Go to Virginia Quarterly Review right now to read Poet. Professor. Essayist, Tiana Clark’s piece At the Tate.  I know that Cezanne is not a Black artist…but Clark’s observations are so sharp and the  Cezanne image is just a point of entry. The piece moves so far beyond the initial image that it represents another possibility for how we think about what Black Ekphrastic discussion/poem/look/writing/critique is or can be…

I have only read this piece through a few times since finding on her Instagram, but I love how expensive Clark or her speaker)  brings in discussions of History and Art History. Clark deftly looks at curatorial and interpretative elements, referencing wall texts and labels. Without losing momentum in the piece, she also spatially locates the reader/looker in the space, in a section of the poem that shifts to mentions of  Ellen Gallagher’s work “on level four.”

Clark uses Gallagher’s comments from a wall text to introduce us to the painterly elements of the work, such as materials and the treatment and the deployment of the paint on the canvas. Clark’s own comments in woven about these same elements are woven through this tapestry of a piece.

I will stop here….I don’t want to spoil it, just go to VQR and digest it for yourself. Clark covers a lot of ground in this piece, so take your time with it. As I said in my opening, I think it represents another possibility for how we think about what Black Ekphrastic discussion/poem/look/writing/critique is or can be…

Clark’s piece is very much the kind of thing, I was thinking of when I started this website

I am grateful that a poet of her craft and stature thinks about this as s “Black Ekphrastic poem.” Check out her Instagram post here