the young people's professor

(left to right: demetrius oliver, wardell milan II, titus kaphar)

Midnight's Daydream is the Studio Museum in Harlem's fabulous new exhibit that showcases the works of its three 2006-2007 artists-in-residence: Wardell Milan II, Titus Kaphar, and Demetrius Oliver. All freshly minted Ivy League MFAs (Milan and Kaphar were trained at Yale, Oliver hails from UPENN) the three represent the Studio's latest black-superstars-in-the-making discovery.

Titus Kaphar, whose work bears an obvious thematic resemblance to the work of portraiture artist Kehinde Wiley, engages the history of black images within 18th and 19th century European and American paintings. In his series "Conversations Between Paintings" the artist "remixes" classic works—repainting them in ways that flip the script on art history's traditional representations of black/white relations (where blackness equals subservience and whiteness equals agency). Unfortunately, in spite of the delicious idiosyncrasy of Kaphar's diptychs, many of the works run the risk of being cliché; predictable even in their kitschy eccentricity. This is in part because Kaphar seems to pay less attention here in producing innovation at the level of form rather than simply at the level of thematic content.


Form is of course of little importance to Demetrius Oliver, whose conceptual works bear the trace of a young David Hammons. In works such as "Midnight," Oliver transforms a simple blue blazer into an art-object: flittering white lights adorn the jacket's back, giving the piece a futuristic, other-wordly effect.This afro-supernatural flare is also embodied in Oliver’s exquisite, minimalist art object “Mimic,” a shimmery, silver tea-kettle which mysteriously whistles without the aid of a stove or heated flame. Shifting gears from object-art to conceptual photography, in terms of sheer size, Oliver’s “Almanac” is surely the grand contribution to Daydream. The work (an ambitious installation which covers the entire back wall of the Studio’s upper gallery) features 44 fish-eye angle photographs taken in the inside the artists’ studio. In spite of these auspicious experimentations, largely absent here from Oliver’s repertoire is the kind of visceral, body-based sensibility embodied in some of his earlier, now signature pieces, such as “Till” (2004) and"Bust” (2006) :










But the true superstar of Daydream is undoubtedly Wardell Milan II, whose brilliant collage dioramas present an endless archive of black diaspora iconography.