In a world overwhelmed by information, Noel W Anderson’s clear artistic voice rings truth to power. Born in Kentucky and based in New York, Anderson’s work reflects his continued focus on identity, hypermasculine imagery, and historical storytelling through his conscious re-presentation of Black men in the media. His bold and sumptuous artworks—often monumental in scale—address complex cultural themes and notions of performance and labor with the Black man at the center of it all.
Last week I attended a lively afternoon conversation between Anderson and Cara Manes, associate curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA, at the University Art Museum (UAM) at the University at Albany. Flanked by his robust solo show “Black Excellence” (on view through April 3), including Anderson’s tapestries, prints, works on paper and a video collaboration (his most comprehensive exhibition to date), the conversation was upbeat and spirited. Manes shared that over 20 years ago she served as an intern at UAM, and she and Anderson have known each other for a decade. The two carried on like old friends as they discussed the brave and nuanced nature of Anderson’s art while his oversized purple and blue toned distressed cotton Co-los-us (2023-present) installation festooned the area above them.
Anderson is a gifted orator with a deft intellect, and his discourse is exemplary. Speaking about his practice and the art world at large, he cited a dynamic range of respected figures in tandem with his sharp cultural analysis, everyone from artist Jasper Johns (“I was looking for something to steal” quoting Johns in reference to his visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art) to conductor Dean Dixon (“I want to feel something” quoting Dixon with regard to the relationship between time and music).
After hearing his insightful commentary, I walked through the show with the discourse humming in my head. Anderson’s potent comments about “exhaustion” and “erasure” in Black culture infuse the work with its cerebral edge (two previous solo exhibitions of his contain these terms). How do these concepts express the reality of Blackness in the America of today? Turning to Anderson’s work for his radiant response, we encounter a repetitive stained glitch effect that embodies the distortion.
This wry glitching is the heart of the matter for Anderson: Existence is evident yet unsettled, blurred, interrupted. Existence is also “excellence” as seen in works such as We Give ‘Em Reverend Brown (2023), a richly hued image of famed singer James Brown seated in a throne and looking the part while simultaneously melting and twisting with Anderson’s tweaking. (Hor)Rorschach (Downward Dog) (2019-23) is an abstract image of blurred figures, another work that is both meta and maximalist in its strength. Still other works such as Magic, Deep in Thought (2023-25) reveal Anderson’s experimentation with adding fabrics and three-dimensional bits to his canvases, in this case fibers and tiny pieces of plastic that protrude from the surface and disrupt the wavy pattern.
Photo: Olympia Shannon
Several of Anderson’s large-scale canvases take us onto the basketball court and into the sweaty heat of the competitive moment, and one can feel the pounding excitement of the scene in works such as Land Cavalier (2023), featuring a sideline of white folks jumping for joy, and Battle Royale (2023) where two players plunge into seated fans who absorb their wild bodily blow-out. But Where? (2022-23) is a magnum opus and features a scatter-effect vision of LeBron James as he pushes a basketball backwards to the court while tumbling into the crowd, a painting that vibrates with the full power of “Black Excellence.”
The intensity of this show is on display in the commissioned video Echoes of the New World (2024-25), a collaboration between Anderson and filmmaker Solomon Bennett. The 40-minute work features appropriated and manipulated clips from cinema and TV as well as archival footage, revealing a complicated narrative around Blackness as portrayed in popular media.
A series of four humble and haunting monoprints on Ebony magazine pages titled Escapism (2017) are among the most poignant pieces that Anderson gives us. The images memorialize Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old killed by police in 2014, just a week after his graduation from high school. In one of the portraits, this beautiful boy with dreamy eyes looks directly at us with a stoic glance that captures Anderson’s poignant trilogy all at once: exhaustion (another crime against the Black man), erasure (another Black man gone), and yet excellence still—an unwavering fearless excellence despite the glitchy messiness, an all-ness of Blackness as par excellence.
