Photo via John Michael Kohler Arts Center
Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola: Magic City installation view at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, 2021.
Despite the brilliant colors, it may be the Blackest installation ever to grace the John Michael Kohler Arts Center’s white walls. The imagery and objects comprising “Magic City,” the first-ever solo exhibition by Nigerian-American artist Anthony Olunbunmi Akinbola, tell a powerful story of Black American culture through a fetishist lens using new works created entirely for JMKAC.
Anchored by a 2006 Cadillac Escalade owned by the artist and recast as a “sound sculpture” at its center, “Magic City” is framed by three immense tapestries woven from “durags,” collections of brightly colored head scarves worn by early African slaves working in the fields. The scarves were later used during the Harlem Renaissance for their ability to preserve the waves in Black hairdos, and more recently adapted as cultural symbols by Black American males, including hip-hop artists.
The thread continues with a constellation of 401 plastic hairpicks embedded in a wall, or one for each year since 1619 when African slaves first appeared in the New World. Nearby, 500 cans of Murray’s Original Pomade, a popular hair dressing among Black Americans since the 1920s, form three towering sculptures. There are even African-style wooden folk sculptures whose traditional nails have been replaced by Torino hairbrushes, bringing yet another element to the fetishist theme that uses commercial products to help depict aspects of Black American culture.
“With a wry and thoughtful approach, Anthony uses asymmetric information as a tool to complicate and question issues surrounding identity, commodity fetishism, popular culture, and ritual under capitalism,” says senior curator Kaytie Johnson. It’s a striking exhibit, and unlike most that have ever graced the Sheboygan art museum, both in its imagery and layered meanings.
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“According to the artist, this is a type of Black sanctuary that addresses Blackness through the prism or lens of fetishism,” says Johnson, who curated the exhibit. “Anthony draws his inspiration from early African material culture and creates an arc from that culture to the present day.”
Akinbola, a Columbia, Missouri, native who now lives in Brooklyn, New York, also draws his inspiration from Karl Marx’s “religion of sensuality” to create what the curator describes as a show of no small political depth.
Commodity Fetishism
“Karl Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism—or, as Marx termed it, the capitalist ‘religion of sensuous appetites’—is central to ‘Magic City’,” Johnson says. “For Anthony, it is an important lens to look through, as Marx’s theory emphasizes the veneration of consumer goods, ascribing magical properties and powers to objects, and the value assigned to objects when they transcend their function.”
Consider, for example, the white Escalade parked in the center of the gallery. The Cadillac has been tricked out with a sound system that fills the gallery with appropriate ambient sounds to give Magic City an audio layer. Deep inside the car Akinbola has added a subwoofer that, when triggered by certain musical passages, provides a thunderous counterpoint that shakes the bones of the exhibit and its visitors every 10 or 15 minutes.
Opposite the Escalade sits a taxidermy goat, a Nigerian symbol of witchcraft. It also can be interpreted as the struggle between Satan and Christianity, Johnson says, or even as G.O.A.T.—the Greatest of All Time—in homage to certain Black American sports figures. It’s all a matter of viewer interpretation, she adds.
Among the show’s subtler and sometimes overlooked features are several taxidermy pigeons perched high top the durag tapestries. Most often thought of as urban avifauna, the pigeons also represent the migratory aspects of immigrants to the U.S., including Akinbola’s parents and the Black diaspora overall.
Even the exhibit’s name relates to its theme, Johnson says. Magic City is a notorious Atlanta strip club popular among hip-hop musicians, a juxtaposition that speaks to an entirely different level of fetishism.
“Each year the art center’s exhibits revolve around a central theme,” Johnson says. “The theme for 2021 is “Return to the Real,” and viewers who take their time and look carefully at ‘Magic City’ will be rewarded in many ways.”
Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola’s “Magic City” will be on display Feb. 1 through July 11 at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, 608 New York Ave., Sheboygan. The show opens online Feb. 19 at jmkac.org.
