African, American: On the Art of Troy Jones
Look closely at the figures in this exhibition, and you will find two things layered into every face: a contemporary American life, and an African mask that has never let go of it.
Troy Jones paints both truths at once. His subjects carry the confidence, the style, and the spirit of the present, and beneath it, an inheritance that reaches back before the country itself, protection, memory, and identity carved into wood and worn like a second skin.
This exhibition asks one question in two directions. How can a people contribute so much to the world, in music, in style, in language, in labor, and still so often go uncredited as the source? And in a nation marking 250 years since its founding, how do we finally say plainly what has always been true: that African Americans are, simply, American, as fully and as rightfully as anyone born on this land?
The title says it before the first painting does. Not African-American, but African, American, two full words, standing as equals, joined by a single comma that refuses to let either one shrink the other. Step inside, and let the masks look back at you.