November - December 2017
Portraits and the Subversion of Racial Tropes
Exhibition Summary:
Collection of portraits displayed on the EAST Studio Tours of 2017. Carrying both aesthetic meaning and cultural significance, black portraiture continues to serve as a humanizing document. Portraits and the Subversion and Racial Tropes features the work of Adrian Armstrong, Ryan Runcie, and Lavaras Tucker. In this series, viewers are presented with a wide range of figures that are imagined and real, escaped and recaptured, and bursting with double-edged critiques on the subject of blackness and black subjectivity.
Ryan Runcie
A studio artist, muralist, and painting instructor local to Austin and with Jamaican parents.
He seeks knowledge and to create a cultural shift in the perception of oneself and others so that people can learn to love better.
Lavaras Tukker
A fine arts painter perusing a visionary life.
He welcomes topics like discovery of life, love, color and meaning of art in his work.
Adrian Armstrong
A multidisciplinary artist whose work expands from music, painting, ballpoint pen, and printmaking.
Trough portrait and figurative practices he explores black identity and how the black body is perceived in predominantly White American spaces.
He work also explores topic like depression, nostalgia, growth, success, systematic oppression, and identity erasure.
