Rico Gatson, Nape of the Neck, Small of the Back, 2006, installed in "Three Trips around the Block" at Exit Art, courtesy Studio Museum in Harlem, New York
At the opening of “Three Trips Around the Block,” a scorching 15-year survey of work by Rico Gatson at Exit Art, people were lining up to stick their heads through the bottom of a box hanging from the ceiling. Titled Two Heads in a Box (1994), this confrontational video installation is the show’s earliest work. Imprisoned behind three bars inside its black interior is a movie that features Gatson’s dark face illuminated by fiery red light and adorned with a white clown nose, a painted white beard and a huge white paper bowtie. Inverting Al Jolson's racist early-20th-century blackface performances, Gatson repeatedly intones Jolson's trademark song, Let Me Sing and I'm Happy, until he is ready to drop.
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