Taking its title from James Baldwin’s celebrated collects ion of essays, Nobody Knows My Name #2 is a work of startling immediacy that typifies Charles White’s revolutionary and hugely influential oeuvre. Executed in 1965, the work dates from a moment of social upheaval in the United States, the year of both the Voting Rights Act, which prohibited racial discrimination in voting, and the Watts Riots in Los Angeles. This broader context is pivotal, as with this work White moves from the depiction of the individual to that of a collects ive. Rather than seeking to highlight a specific social injustice, as with his celebrated portraits from the 1940s and ‘50s, here White’s protagonist is an everyman; he is not named in part because he is a stand-in for the black American experience, defiant and beatified in a forest of black charcoal strokes.

Today, in a society where many of the concerns that White sought to address remain front of mind, this emphasis on naming is particularly apposite. Over the last 18 months, one of the rallying cries of the Black Lives Matter movement has been to say the names of Americans who have been killed by law enforcement – Breonna Taylor, Laquan McDonald, Eric Gardner, George Floyd – in recognition of the fact that namelessness has historically made it possible to ignore these tragedies. With this work, Charles White commemorates those who remained nameless, just as Ralph Ellison did thirty years earlier with his literary masterpiece, The Invisible Man.

Continuing this literary allusion, as celebrated activist, musician and pioneering collects or of Charles White’s work, Harry Belafonte, observes: “When in the presence of Mr. White’s work, his people take on a reality all their own. You feel that somewhere, somet.mes , some place you have known these people before… You are enriched by the experience of having known Charles White’s people, who are like characters from a great novel that remain with you long after the pages of the book have been closed.” (Harry Belafonte, James Porter and Benjamin Horowitz, Images of Dignity: The Drawings of Charles White, Los Angeles 1967, p. 1)

Nobody Knows My Name #2 is a work of remarkable technical proficiency, juxtaposing a hugely detailed and finely rendered head with a flood of abstracted staccato strokes. The face epitomizes White’s style, with pronounced contouring and heightened contrast between areas of light and shadow. Surrounded by the encroaching darkness, the upturned head reads as a determined attempt to stay above water, to survive. The distinct sense of threat conjured by the churning darkness that surrounds the subject is only alleviated by the curve of light that emanates from the figure’s head. Evocative of a halo, it symbolizes hope in the face of insurmountable odds, and is reflective of White’s remarkable and revolutionary draughtsmanship.

White’s contribution to the course of Twentieth Century art history cannot be understated, not only as a supremely talented artist and social historian, but also as a mentor and teacher to some of today’s best-known artists. In the preface of the exhibition catalogue for Charles White: A Retrospective, former student Kerry James Marshall writes of his beloved teacher at the Otis Art Institute of Los Angeles County: “The labor, the work, in Charlie’s drawings is palpable. One can follow the process through his technique and understand exactly how the image came to be on the page or the canvas. His most accomplished drawings achieve true perfection. The effect is dazzling, efficient, and never extravagant. An atmosphere of stillness and quietude envelops the space in and around the work. I can’t help remembering a Shaker motto I read somewhere that governs their sense of piety and discipline: ‘Hands to work, hearts to God.’ The terms art and work gain embodied meaning in the best of his pictures.” (Kerry James Marshall, “A Black Artist Named White,” in: Exh. Cat., Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago (and traveling), Charles White: A Retrospective, 2018, p. 19)

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Charles White, A Retrospective at MoMA