Black Celebrity

Year of Creation:

2019

Media:

Digital Collage 

Dimensions:

Variable 

Interaction Type:

Not Interactive

Duration:

None 

Description:

A digital collage confronts the spectacle of Black suffering as media commodity. A lynched figure hangs from a tree, another echoed in the background. The tree itself bears the visage of Ida B. Wells, anti-lynching journalist and activist, transforming the landscape into an archive of witness. To the left, paparazzi swarm with cameras, capturing death as spectacle. A crow hovers nearby, both omen and witness. The background glows with bright yellow-orange patterns, recalling propaganda posters or digital grids—suggesting how violence is staged and circulated. The figure’s posture, including the act of masturbation, intensifies the work’s critique: Black bodies are doubly exposed, their death and sexuality consumed as images. The piece insists on the paradox of visibility—where representation can both expose injustice and reproduce spectacle.

Core Question:

When does visibility empower, and when does it exploit?

Loop Analysis

Structure: 

Spectacle Feedback Loop

Definition: 

A system where Black suffering becomes image, circulated by media until tragedy is consumed as content.

Leverage Point: 

The recognition that attention economies transform violence into celebrity, erasing justice while preserving spectacle.

Inputs / Outputs: 

Lynched body → photographic capture → public circulation → audience consumption → reinforced spectacle of suffering

Effect: 

Unease, confrontation, recognition of complicity in systems of mediated violence

Ethical Valence: 

Critical and accusatory—forces reflection on the voyeuristic consumption of Black death and sexuality

Design Note: 

By embedding Ida B. Wells into the tree, the work invokes both witness and resistance, situating the critique in historical continuity.