It’s time for a new classic.

This series is a kiss-off to exclusionary traditions in art, and an introduction to a new era of color, individualism, authenticity, and boldness.

In relation to Susan Sontag’s Notes of ‘Camp’ and Allison Meier’s study on the luridity in pulp fiction covers, this is a series of contemporary, full-color, photographic reimaginings of different paintings and portraits deemed important to the canon in art history.

The works chosen are from the vast canon of Art History, specifically being from the past 400 years. Many of the paintings selected are flavorless in color, using earth-toned palettes, lacking vivid colors or ornamental elements. To art historians, these paintings are “classics”, offering beneficial cultural content and speaking to a certain era of world history or fleeting art movements. In my eyes, if these pieces are “culturally significant”, then they are subject to the subversions and mimicry that come with a camp aesthetic.

For millennia, White men have been in control of the art world, dictating rule on what constitutes as high art and what is or isn’t acceptable. This series will source paintings, drawings, and other portraits from European and American male artists. The subversion in these reimagined photographs, created by a Black, male, queer photographer, featuring marginalized and melanated models, creates a new context and rationale for the creation of these new images. The world has changed tenfold since these art scholars had their reign over our minds and ways of thinking. We are now within a culture that is ever-changing and liberating, yet desperately holding on to the ideals of the conformist past. A New Classic, per say, will be created one way or another, and I am willing to be a part of that change.