Antoinette Cauley creates expressive portraiture to bridge hyperlocal and global concerns in I Do It For The Hood, Pt. 2 in Phoenix.
Antoinette Cauley: I Do It for The Hood, Pt. 2
December 15, 2023–February 10, 2024
Modified Arts, Phoenix
Born and raised in South Phoenix, artist Antoinette Cauley recently returned to the city after spending three years in Germany. Following a companion exhibition in Berlin, she’s currently showing I Do It For The Hood, Pt. 2 at Modified Arts, in which new works elevate Black empowerment, challenge historical and contemporary injustices, and highlight the intersection between her hyperlocal and international sensibilities.
The show features more than twenty acrylic-on-canvas portraits, including The World Is Yours (2023), in which a young Black girl sporting rose-colored glasses and braided pigtails has a tattoo of the city’s 602 area code and holds a round lollypop with a globe design. In Visionary Riches (2021), she created painterly images of saguaro cacti and transmission towers that rise over South Phoenix. In See I Done Came a Long Way (2021), she added a graphic silhouette of the Paris skyline, presenting it upside down.
Cauley primarily conceives this body of work as a tribute to her neighborhood, her family, and the Black community in South Phoenix, according to her statement posted inside the Roosevelt Row gallery. There, she notes that the paintings also honor “hoods across the country and the beauty they have created through their adversities and despite the beating down of systemic racism and violent colonization they have endured.” Cauley’s upside-down skyline speaks to these issues, as do various tattoos on her subjects referencing Exodus 2:25, Kahlil Gibran’s poem On Pain, and lyrics to German-born rapper J. Cole’s song “Before I’m Gone.”
Throughout the exhibition, which was curated by Melissa Koury, Cauley uses both text and visual symbols to effectively convey her ideas. By painting “Brixton” on a man’s sunglasses in Nobody’s Holding My Hand, Trust Me (2023), she foregrounds the 1980s uprisings against police brutality in London. A red palm print across a woman’s mouth in her canvas print You’re Prettier When You Smile #4 (2023) draws attention to missing and murdered Indigenous women.
For locals who get the references, including images and catchphrases by fellow artists with strong ties to Phoenix, Cauley’s portraits offer additional layers of meaning. Those who don’t should still recognize plenty of cultural signifiers, such as the gold grills, chains, and large hoop earrings that appear throughout this body of work. By creating detailed, expressive portraits that combine universal and hyperlocal symbolism, Cauley succeeds in her quest to honor her South Phoenix roots while elevating broader social, emotional, and cultural landscapes.
An artist reception, with remarks by Cauley at 7:30 pm, is scheduled to take place on Friday, January 19, 6-9 pm.
