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At first glance, Me Against the World is little more than a repeated pattern of stacked discs forming towering, teetering columns. Drawn with pencil on a nine-foot by five-foot expanse of off-white paper retrieved from a dumpster, the unframed piece is literally stapled to a gallery wall in the Nasher Museum of Art.
And yet, even if you come to the piece without knowing anything about the artist, William Cordova—his Peruvian heritage and working-class upbringing in Miami, his itinerant lifestyle—it's impossible to ignore the impulse to locate the artist (or yourself) in the flat landscape. Is Cordova represented by that disc jutting out halfway down a column on the left, disrupting the predictable, prescribed order of things? Is it possible to retain a sense of individuality when you live in a densely populated urban setting? How many countless other people are doing the same thing you are, day in and day out, just to get a little bit further ahead—or, at the very least, not to lose your place in the clamoring queue of humanity?
Across the gallery, the digital-animation piece He Got Game shows South African artist Robin Rhode, his face obscured by a hat pulled low over his brow, going airborne as he somersaults and dunks a basketball into a waiting net. It takes only a moment to see that the net and the lopsided score (115-16) are drawn in chalk on blotchy pavement and that Rhode is repositioning himself for each frame to give viewers a stop-motion view of his virtual agility. For the literal minded, the sequence is simply a playful amusement. But there are subtler undertones at work, too: Athletic prowess can be a ticket out of rough neighborhoods, a long-shot chance at wealth and status. Embodying as it does the striving and struggle of the underclass, He Got Game takes on additional resonance when considered through the lens of apartheid.
Cordova and Rhode are two of the artists featured in the Nasher's "Street Level" exhibit, which runs through the end of July. It's the first show organized by the museum's new curator of contemporary art, Trevor Schoonmaker, who says that the works "address ways that people culturally transform space, mark territory, and position themselves within the landscape of the city."
Los Angeles native Mark Bradford, the third artist in "Street Level," draws from the same types of cultural wells as Cordova and Rhode to create his own vision of urban landscapes. Scorched Earth is a vibrantly colored geometric composition that Kurt Schwitters might have made had he come from twenty-first-century South Central. The enormous collage (ten feet wide by nine feet high) provides a bird's-eye view of a city grid and repeating rectangular patterns that could be rows of tenements or nameless headstones—or something else entirely. Bradford, a gay black man who grew up in a boarding house with his mother and grandmother, creates visual worlds that question what it means to belong or not belong to one's community and the ways in which mainstream (white) society codifies who and what is considered threatening or safe, valuable or disposable.
Schoonmaker joined the Nasher staff in the summer of 2006 and figured that a tightly focused, three-person show would be the most manageable approach for his curatorial debut, given the short turnaround time between conception and execution. He liked the idea of work inspired by, or generated from, the hustle and bustle of the inner-city street, a mash-up of youth culture and melting-pot funk. He'd gotten to know Cordova, Rhode, and Bradford while working as an independent curator in New York; each, in his own way, was capturing that electrifying energy in different yet complementary ways. "Thematically it made sense to group them together," he says, "because all three share a use of found materials and draw inspiration from the street cultures where they live."
In keeping with the museum's goal of focusing on modern and contemporary art, Schoonmaker is responsible for generating excitement—and visitor turnout—for up-and-coming artists. His curatorial instincts appear sound. In the months before "Street Level" opened in March, Cordova had a successful solo show at the prestigious Arndt & Partner gallery in Berlin; Rhode won the 2006 W South Beach Artist Commission at Art Basel Miami Beach in December; and Bradford received the $100,000 Bucksbaum Award for his body of work in the 2006 Biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. (Coincidentally, when he mentioned his ideas for "Street Level," to Blake Byrne '57, chair of the Nasher's advisory board and a prominent contemporary-art collector, Schoonmaker was pleasantly surprised to learn that Byrne's own collection included four Cordovas, which are on loan to the museum for "Street Level.")
Schoonmaker says that even though the three "Street Level" artists have earned degrees in fine arts and been represented in galleries and shows in the U.S., Japan, Italy, Germany, Taiwan, and Mexico, each one is also strongly rooted in his respective social and cultural origins. He says that the artists' growing celebrity—as measured by awards and recognition, as well as the ability to command higher prices for their work—has not altered their compass of values.
"Mark, William, and Robin started using these unconventional means and materials to make their art primarily because they didn't have much money," Schoonmaker says. "Part of what keeps [all three artists] grounded is that they come from such humble backgrounds, and while they are very much a part of the global, cosmopolitan art world, each one of them remains connected to the particular aesthetics and culture that they came from. I would be shocked if any of them started producing work purely in response to market influences."
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