So, you need to be prepared to face whatever a ride throws your way, whether it is bad weather or unsafe riding conditions, and having the right headgear is how you can do that. If you love going on long road trips on your motorcycle, then you would know that the life of a biker is filled with excitement and adventure. And then there’s how the durag is seen in African culture too.Buy Premium-Quality Motorcycle Headgear At The Bald Head Store So it’s also this story of being first-generation in America. People who are first-generation wearing durags to assimilate in American culture are grappling with that too. For me as a Nigerian, wearing a durag gives me more Black American identity than not. But now there’s an awareness of a different side, a more vulnerable side to the durag.īut when I think about this work I’m also thinking about contemporary African painting being a first-generation American of Nigerian descent. And I was like, ‘Oh shit, this is an object that can be genderless.’ She’s always used it and had a relationship with the durag. It’s interesting though, I had a studio visit with a friend and I hadn’t really had conversations with many women using durags, but she said it made her think of her sister. It reminds me of the newer ways I see people wearing durags right now. But that was something that struck me looking at your pieces too, that the colors can be so bright and vibrant. To me, what’s different about today compared to other popular times for durag culture is that there seems to be more attention paid to its elegance and softness, which could relate to our interest in seeing a softer side of masculinity. And I feel like with these durag pieces, I’m trying to subvert that or camouflage that by trying to have some pieces in spaces where a person wearing a durag would never go, or the person that’s buying the piece could be intimidated by someone wearing a durag. People like Blackness-but if it’s too Black, or if it seems too intimidating, then they don’t want it anymore. Working with these things that are specific to a certain racial and class identity kind of repositions that power. So when I think about the materials I use I like to switch that by working with items like the Jesus piece, durags, or cassava. I couldn’t necessarily identify with the work because also I didn’t have any art history background or schooling around that. When I first started getting into a lot of those white art spaces, there was an elitism that I felt. VICE: What first got you into creating art with durags?Īkinbola: I’m coming from a space where I don’t have any traditional art training-I was a communications major at SUNY Purchase. But as he continues to show his art-he's had exhibits in the Queens Museum and Belgium's Verbeke Foundation, among others-he finds viewers surprise him with their own personal stories that they see reflected in his work. There’s no real in between.” And as a first generation Nigerian-American who spent part of his childhood living in Lagos, the durag is a very Black American item that reminds him of assimilating into American culture. But for Akinbola, they’re an item that has helped him reflect on navigating his Blackness growing up in Columbia, Missouri, where he said he felt ashamed to wear a durag, “because if you’re Black in Missouri you either get to be the hood nigga, the African nigga, or the oreo. He finds that dynamic especially important in the art world, explaining, “For Black artists there’s a struggle of trying to actively keep your culture knowing that people are trying to buy that.”ĭurags can hold many different personal meanings for whoever has used them. “I like that if you know you know,” he says, reflecting on the in-crowd dynamic he believes his art creates.
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