Noel W. Anderson explores the relationship between the formation of Black identity as socially constructed through images from American media.

His works are often made of cotton, either in the form of woven tapestries, handmade paper objects, or experimental prints.

Anderson heavily manipulates appropriated photographs by digitally and physically altering them in the resulting artworks.

The works’ slide from clarity into abstraction conceptually mirrors what happens with the subjects from the source images themselves, as stereotypes and archetypes overtake the individuality of the person being photographed.

Anderson’s photographic source materials—from political activists like Martin Luther King, Jr., to a group of prisoners lined up against a prison fence, to sports heroes like basketball player Spud Webb—collectively prompt the viewer to consider their own relationship to the distorted depiction of Black masculinity in American culture.

Noel W. Anderson was born in Louisville, KY and lives and works in New York. He has an MFA from Yale University in Sculpture and MFA from Indiana University in Printmaking, and is currently a professor in Printmaking at New York University. In 2018, he was awarded the NYFA artist fellowship grant and the prestigious Jerome Prize.

Anderson’s most recent solo museum exhibition Blak Origin Moment debuted at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati in 2017 and traveled to the Hunter Museum in Chattanooga, TN in 2019. He has an upcoming solo project at the Telfair Museum in Savannah, Georgia, titled Heavy is the Crown, which uses the words and images of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rodney King to articulate the spectrum of Black masculinity in America.