In Character explores how contemporary artists draw from the visual aesthetics of animation, illustration, and sequential art to unpack notions of identity, imagine alternate realities, and depict Black life and community. Across the featured paintings, drawings, sculptures, and textile works, the distinctive language of cartoons and comics emerges through flat, outlined forms, shallow picture planes, and exaggerated bodily features.

Works like Trenton Doyle Hancock’s grand superhero narratives and caricatured self-portraits mythologize personal experience and complicate understandings of power, while Gary Simmons’ painted reinterpretations of early Looney Tunes characters interrogate the origins of racialized stereotypes in cartoons. By leveraging the familiarity of animation, the exhibiting artists demonstrate how popular media have historically flattened Black representation, while simultaneously revealing its potential for experimentation and expansion. In Character underscores the power of these aesthetic traditions as both a form of expression and a method for idealization and self-reinvention.

Featured artists
Trenton Doyle Hancock 
Victoria Dugger 
Mark Thomas Gibson 
Arthur Jafa 
Gary Simmons 
Kara Walker 
Qualeasha Wood