Beckoning for Change - Artists With a Cause

Charles McGill

In the studio at The Museum of Arts and Design as a curious visitor takes note of the process, NYC 2009.

Charles McGill is an African-American artist who lives in Harlem. He also plays golf, a game that is still, notwithstanding the ascendancy of Tiger Woods, popularly thought of as an economically advantaged white man’s sport. As an artist, he slyly conflates these different aspects of his identity.

Under the auspices of a fictive label, ”Club Negro,” he has issued a line of satiric mock-commodities for black golfers. For example, a commercial-style display promoting new, Africanized golf balls titled ”The Hard to Swallow Suite” offers brands like the ”New Spook” (”If you can’t beat them, scare them,” reads the ad copy on the shelf) and the ”Malcom X” (”Guaranteed to improve your game by any means necessary”).

Elsewhere, Mr. McGill presents various decorative objects for the clubhouse. A glass-doored rack contains rows of balls inscribed by hand with disclaimers like ”I was never on Soul Train” or ”I can’t jump.” A wooden plaque displays a golf club festooned with dreadlocks; another is entirely papered by reproductions of old photographs depicting lynchings.

The collision Mr. McGill craftily sets up between incongruous worlds — the one traditionally overprivileged and effete, the other disenfranchised and funky — is at once funny and sobering. New York Times – Ken Johnson

CONCERNING CHANGE

As with most sustained bodies or work, the golf-inspired theme happened quite by accident. The subject matter began showing up in my work after I picked up the game – it really was as simple as that. I saw the action of playing golf as creative, like “drawing” and composing space on the earth within a predetermined picture plane.

Each hole was its own framed piece of art. Only I felt like I was a part of the composition – inside the picture. There was a history of marks and directions that I could draw from memory later on in the studio. So I began experimenting with these memories by drawing aerial views of golf holes I imagined.

Shortly afterwards I began using golf objects as metaphors for a larger discussion of racism and identity. While I explored my own fascination with golf, I started to merge this passion with a more conceptual understanding of found object, the recycling of obscure Internet imagery, the Internet as “palette”, ethnicity, identity and socio-political dialogue.

Over the last decade I began seeing the golf bag as “found canvas”, as metaphor, as vessel and as the human form; I saw its potential as both object and subject.

Using the process of collage and “found digital imagery” I changed the identity of the bag while maintaining (or in some cases, re-establishing) its relationship to race and social differences. In the end, I want to create an object that is at first beautiful then thought provoking.

The two quintessential pieces from this body of work are, Arthur Negro I & II. Both are photo realistic, life-sized self-portraits. They represent my defining answer to the notion of Black Art, hence the name Arthur Negro.