As an alumna, mentee of Larry Walker, and current Welch faculty member, Yanique Norman has been invited to showcase a solo exhibition to accompany selected works from the Larry M. and Gwendolyn E. Walker Collection. The exhibition opens on January 16, with a reception on February 6, 2025 in tandem with the "Legacy: Selected Works from the Larry M. and Gwendolyn E. Walker Collection" Exhibition.
YANIQUE NORMAN is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores issues of privilege, nationalistic ideologies, alienation and Black embodiment operating under a mode of critique called Black Fungibility. Norman defines Black Fungibility as “an alternate ideological dream model” that tethers Black experience with scientific and technological actions of organic transmutation, multiplicity, reproduction and shapeshifting through installation, sound, video, sculpture and drawings. Born in Spanish Town, Jamaica, Norman migrated to the United States at age twelve. She completed her studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA, 2018) and Georgia State University (BFA, 2014). Norman was recently awarded the Individual Artist Career Opportunity Grant (2022); United States Artists Relief Grant (2021); Artadia Award: Atlanta (2020); National Museum of Women in the Arts of Georgia Grant (2020), Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant (2019) and Susan Antinori Visual Artist Grant (2019). Her work can be found in the public collections of the High Museum, Clark Atlanta University Art Museum and Hammonds House Museum.
Situating work within a fantastical methodology, Norman’s concept of Black Fungibility tethers blackness to an actual fungus to better understand its unique physiognomy. By nestling work within the confines of mycology, the artist explores how blackness is both expressed and produced specifically through a pseudo-scientific lens. By aiming to radically upend existentialist claims that too often render blackness very simplistically, Black Fungibility is an urgent corrective, as it beautifully captures the peculiar constitution of black interiority while simultaneously treating white iconography—an essential biological component of black DNA—like a deadly pathogen.
In her latest series, The Last Ladies, Norman radically reconsiders official portraits of US presidential wives. Concerned with both the FLOTUS body politic and its tangential and precarious relationship with power, the series serves as a reclamation project on iconicity while also offering a serious reflection on counter-narratives regarding blackness and the US carceral system. In looking specifically at the interconnections between the oligarchy and proletarian class, The Last Ladies series tests out the viability of Black Fungibility theory. Here, the ultimate intention of the series is to hijack the oligarchal order so as to reestablish a more equitable balance of power, which in a fungible context is to jail the scandalously free and exonerate the mercilessly maligned by whatever means necessary.