Filmmaker RaMell Ross’s Black History Month Guide to Contemporary Art

I’m so attracted to Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s complex, research-based practice because of the amount of intellectual labor that goes into producing material objects. These works challenge one’s desire for simplicity and understanding and allow me to expect more from what I’m doing.

The Backlight was the first piece of hers that blew my mind. It was like, Oh, you can make art that is an actual material intervention and also a reflection of the complexity of hypervisualization. You can make art that is both aesthetic and solves a problem, with material traction in the world. And it’s intellectual, beautiful, and graphic. It’s just the most fucking perfect piece of art. I tried to buy it from her; she wouldn’t sell it. In your spare time, if you’re high or something, just go look at her website. You’ll be like, Whoa, I don’t even get this stuff, but I love it.

Kevin’s a filmmaker who’s always making a film. He’s made hundreds, crazy prolific. You look at his work and realize there’s no excuse ever not to make a film. You don’t need high production value, a studio, or permission. You just need a camera, and you can make something that holds someone’s attention and is full of ideas and beautiful.

IFO (2017) recounts UFO sightings by people who saw them in Mansfield, Ohio, where he’s from. It’s like oral history, the symbolic ancestral passing down of knowledge via body and gesture, and the essence of what it means to make a documentary. But the film is fiction, so it’s a chimera of a film, super simple and super short.

If you look up Sanford Biggers’s work now, you would think that he only makes artistic quilts, which maybe is a reference to the Gee’s Bend quilt makers in Alabama. But he’s actually an interdisciplinary artist, and his work is deeply playful yet also in conversation with all these mediums as they’re elevated to the museum and gallery space. One of my favorite works is Infinite Tabernacle (2017), where Biggers makes the statue and then shoots it, filmed in slow motion.

All his work is tied to diaspora, but he makes aesthetic objects that aren’t too dense. They have their symbolic reference, and they’re very satisfying. I love Laocoön (Fatal Bert) because it’s just so funny, like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade thing.