Tariku Shiferaw Investigates Abstract Expressionism’s History

Tariku Shiferaw is a mixed-media artist looking to rewrite the history of Abstract art. Frustrated that all of his glorified predecessors were overwhelmingly white male, Shiferaw discovered how to create his own distinct marks, full of clever references to his culture and its place in the world. Shiferaw’s work weaves together different historical narratives of Black culture to create deeply meaningful, powerful pieces. Shiferaw is based in the Bronx, NY.

 

For the most part, I grew up in Los Angeles, California and moved to New York over five years ago. Art became a part of my life when I was a kid. I really didn’t know it at the time, but seeing my older brother draw cartoon characters so precisely and playfully with a regular pen became my introduction to art. I found a desire to simply draw things. Later, I pursued it more seriously.

 

How did you arrive at your latest series of works?

My latest body of work is titled One of These Black Boys consists of paintings, sculptural objects, and installation. Through this series I explore the idea of mark-making in order to address the physical and metaphysical spaces of painting and societal structures. In the discourse of painting, the term ‘mark-making’ is a word used to describe painterly gestures that mark the painting surface. This term is especially prevalent within the conversation of abstract paintings. With this in mind, I began to think about the role of the mark-maker and how I fit in the picture. For so long, Western Art history had credited the white-male artist as the sole contributor to the movement of abstract art, while ‘othering’ everyone else. Even when occasionally recognizing white female or Black artists as contributors, the interest remained mainly on the white-male as the mark-maker and producer of culture through art. This led me to re-appropriate the term ‘mark-making’ so that it functioned outside of the discourse of painting. I began to physically place a band of stripes over painterly gestures. In a way, this allowed me to place my own mark over well-recognized atavistic gestures. Secondly, I began to title each work based on Hip-Hop, R&B, Blues, Jazz, and Reggae song titles. This method of titling proved to introduce another layer of marking, which referenced something outside of painting and visual art.