KADIR NELSON’S ILLUSTRATIVE BODIES
Richard J. Powell
Kadir Nelson does not emerge, Athena-like, fully formed and visually operative out of thin air. Many of us intuitively know and embrace his work (apart from its obvious charms) precisely because of his long and distinguished art lineage. Think of Charles White’s endearing Images of Dignity. Recall the delightful childhood classics illustrated by John Steptoe and Diane & Leo Dillon. Dig through a stash of urban artifacts and reflect on Anheuser-Busch’s wildly popular Great Kings and Queens of Africa poster series, featuring such legendary illustrators a Jerry Pinkney and Charles Lilly. And, of course, close your eyes (or, rather, open them, turning your television to a cable channel and watching the old situation comedy Good Times) and remember the 1970s black pop imagery of painter Ernie Barnes: a body-centric art that culturally the African American community’s sense of itself in those heady, post Civil Rights years. Yet it is clear that Kadir Nelson not only rides on the shoulders of his predecessors, but vaults their many accomplishments, wielding his talents in a contemporary, multi-dimensional art scene of book and magazine illustration, national advertising, institutional and corporate projects, visual development work for mass media, and lucrative private commissions.
On the other hand, many of Kadir Nelson’s most memorable sports images do not depict the actual games but, rather, athletes in repose: nonchalantly warming up, or languorously cooling off at courtside, or posing with a bravura and theatricality that comes rom constantly appearing (and measuring oneself) before adoring crowds and sneering critics. Nelson is especially attuned to the enormous egos and transcendent identities, with which athletes envelop themselves, creating portraits that, with a curious mixture of flattery and irony, further inflate the already “puffed up” players. The results are a representational extravagance that, like the dandified portraits during the reign of England’s Charles I, turns every simple gesture or piece of athletic wear into a grand discourse on style.
These discursive figures serve up a powerful course of artistic action when employed in children’s book illustrations. In Kadir Nelson’s Coretta Scott King Award winning picture book collaboration with author Ntozake Shange, ellington was not a street (2004); sensitive portrayals of cultural luminaries like Duke Ellington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Kwame Nkruma, and Paul Robeson are placed against a stage-like setting of a black middle-class domesticity. The recurring figure of a little girl (Shange’s semi-autobiographical protagonist from which this book’s text is constructed) interacts with these and other real life personalities and, with her diminutive exclusivity and robn’s-egg-blue visual pluck, enlivens the turning of each page. The book’s simple yet profound message is that the past (when juxtaposed to today’s “official” remembrances) looms even bigger and weightier in the memories of those who lived and loved yesterday’s character forming cultural experiences. Nelson perfectly encapsulates this message in his brilliant but understated frontispiece: the book’s little girl, now grown up, clutching an old Ellington vinyl record and seated in fr0nt of a grand piano, Archibald J. Motley, Jr. painting entitled Blues, and an expansive wall, the same color as the robin’s egg blue dress she wore as a precocious, all-seeing child.
The commercial art world’s requirement for a legibility paired with visual flair is exceeded in these and related projects. Through Kadir Nelson’s athletes, Civil Rights figures, and other mythical characterizations, an aesthetic idealism emerges that not only succeeds in the marketplace, but touches an emotional chord in viewers. And perhaps of even greater consequence Nelson’s illustrative bodies create their own illuminated books in the minds and hearts of those who, like the lead character in ellington was not a street; reminisce about portals, architectural and metaphysical, that “opened like our daddy’s arms, held us safe and loved.”
