Michi Meko exhibition: 'So Black and So Blue'
Michi Meko creates large-scale paintings that address and process “the African American experience of navigating public spaces, particularly in the American South, while remaining buoyant within them.” The artist’s powerful subject and impressive approach to making these works were brought about by a near-drowning, which shifted his perspective on how he exists in nature. While pursuits in the water or woods like fishing or hiking have historically been fraught for Black individuals, often restrictively codified as “white” spaces in the U.S., Meko’s exuberant art and passion for fly-fishing reclaim these nonurban sites, demonstrating that nature has always been a thriving source for Black creative expression.
Meko’s immersive paintings evoke turbulent skies, undulating seascapes, and billowy marshes with spray-painted gestural markings, while also incorporating forms and navigational lines in white color pencil and beacons of gold leaf sparkling in the night sky. The artwork’s inky palette and the exhibition’s title, So Black and So Blue, take inspiration from Louis Armstrong’s interpretation of the jazz standard “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue,” Ralph Ellison’s evocation of the song’s racial protest dimensions, and Imani Perry’s groundbreaking text Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People. Contextually and lucidly, Meko maps an optimistic framework of resilient expedition and profound change.
So Black and So Blue is organized by SCAD Museum of Art chief curator Daniel S. Palmer.
About the artist
Michi Meko (b. 1974, Florence, Ala.; lives and works in Atlanta) develops work spanning painting, sculpture, and installation, activating spray paint and found objects to create layered compositions. His gestures reflect an interplay between beauty and violence, rebellion and reflection, and past and future. Meko’s artworks interrogate themes of identity and resilience by offering an exploration of light, texture, and form. The landscape of the U.S., with its layered histories of fugitivity and survival, serves as both a backdrop and a starting point for his examination of race, place, and memory. Through the use of repurposed and hand-built tools, Meko’s compositions invite viewers to engage with multifaceted narratives that speak to emotional, psychological, and ecological histories.
Meko is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and the Atlanta Artadia Award. Recent exhibitions of Meko’s work include The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Richmond; Michi Meko: Black and Blur, Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, Atlanta; Michi Meko: It Doesn’t Prepare You for Arrival, Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta; Michi Meko: Before We Blast off: The Journey of Divine Forces, Atlanta Contemporary; and Abstraction Today, Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta. His work is held in the collections of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; King & Spalding, Atlanta; Ruby City, San Antonio, Texas, Scion (Toyota Motor Corporation), Los Angeles; and CW Network, Atlanta, among others.