BLACK CATS GO OFF (FFO OG STAC KCALB)

Michael Ray Charles’s powerful paintings, prints, and sculptures incorporate historical caricatures of Black people taken from nineteenth and twentieth-century visual culture. Since the early 1990s, Charles has amassed what scholar Patricia A. Turner calls “contemptible collectibles,” consumer objects and ephemera such as Aunt Jemima syrup dispensers and advertising posters, that feature stereotyped imagery of people of African descent. Charles views these racist depictions as visual representations of power dynamics that persist in the American psyche. 

Charles’s work directly engages with this history while simultaneously critiquing it through humor and satire. Works such as BLACK CATS GO OFF adopt the aged look of a vintage poster and combine caricatures such as wild braids and bulging, bright red lips with slogans that underscore the pervasiveness of such racist imagery as a marketing tool. Yet the historical sensibility of Charles’s work provokes reflection on contemporary mass-media portrayals of Black youths, celebrities, and athletes. “Stereotypes have evolved,” Charles notes. “I’m trying to deal with present and past stereotypes in the context of today’s society.”

Charles was a professor in the Studio Art program at UT Austin from 1993 to 2014. BLACK CATS GO OFF was printed and published by Flatbed Press, Austin.