As part of the online viewing room series Gallery Platform LA, Roberts Projects is presenting Winter 2021 featured artist Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe's "Black Cowboy" works. One the key traits that drew us to Otis's works was the bold and slightly distorted vantage points in the artist's portrait works. In the "Black Cowboy" works, Quaicoe takes on American history in a fresh perpsective.
From Roberts Projects, "Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe: Black Cowboy takes as its subject the lesser-known history of Black cowboys of the American Frontier as seen through lens of contemporary portraiture. Quaicoe, a Ghanian painter living in Portland, Oregon, utilizes color to accentuate his subjects’ themes of empowerment while embracing ideas of personal narrative. His portraits of Black cowboys modernize the genre without continuing a popular yet inaccurate and exclusionary account of US history. In Black Cowboy, Quaicoe approaches painting as an exploratory medium for self-reflexive commentary while engaging with the history of the medium itself. Rendered in an approachable scale, the resulting portraits are intimate, and invite comparison to Baroque devotional paintings. A common theme throughout Quaicoe’s practice is the use of color and how it further accentuates his subjects, be it political or personal. His richly textured paintings convey the complexities of the diasporic experiences of both himself and the people whose portraits are captured within."
