Black Cherokee

What can we say of art that leaves no trace?

That it’s existence is purported, it’s absence assured?

Since 1997, Otis Houston, Jr., aka Black Cherokee, has made

art on the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive at 125th Street. Using

his body as his primary medium for performance, and working at

such a congested crossroads he has found the largest audience

for any artist in NYC, in some sense larger than the daily

droves of the Met, MoMA, Whitney, and the New Museum

combined.

Though he is known to many, he remains unknown to most.

Dozens of YouTube videos with thousands of views later, an

article in The New York Times, a like on Instagram from the

art dealer Gavin Brown, this exhibition at ROOM EAST marks the

artist’s gallery debut. Like Jiri Kovanda’s undocumented

performances on the streets of Prague in the 1970s, or the

peripatetic actions of Fluxus, his peers in performance

include Abramovic, Acconci, Burden, Oppenheim, Schneemann,

among others. His use of text recalls the blunt force of

Kruger, the poetics of Holzer, or at times the bald irony of

Ruscha.

Houston started making collages after taking an art class

during his incarceration in 1984-1990. The works in the

present exhibition were selected from the 1980s and 90s, a

highly charged era, during which the tumult of political and

corporate powers were channelled through the print media of

the time, and consumerism was all ugly sweaters, and padded

shoulders.

In some respects Houston’s collages are the progeny of the of

the diametric cultural polarities positioned by Kirk

Varnedoe’s “High and Low” exhibition at MoMA in 1990. During a

period bookended by the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in

1992, and the shooting of Amadou Diallo in New York 1999, race

and society were hot button issues, kindling for the resurgent

conservative forces of the America that birthed a new

mainstream of mistrust.