W. Ian Bourland – författare

For centuries, Africa has been the center of the global trade in gold. Synonymous with wealth and power in African cultures, this precious metal was also central to the emergence of Europe’s colonial empires and the contemporary world made in their wake. Black and gold have thus always been conjoined and yet set in opposition: blackness as negation, gold as universal standard of value. Black & Gold is a genealogy of this seeming contradiction—a global history of value told through episodes of Black creative practice.Featuring the work of acclaimed contemporary artists such as Yinka Shonibare, Theaster Gates, Wangechi Mutu, El Anatsui, Chris Ofili, and Kerry James Marshall, this book unearths a series of historical and ecological connections—the mining of gold on the continent and its relationship to the diaspora, “black gold” as a colloquialism for oil, and Blackness as a form of cultural “gold.” By bringing early modern histories of alchemy, art, and colonial contact into the present, W. Ian Bourland tells a multifaceted story about the fetishization of gold, driven by an impulse to extract Blackness and refine people and matter into ever greater forms of abstraction with devastating consequences for the environment and humanity. In simplest terms, Black & Gold reconsiders the material and symbolic life of gold and the Black labor that has always sustained it. It will resonate with art critics and scholars, museumgoers and collectors, and anyone interested in modern and contemporary art, the Black Atlantic, and global histories of empire and culture.

For centuries, Africa has been the center of the global trade in gold. Synonymous with wealth and power in African cultures, this precious metal was also central to the emergence of Europe’s colonial empires and the contemporary world made in their wake. Black and gold have thus always been conjoined and yet set in opposition: blackness as negation, gold as universal standard of value. Black & Gold is a genealogy of this seeming contradiction—a global history of value told through episodes of Black creative practice.Featuring the work of acclaimed contemporary artists such as Yinka Shonibare, Theaster Gates, Wangechi Mutu, El Anatsui, Chris Ofili, and Kerry James Marshall, this book unearths a series of historical and ecological connections—the mining of gold on the continent and its relationship to the diaspora, “black gold” as a colloquialism for oil, and Blackness as a form of cultural “gold.” By bringing early modern histories of alchemy, art, and colonial contact into the present, W. Ian Bourland tells a multifaceted story about the fetishization of gold, driven by an impulse to extract Blackness and refine people and matter into ever greater forms of abstraction with devastating consequences for the environment and humanity. In simplest terms, Black & Gold reconsiders the material and symbolic life of gold and the Black labor that has always sustained it. It will resonate with art critics and scholars, museumgoers and collectors, and anyone interested in modern and contemporary art, the Black Atlantic, and global histories of empire and culture.

In Bloodflowers W. Ian Bourland examines the photography of Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1955–1989), whose art is a touchstone for cultural debates surrounding questions of gender and queerness, race and diaspora, aesthetics and politics, and the enduring legacy of slavery and colonialism. Born in Nigeria, Fani-Kayode moved between artistic and cultural worlds in Washington, DC, New York, and London, where he produced the bulk of his provocative and often surrealist and homoerotic photographs of black men. Bourland situates Fani-Kayode's work in a time of global transition and traces how it exemplified and responded to profound social, cultural, and political change. In addition to his formal analyses of Fani-Kayode's portraiture, Bourland outlines the important influence that surrealism, neo-Romanticism, Yoruban religion, the AIDS crisis, experimental film, loft culture, and house and punk music had on Fani-Kayode's work. In so doing, Bourland offers new perspectives on a pivotal artist whose brief career continues to resonate with deep aesthetic and social meaning.