Art Like ME takes us back to school to hem the connections between dandyism, masculinity, and Black boyhood.

 

Many of the red-carpet attendees — dressed in luxury fabrics and adorned with gems on-loan — also sported the tell tale signs of a humid day in New York. Beads of sweat on the upper lip or hairline, the sort of full-face glisten that you can only get by walking through a cloud to arrive at your destination (even if you’re only coming from the hotel across the street). Uncomfortably wet is not a conventionally attractive look; sun-kissed sells but there’s no setting spray that’s advertised as giving you a “rainy day glow”. Even the R&B singer Usher, who usually manages to look dapper during a mid-performance sweat, seemed caught off-guard by the moisture — and he’s from a city that’s humid year-round. It rained all day on Met Gala Monday in a steady stream of drips and drops; on all the days that followed, there was a downpour of discourse, critiques and think pieces. 

 

One quizzical remark that gained traction on social media was about Kamala Harris. Voices online (be they real people, trolls, or bots) questioned why she’d been the only politician to receive and accept an invitation and implied that she should be spending her time “saving” the country. I didn’t need to pipe up to add my disapproval, many other Black voices were already on it. Surely, the first Black vice president, who herself is a living piece of Black history and culture, might be invited to celebrate what may be the first Met Gala to explicitly spotlight the contributions of Black history and culture to fashion as we know it. (Whether you thought her outfit appropriate for the theme is entirely up to you.) It had to be stated again and again that this theme is about Black culture, Black fashion, and Black style. It’s long overdue and already old news; whatever follows will cite the tastes of today’s Black youth. For example, when I was a kid in the 90’s, we had 70’s spirit day where we all wore bell bottoms and afros. In the 2020’s, kids have 90’s spirit day where they boil down my entire childhood wardrobe to jersey dresses, turtlenecks, and mom jeans. And so it follows that 20 years from now, the youth of tomorrow will appropriate the mainstream themes we see in the outfit choices of the youth of today. Whatever ‘vibe’ comes next is quietly brewing in high school hallways right now, and the doors of the school were open this Sunday. 

 

For two days, Eagle Academy for Young Men of Harlem, which occupies the 2nd and 3rd floors of the Percy E. Sutton Educational Complex on 135th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue was reimagined as an immersive art exhibit. Curator teddy raShaan, ph.d. (his name is stylized in all lowercase) writes that Fly meet Swag² meet Drip: The Legacy of Dandyism in Black and Brown Boyhood “celebrates how each generation of young men reimagines dandyism not merely as aesthetic but as resistance, innovation, and ultimately, freedom.” raShaan is a native of Winston Salem, NC, a curator of religion at the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture (and a fellow graduate of Hampton University!) 

 

While teddy hails from North Carolina and the school is solidly in Harlem, there’s room for a wide geography of Black experiences in the show. In one room, a barber curates a collection of items from his Brooklyn shop Satsang; on the lockers, there’s a multi-media painting by Kingston, Jamaica-born artist, Stuart Robertson. Titled “Tied and Untied and Held and Let Go”, the painting depicts three figures dressed in button-down shirts, ties, and durags reaching to groom the successive generation. There’s space for the South, too. In a room themed for rites of passage and sacred rituals, the classroom smartboard loops a video of a KAΨ-sponsored beautillion in Chesapeake, Virginia with a news interview of a young man in the Deep South who arrived to his prom via helicopter because he “wanted to do something different.” 

 

Across the works, the mediums are similarly diverse. There’s an uplifting quilt by Desmond Beach (Gravity Does Not Know His Name), a mixed medium assemblage in the shape of an ironing board by Danielle Scott (Peter Thorough), and hand-customized garments by Hidden Talent Customs (there’s a pair of distressed black skinny jeans with the brand’s name chalked across the crotch). The gym is strung with clotheslines and holds, among many things, smiling photos of Black youth, a Wu-Tang t-shirt, and a Bel-Air Academy jersey like the one from the television show Fresh Prince. Some rooms featured guest curators and the selections were created by career professionals and student artists alike. 

 

For all the earnest talk of an ongoing crisis in masculinity, I was greeted with respect by the students who’d come to school on the weekend to share their locker projects. Each student had repurposed the space inside his locker to arrange artifacts that expressed his identity and his story. In one locker, a white plastic Playstation controller and a ruddy New Balance sneaker. In another, a folded African print cloth, a Qur’an, and a plastic bottle of shea butter that had been squeezed into a shape reminiscent of abstract art. The participating students, all graduating seniors, spoke with optimism about life after high school and I left the room feeling relieved that at least these boys, who are my neighbors, are going to be alright.  

 

Many years ago, I worked in this building — in a school that occupies another floor. On my way in and out of the building, I would see the Eagle Academy students with their handsome teachers. Far better looking, I thought, than most of the men teachers I knew. It could’ve been their bowties, or their taste in dress shoes and sneakers but I think what I found most attractive was their dedication to their work. They seemed so proud to be there, that they believed their students would enter the world as men of honor, that they needed to be role models and “lift as they climb”. The ethos of the school is on every wall; images of of great men like Muhammad Ali, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King, Jr. look on approvingly from the painted hallways. A geometric mural that reads “retrieve the past, create the future” depicts Arturo Schomburg, the man who collected works written by Black people after he’d been told by his schoolteacher that we had no history. His most famous portrait — which is the one represented in the school’s mural — depicts him with a bowtie, a bushy mustache, and a gleaming head of hair that’s just a few brushes shy of 360 waves. In Schomburg’s rejection of the dominant retelling, he not only corrected the falsehood that we had no history, he made history in the process. It’s a fitting backdrop for the students moving through Eagle Academy as well as this inspired exhibition.   

 

In Fly meet Swag² meet Drip, raShaan has gathered the voices of four generations to connect this moment, one in which our ideas are mined while our personhood is minimized, to our enduring legacy of origination. We have and will continue to be at the forefront of every vibe shift. This exhibition functions as a companion narrative, one that’s informed by contemporary lived experiences and takes seriously the way youth culture can define an era and create the future. As the Met prepares to open its Superfine dandyism show of centuries-old street style, and the gala’s red-carpet photos inform a year’s worth of style guides, Fly meet Swag² meet Drip opens the sketch book of Black creativity to what’s new and what’s next, writing our history as we live it.     

   

blacklove 🖤 and starlight 🌟 

 

Fly meet Swag meet Drip: The Legacy of Dandyism in Black and Brown Boyhood was a two-day art exhibition at Eagle Academy for Young Men of Harlem. The exhibition was presented by art like ME, a 501(c)3 “dedicated to empowering Black and Brown boys and men in cultivating emotional intelligence through art and culture” and curated by teddy raShaan, ph.d.