Urban As A Verb
Not too long ago, I was rewatching “Insert Complicated Title Here,” one of my favourite lectures from Virgil Abloh. I credit Virgil for giving me the courage to pursue art and design, and he proved to millions like me that black art can not only make its way to the ‘upper echelon’ of design, but can also become canon. In the lecture, he asks, “what if streetwear was an architecture movement?” I interpreted this question more broadly as “what would it look like for ‘urban’ - it should go without saying that urban/streetwear are code words for ‘black’ - aesthetics to be at the forefront of art and architecture?” In trying to find precedents and a baseline for what this “streetwear”/“urban” movement would look like, my relation to this word ‘urban’ shifted and became something else entirely. Max Alfert wrote that “Considering its effect on modern Western art, the traditional art of black people must now be regarded as a major contribution to human culture in general.” This statement is apparent in the case of abstraction, which, as I will show, is indebted to the Urban ‘philosophy’ and creative pursuits of black people across the globe.
‘Urban’ artists from Africa and their artifacts were the genesis of modern art in the West. Primitivism, the German Die Brücke movement, the French’s Fauvism, among a myriad of other modern movements, were greatly influenced by artefacts found (and often stolen) from then-colonized West African countries. Despite European artists disregarding or out-right denying the sway that these African artworks had on their imagination – the influence, be that direct or circuitously, is sometimes undeniable. This unabashed concern of expression by means of colour, exaggerated form, and an interest in abstracted, more-than-human subject matter, de facto clashed against the status quo of monotonous academic art coming out of Europe. Positing themselves as antinationalist through their anarchist and self-proclaimed anticolonial worldview, these European avant-garde artists looked to adopt (but really, appropriated) “exotic” aesthetics from countries under colonial rule as protest against bourgeois culture; in so, completely missing their own ethnocentric attitude, fetishization, and their colonial-reminiscent extraction of resources from ‘tribal’ places.
Primitivism’s commodification of a mystical, idealized version of African aesthetics and traditions (particularly in parts of modern-day Congo and Benin) parallels the French zoos in which Congolese and Dahomean ‘priests’ and ‘witch doctors’ were put on display as entertainment and as props for propaganda. This intentionally pushed narratives of white supremacy in order to ‘rationalize’ colonial projects. In an attempt to segregate and hierarchize blackness from whiteness – and by violently inhumane means - the former’s ‘urban-ness’ was extracted in order to benefit the ladder. Despite an attempt to counter the dehumanization seen in the Human Zoos and other horrors of colonialism, the chief accomplishment of Primitivism and other movements was that they managed to bolster “canonical” art through their appropriation of black aesthetics.
What I’m trying to show is that Black aesthetics is reduced to the ‘urban category’ despite its documented influence on design as we know it. The abstracted art of the late nineteenth century and onwards is the direct result of the West coming across our art. American Architecture is also indebted to us, as ‘Negro hires’ - that is, slaves hired for construction projects - were common for campuses and government buildings such as the White House and the US Capitol building. Another example of black creativity speckled in American architecture can be traced out in wrought iron fences; ironwork gates and fences were often influenced or made by ironworkers from Cote D’Ivoire, Sierra Leone, and Ghana, who were sent to America as slaves. The designs and motifs incorporated into these iron fences – called adinkra – were symbols of status and/or funerary symbols; the most common (which you would not have to look too far to find) is the Sankofa, which almost looks like a heart and means “go back and fetch.” This is yet again an example of bastardized ‘urban’ design seamlessly assimilated into the West’s identity.
Earlier I mentioned Virgil’s achievement of putting his work and artistic vision at the forefront of luxury fashion. Virgil was the creative director of Menswear at what is arguably the biggest fashion house ever, and yet, words like ‘streetwear,’ ‘urban,’ and ‘hip-hop’ are the adjectives of choice in describing what he makes (like in 2022 when he was given an award for “Best Hip-Hop Fashion designer, what does that even mean??). Tyler, The Creator succinctly echoes my grief over the word ‘urban’ and its negative connotation. In 2020, he won his first ever grammy for his album Igor. Despite the album being more of a Pop record than anything else, the album won under the category of “Best Rap Album.” To this he said,
“On one side, I’m very grateful that what I made could be acknowledged in a world like this, but also, it sucks that whenever we — and I mean guys that look like me — do anything that’s genre-bending or that’s anything, they always put it in a rap or urban category, which is — I don’t like that ‘urban’ word. That’s just a politically correct way to say the n-word to me.” he said.
Let’s rid ourselves of the word ‘urban’ as an adjective and start thinking of it as a way to describe what we do. In doing this, we still need to ask ourselves where does this Urban-ness come from (and what this word would look like through this lens). That, I can’t answer alone, but I have an idea of where it we can find it at its highest. Ryan Coogler powerfully gesticulates the continuity of black music in his 2025 film, Sinners, through its “I Lied To You” sequence. What this sequence points to is the similarities between Afro-American art and art directly from Africa. The wisdom-packed storytelling of black music rhymes with what the Griots of West Africa do, the call and response we hear in ‘urban’ hit songs or in the black church follow the structure of the centuries-old funerary hymns that I grew up singing (Nyimbo za Wokovu), the loud evocative percussions of twenty-first-century rap music echo the drums of masquerades across the continent, the polyrhythmic flows of rap and Jazz are directly tied to West-African traditions brought to America through Slavery, and the dissonance of blues, I’ll say, is the apparition of our Urban-ness in spaces in which we were not supposed to exist in.
To clarify, I’m not laying a theological argument that our ‘urban-ness’ comes from God. Rather, I believe it may be inextricably tied to our posture of looking upwards; be that to God, the future, the supernatural, or other possibilities – as seen in the African masks and carvings which were stolen by Europe. Our capacity to keep this posture despite the heinous history inflicted upon us is what makes our art unparalleled to others. A year ago, for an art history course I wrote an essay on Arthur Jafa’s akingdoncomethas, a one-hundred minute film which compiles black performances in the church; each filled with intense or subdued black expression, in so, evoking a true and raw sense of the divine. This film has been the singular force in redefining my relation to black art. T. Jean Lax says this about the film.
“Just as ecclesiastical architecture, with its vaulted ceilings and plays of light, encouraged a leap of faith through the seeing eye, the black church (“the church of the insurgent”) has envisioned the possibility of human transcendence under captive conditions through a listening ear and the embodied word.”
To this, I’d also like to mention how hard this film goes when you consider the fact that none of it was supposed to happen. People who look like me weren't supposed to be on this side of the world, we weren't supposed to worship this god, and we weren't supposed to be thrown to the side and made into a homogenized group of peoples called "black," let alone survive. But someway, somehow, we carried the very tools that were meant to destroy us with unparalleled grace and swagger.
I say all of this to posit this “urban” word as an intrinsic design philosophy of Black people. I see it as a complex, unique, and incredibly immense umbrella of vernaculars born out of impossible hardships and unbound creativity, rather than a belittling and segregating adjective. When I say it’s a verb I mean that it’s something we do, not who we are. Because of our unique positionality across the globe, no one else in the world could ever do this Urban thing that we do. Black artists and their art have been the steam for Western imagination for the better part of half a millennia. A streetwear movement would be counter cultural, I admit, but would not be the only place where black aesthetics exist and thrive. This would presuppose that blackness is somehow beside the ‘status quo,’ but what I’m trying to show is that our contributions put us in the middle of it. So to answer Virgil’s question; I believe that our way of designing is already quite ubiquitous.
Sources:
Max Alfert, Relationships between African Tribal Art and Modern Western Art, https://www.jstor.org/stable/775542?searchText=max+alfert&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dmax%2Balfert%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3Ae5bfb0fac64e4540374df240d7b19696&seq=1
Core Studio Public Lecture: Virgil Abloh, “Insert Complicated Title Here,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qie5VITX6eQ
From Naming To Know, Slavery In Construction Projects,https://namingtoknowing.org/slavery-in-construction-projects/
Patricia Leighten, The White Peril and L'Art nègre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonialism, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3045764?workspaceFolderId=8902d2c1-7ae5-46bf-8341-1e0e1e9284b2&orderBy=updatedOn&orderType=desc&index=2&seq=1
Rolling Stone, Tyler, the Creator on His Grammy Win: It ‘Feels Like a Backhanded Compliment,’https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/tyler-the-creator-rap-grammy-backhanded-compliment-943568/
T. Jean Lax (MoMA), A Rehearsal for Communion: On Arthur Jafa’s akingdoncomethas, https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/329
Yaatia Asabea, West African Symbolism in Ironwork Across the East Coast, https://vizcaya.org/beyond-vizcaya/west-african-symbolism-in-ironwork-across-the-east-coast/
