Guggenheim Fellow and native Angeleno Todd Gray is a visual artist whose work is in the collections of MOCA, LACMA, the Whitney, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. While mostly photo-based he also presents performance works; that is how we first met and collaborated. We recently spoke over the phone for a couple of hours, talking about food and his career, in no particular order.
AUGUST 2020: The quality of my work as a Black artist could reasonably be questioned; taste, trends, events, politics, all influence reactions to cultural artifacts and their respective makers. Yet it came as a surprise to me, early and repeatedly, that my very Blackness itself was also interrogational, and that I would become one of its chief examiners.
JUNE 2004: The “California Missions” project was a stab at the colonial history of my native state. Too immersed in the cultural windfall of Southern California and still too angry to assess my own colonization, I created a series of enormous photographs of landscape as guillotine, a symbol of the proselytizing missionaries who sliced a cultural before/after through the people, their land, their traditions. Half a horse protruded from a forest while the other side of the photo was a gleaming mirror finish so the people, newly redeemed in Christ, could see themselves reborn as saved souls.