer James Brown (1933–2006) and stage and screen actor, singer, and activist Paul Robeson (1898–1976). Anderson has selected stills of Brown from his role as a preacher in The Blues Brothers (1980), a comedy centered on two fictional white Blues musicians and featuring cameos by notable Black blues artists of the day. The image of Robeson is from his titular role in The Emperor Jones (1933), the first mainstream feature film in the US with a Black lead, which was also rife with problematic racial tropes.
Anderson offers new ways to emotionally understand these images, the struggles of these men, and the exhaustion that accompanies the labor of extraordinary Black performance. He makes haunting digital alterations—glitches and wave patterns—before having the images mechanically woven into Jacquard tapestries. Anderson then physically manipulates and distresses the tapestries: staining, blanching, or dyeing with pools of color; scraping with steel brushes to achieve a fur-like texture; and picking the tapestries apart thread by thread, allowing the artist, in his words, to “open up the image.”
Echoes of the New World
The video Echoes of the New World reimagines classical music instruction as a language of resistance and remembrance. Centered on archival footage of pioneering conductor Dean Dixon demonstrating musical terms—legato, staccato, augmentation, diminution, tremolo, and trill—the film weaves these lessons into visual meditations on the public struggle and endurance of Black life in America. Other appropriated elements include the music of Duke Ellington, singer and actor Paul Robeson in his film portrayal of Emperor Jones, and news footage of O.J. Simpson’s 1994 car chase, among other images.
Each movement builds upon the last, with songs and images that echo forward, as if haunted by what came before, guided by the ghost of Czech composer Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 New World Symphony (1893)—the second movement of which recalls the melody of African-American spirituals. Structured like a symphony and unfolding like a reckoning, the film moves through a series of lessons: Preparation’s Preface, A Class on the Metrics of Excellence, Stay in Your Lane, A Question of Gathering, and Stop Driving Us Crazy. Together, they form a score of Black presence, grief, resistance, and visibility.
A phrase that is AI-generated to sound like Dixon repeatedly says, “At least you’ll see the Black,” and serves as both refrain and challenge. The enduring presence of Blackness, and the pursuit of its excellence, marks this as not simply a film to be watched, but a composition to be felt, questioned, and heard anew.
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