Hangman, 2007

Rujeko Hockley: Hangman is a painting from 2007, which makes it the earliest painting in the exhibition. 

It really is a hinge in her practice. You can see traces of self-portraits, actually, kind of submerged in the more orange or rust colored bands. And then there is a central figure, a Black man in profile with his eyes closed and his face turned up, perhaps to the sky. Amy has described this painting as a reverse lynching. It is probably the single most direct visual reference she has made to a very particularly American history of racialized violence. But the figure actually floats quite dreamlike and free of that history, though the title of the work is Hangman, and it is a reference to that history.

It represents a really important step in Sherald's thinking about her work in relation to a history of oppression of African-descended people in the United States, and her commitment to creating paintings that don't hide that fact or shy from that fact, but instead, represent different and complex narratives of Black life.

Narrator: Sherald achieved the mottled effect by layering different colors of paint, and then dripping turpentine on the surface, allowing the lower layer of color to show through.