N’Namdi Contemporary

N’NAMDI Contemporary, Miami is proud to present, Contemplation of Flight, a solo exhibition of new works by Rashaun Rucker. “If you can control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his action.” These words of Carter Godwin Woodson, author of The Mis-Education of the Negro are the impetus to the artist, Rashaun Rucker’s latest body of work, Contemplation of Flight. In a series of 23 drawings, Rucker, a skilled printmaker, and draftsman, takes us on a journey in dissecting the complexities of the Black American male psyche, and what he calls “psychological gentrification” or the capturing and conditioning of the mind. In this series, Rucker highlights the ways in which fear, inferiority, and inaccessibility negate the exploration of greater heights and a better life. Using “America’s most hated bird,” the pigeon as a metaphor for Black masculinity, Rucker employs that stigma and the feral nature to personify the way in which Black men are treated. Amagelmating 23 male figures with appendages of pigeons. 2 large scale works and 13 smaller works depict the amalgamated figures pigeonholed into “redlined coops” which speak to the destructive policies of discriminatory housing practices and mass incarceration, both among many devices used to continue the implementation of America’s caste system.