Eshun focused on three thematic groupings. The first is “Double Consciousness,” an idea articulated by the sociologist and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois to describe Blackness as a psychological state: the unique experience of living physically within but psychologically outside a predominantly white society. “It is a peculiar sensation,” Du Bois wrote, “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”

In this section of the exhibition, Claudette Johnson’s powerful, monolithic figures, mostly women drawn from life, demand the opposite response, confronting the viewer with their presence and claiming attention. The artist herself gazes coolly from the canvas in Standing Figure with African Masks, a direct riposte to Picasso’s Cubist masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which was itself informed by his appropriation and narrow view of African art. Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s fragmented portraits, often of his family and friends, or of figures associated with his youth in a working-class suburb on Chicago’s South Side, are quieter but take the idea of a double consciousness almost literally. Homeboy Down the Block, for instance, in which an accentuated eye, slightly parted lips, and a panel of pretty floral fabric all come together to emphasize the vulnerability of the figure, is based on a real person from the artist’s past who, says Quinn, “on the surface presented as a street thug. You would cross the street if you saw him walking toward you. But I broke through his barrier, and what I found is a person who is highly fragile, deeply insecure, filled with doubts. Who has dreams, who wants to someday do something else with his life but doesn’t know how.”

The simultaneous presence and absence suggested by Du Bois’s idea also looms large in the work of Kerry James Marshall, who uses a deep, exaggerated black to render the skin of his figures, somehow highlighting them while drawing attention to the concept of Blackness as a constructed idea. Amy Sherald, meanwhile, employs the Renaissance painting technique of grisaille, gradating shades of gray for the skin of her African American subjects, in contrast to their vibrant clothing. It’s an effective method of shifting the emphasis away from skin color to the person behind it.

The subject of art history—and its shortcomings when it comes to the Black figure—surfaces repeatedly throughout the show. In Eshun’s second section, “Past and Presence,” Barbara Walker’s striking works in graphite pencil starkly highlight how Black servitude is presented in canonical works. By reducing a scene, such as the one in Pierre Mignard’s 1682 painting Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, With an Unknown Female Attendant, to graphite on embossed paper and then intricately drawing in the Black figure—in this case, a young girl who holds a shell full of pearls and grasps a stick of red coral—Walker instantly elevates the hidden person in the original painting.