As this is written in early spring, Deana Lawson has two exhibitions up in Manhattan, one at the Guggenheim Museum, where she is presenting her show Centropy as the 2020 Hugo Boss Prize winner, and another at Sikkema Jenkins, her gallery in Chelsea. A third major show is upcoming this fall at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.
Lawson’s recognition as a profound orchestrator of convulsively charismatic images of Black subjects was inevitable—not least because of her unique depictions of Black folk in domestic spaces in a time of Black pictorial hypervisibility. She has stated that her work “negotiates a knowledge of selfhood through a profoundly corporeal dimension; the photographs speaking to the ways that sexuality, violence, family, and social status may be written, sometimes literally, upon the body.”
On another occasion, Lawson revealed to an interviewer some of her primary inspirations: “vintage nudes, Sun Ra, Nostrand Ave., sexy mothers, juke joints, cousins, leather-bound family albums, gnarled wigs, Dana Lawson, purple, the Grizzly Man, M.J., oval portraits, Arthur Jafa, thrift shops, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, acrylic nails, weaves on pavement, Aaron Gilbert, the A train, Tell My Horse, typewriters, Notorious B.I.G., fried fish, and lace curtains.’’ Our brief chat on Zoom revisited a few of these madeleines and sifted in a few more epiphanic treats (and treatises) for good measure.
—Greg Tate
Greg Tate: I want to start off by asking you about your journey to becoming an artist who makes photographs—someone who’s pursuing a singular vision through the medium.
: Well, one of my earliest memories as a child is trying to build a flying car with my twin sister, Dana. I remember pulling all these things out of the back room from my toy box, and I was so excited that we were going to rig up something that could elevate us off the ground and have us float off into the sky. I had a lunch box for a seat, and some rope, and some other gadgets, but the more
