BLACK MONUMENTALITY, First masterclass with André Leon Talley
In celebration of the Black History Month at The New School, André Leon Talley and Parsons Paris students are addressing issues of inclusion and diversity in today’s society drawing from his own personal and professional experience and from a rich body of African-American historical and contemporary artistic narratives and works. This masterclasses with BFA Fashion Design students focuses on themes such as: patterns of racism, resilience, cultural and political disenfranchisement, exclusion & inclusion and social change through the connections between fashion and other forms of visual and performing arts.
This one-of-a-kind project has been organized by Leyla Neri, founding director of the Master of Fine Arts in Fashion Design and the Arts that will welcome its first cohort of students in September 2021.
In this first masterclass André Leon Tally presented the theme “BLACK MONUMENTALITY.” The masterclass focused on the idea of monumental authenticity to approach the topic of the monumentality of fashion from an African-American perspective. Fashion Design students explored a multitude of art works, from the collage-style paintings of Mickalene Thomas to the anachronistic compositions of contemporary artist Kehinde Wiley, and from the photographic work of Carrie Mae Weems on Black women and exclusion to the Sugar Baby and other monumental works of Kara Walker. Comparative analysis with the European-American dominant culture in classical painting, cinema and other fields allowed the students to acquire critical thinking and elaborate their own artistic interpretation of current social and cultural tensions in the context of the Black Lives Matter protests.
