Evocative Photo Project Counters Stereotypes Of What It Means To Be Black, Masculine And Stylish

For black men, a universe of conform has mostly been one wrought with stereotypes, misconceptions and images of three-sizes-too-large T-shirts, relaxed jeans and adorned chains.

But a ongoing fabrication array “The Dandy Lion Project

The plan is orderly by Shantrelle Lewis, a Philadelphia- and Brooklyn-based curator. Initially launched for a pop-up art space in Harlem in 2010, “Dandy Lion” has given been featured in shows via a world. Its latest exhibition, at a Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago

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The show, patrician “Dandy Lion: (Re)Articulating Black Masculine Identity,” explores a thought of a “black dandy,” who Lewis described as “a male of African skirmish who has digested and acculturated European conform in terms of Edwardian-style conform and tailoring and has African aesthetics.” The uncover facilities photos of immature civic group dressed in a “dandy” character from all over a world, taken by photographers trimming from a eminent to a unknown.

But what accurately creates adult a “dandy” style? The demeanour is a delicately tailored one that mostly includes a suit, or a selected sweater or varsity coupler and mixes that early-to-mid 20th-century character with an African cultured that is mostly ripping with confidant colors, abounding fabrics and decorated patterns. It is not simply, as a muster proclamation noted, “an fabrication of European high-brow society.”

Though a “dandy” judgment dates behind hundreds of years — many delicately documented by Slaves to Fashion — a “remixed” character is generally fitting of today’s “hip-hop generation,” Lewis explained.

“It unequivocally goes opposite a normal in a industry,” Lewis told The Huffington Post. “It’s a approach in that they meticulously take and steal from opposite cultures that speaks to a diaspora knowledge in general. It’s also partial of a hip-hop aesthetic, borrowing and sampling — that’s what these guys are doing when they get dressed.”

Museum of Contemporary Photography executive executive Natasha Egan also found a theme timely — that is partial of a reason because they brought a uncover to Chicago.

“It’s a theme that people speak about in a contemporary art world, this arrange of illustration of civic black men, though we haven’t seen a uncover like this,” Egan said. “It’s a good matrimony between photography and fashion, that also is mostly about politics and gender.”

While profitable so most courtesy to one’s coming competence strike some as feminine, Lewis forked out that a plan is dictated to pull behind opposite that classify too. The fabrication subjects are a brew of true group as good as happy men, according to Lewis.

“I wanted to fight these singular and slight ideas of masculinity,” Lewis said. “It’s lovely to see group who can welcome femininity regardless of sexuality. we have consciously picked images that uncover and honour that ethereal change between masculinity and femininity — one doesn’t repress a other and they work in harmony.”

And during a time where media images of black group continue to strengthen stereotypes rather than charity a broader perspective of African-American experiences, exhibitions like Lewis’s offer a absolute purpose.

“There’s something to be pronounced about how images continue to continue charge and fear of black group in a society, images that are closely associated to a commercialized picture of a bully and a rapper, what we hear on a radio and what we see in films and on TV,” Lewis said. “It’s a made image. we consider of those images as being tranquil and we consider it’s time we collectively as a multitude opposite races and demographics start to unequivocally idle them.”

Below, perspective some-more photos from Lewis’ “Dandy Lion” show, that is on arrangement at a Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago by Jul 12

Article source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/07/dandy-lion-photo-project_n_7011860.html?utm_hp_ref=chicago&ir=Chicago