Think of a Renaissance painting. What comes to mind? The vibrant colors, the lighting, the billowing clothes? Whether it’s "The Birth of Venus" or the "Mona Lisa" that you thought of, this is an era of art that is unmistakable.
Alanna Airitam, a photographer and artist based in Tucson, loves it too. But, she saw something missing when she spent time in museums as a kid: people who looked like her.
Airitam is one of the artists behind the new exhibition at the Tempe Center for the Arts titled "Reclaiming Hope: Afrofuturist Visions." In it, you’ll see her version of Renaissance decadence in portraits she took of Black people dressed in silks, holding fruits, adorned with flowers.
All of the pieces in this show are from Airitam’s 2017 show "The Golden Age," her first real body of work. Airitam said it was born out of frustration and anger that she didn’t know what to do with. So, she made work out of it.
She joined The Show to talk about the exhibit and what it means to her today.
Full conversation
ALANNA AIRITAM: The Golden Age for me, the title ties into the work that we know to be art, right? So when I started making these portraits, I realized that it took me a long time to create this work because I hadn't seen myself represented in art spaces. So it didn't really occur to me that it was a space that I could inhabit myself. And also, you know, growing up and having spent large amount of time in museum spaces, and again, not seeing myself there, I was just like in love with the richness of these 16th century Renaissance rooms, you know, and the portraits that were there, and how just beautiful the light was, and how realistic the skin was, you know, on on these paintings.
And, you know, when we think about art, even in sort of like a layman's terms, somebody that's not educated in art history can look at a Rembrandt and say, that's art, right? Yeah. So, you know, I think that that was kind of a one of the starting places for me with this work, was making work that everyone can sort of relate to, and also saying, “hey, we were not there, and we belong there, you know, and we belong there in a context that wasn't just in servitude or subjugation.” And so to put these people in this context, I felt like it needed to be something that was very readily seen as art. So I used what would be an art trope, if you would.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, yeah. Well, there's so many interesting dichotomies there. Like you're, you're flipping the art history on its head, but you're also flipping the approach to creating this work on its head, because these are photographs that you sort of render to look like paintings, right?
AIRITAM: Right. Absolutely. I'm a self-taught photographer, so as I was teaching myself this craft, I asked myself, well, if I could go to school and learn from the best teachers, like, who would I study under? And when it came to lighting, of course, I went back to those paintings, of course, because it was just, you know, my first sort of touchstone with that. But also, like, that is the best light. And it was also some light that everyone could create. All you need is a window or a candle, right? Like, it doesn't cost a whole lot of money to create this sort of light.
And again, I wanted it to be accessible. You know, I didn't feel like I didn't have the money, but I also didn't feel like it was necessary to go out and have like seven, seven strobe lights set up in a big warehouse somewhere to create this work. It was a one light setup. And, yeah, very, very easy to create, in a sense.
GILGER: Well, so, so this is radio, right? So describe maybe one of these portraits for us, like they're so ornate. The lighting is very intentional, as you're talking about, but it's also colorful. It evokes that period very much.
AIRITAM: And the color for me is, I wanted it to be rich and luscious and and, you know, something that you look at and feel like there's life in there, you know? So the portraits, for the most part, I tried to make them one to one size, so you're looking at someone. They have dark backgrounds in the background, there are these textures, so it sort of mimics a painting in that way. They have lots of flowers in them. Some of them are holding out fruits, and these are symbols of life and abundance and beauty. And you'll see in the 10 portraits that, you know, they are holding out these offerings.
And the last one that I would normally show in the series is the woman who I call Queen Mary, the Queen and, and she has a halo of flowers, and she has, she's offering out a handful of grapes, and has a key in her hand that she's holding up. And the key, to me, symbolizes this idea that, you know, once you look at all of these, these people offering these these fruits and these flowers, this abundance, this life, this beauty, you know that she's offering this key, saying that you are already all of these things, and that we don't need to look externally for this, that we already hold all of this inside of us. So she's offering out the key.
GILGER: Right. But, the people in these portraits are people you know from your own community, like artists, writers, scholars, thinkers, things like that. And that is the part where you're subverting something in art history here.
AIRITAM: You know, when I was sitting in those rooms as a kid, even now, going back into these Renaissance rooms, you do, you can see black people in a lot of these paintings, but they are grayed out in the background, or, you know, at the feet of someone they're, they're usually in a several sort of role. And that's not all of our story.
And it just, you know, I think for me, I just got tired of seeing us being reduced to these sort of one dimensional spaces, and, you know, we were there, and we were scholars, and we were artists and we were thinkers, you know, and so I really wanted to show that through my community, but also to say that we are more than just this one dimensional story.
GILGER: Yeah, OK. So let's talk about how this fits into this broader exhibition right now at the Tempe Center for the Arts, which is about Afrofuturist visions, right? Exploring black healing, future building through visual art. It's interesting to me to put this kind of portraiture work inside an Afrofuturism context, right? Because what you're doing by looking back is kind of looking forward, it seems.
AIRITAM: You know, what's interesting about this for me is I read a lot of black feminist literature and philosophy. Christina Sharpe talks about the wake and in the wake can be like becoming awake. The wake can be the celebration of a life, the wake, it can be the thing that happens behind a ship, right the water, behind a ship. And so in this context, she is talking about in the wake of slavery, the place that artists can somehow inhabit, where we get caught up in this idea of what happened and the pain and the thing that we're constantly trying to work through, right?
But what happens if we move beyond the wake and to think about our lives in that context of not being attached to that other story? And so in that way, I feel like these portraits do live in an Afrofuturistic sort of scenario, and that it, its primary sort of center of what I'm saying here in this narrative is not about our subjugation, it is about our existence, being rich and fruitful and alive and beautiful, and you know, all of these things, with or without being in the wake, we just are.
GILGER: It’s a beautiful place to end this conversation. We'll leave it there.
