Reimagining
the Masters

What did the Old Masters understand about composition, colour, space and visual authority—and how can a contemporary Black artist acquire that knowledge without reproducing the exclusions of the historical canon?

Marshall represents Black figures with the force, ambition and complexity traditionally reserved for European subjects. He studies historical systems and uses them to project a different ideal into the museum.

Harmonia Rosales reimagines familiar Renaissance compositions through Yoruba mythology and Black female figures.

Women and people of African descent occupy roles associated with divinity, beauty, creation and authority. Greek and Roman sources are interwoven with Yoruba cosmology.

Titus Kaphar demonstrates how changing the visual hierarchy of a historical painting can reveal people and narratives that were previously overlooked.

By obscuring dominant figures, Kaphar makes a marginalised Black figure visible. Historical art, he proposes, can be amended and reframed—not erased.

Wiley replaces the aristocrats and rulers of European portraiture with contemporary Black subjects in present-day clothing and elaborate pattern.

Participants select historical references and decide how they wish to be represented, introducing agency into a tradition historically controlled by wealthy patrons.

Contextual note: Serious allegations have been made against Wiley since 2024. He denies them and has not been charged. This film is included as an examination of artistic practice, not an endorsement of the artist personally.

Barkley L. Hendricks brought European portraiture into conversation with the confidence, fashion and individuality of contemporary Black life.

His subjects control attention through posture, clothing, scale and gaze. The Frick setting places that authority directly among Old Masters he admired.

Bisa Butler creates monumental portraits from intricately cut, layered and stitched textiles, using historical photographs to restore individuality and presence.

Butler approaches fabric as a painter approaches pigment. Pattern, colour, texture and cultural association model faces, clothing and character.

Akunyili Crosby combines painting, drawing, photographic transfer and collage in interiors shaped by her Nigerian upbringing and American life.

Family photographs, magazines, album covers, plants and Igbo patterns form a material archive in which several places, generations and identities coexist.

Shonibare reconstructs European historical scenes with sculptural figures dressed in brightly patterned wax fabrics, questioning empire, class and cultural ownership.

The fabrics carry complex international histories before narrative is added, showing that material can communicate history rather than function as surface decoration alone.

Firelei Báez overlays painting, pattern and hybrid mythological figures onto maps and documents associated with colonial power.

Caribbean history, the African diaspora, Yoruba traditions and speculative fiction turn historical trauma into a starting point for imagining survival and alternative futures.

Wangechi Mutu creates hybrid female figures from painting, collage, fashion, medicine, botany, anthropology and mass media.

Her figures can appear beautiful, unsettling, mechanical, organic and mythological at once. Incompatible sources become a coherent and unmistakably personal world.