Forbidden Fruit positions the music videos of contemporary black artists as landscape precedents analogous to landscape painting at the beginning of the field's formation. The exhibition uses this form of artistic expression to explore the meaning of landscape from an unconventional cultural perspective. Conscious of the fact or otherwise, each selected artist has used landscape as a primary element in their visual messages. By examining their work through the lens of landscape architecture, we speculate on each artist's decision making and creative process. Though landscape architecture as a discipline proclaims to be interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and inclusive, it has historically failed to consider contemporary black culture due to an attachment to its Western colonial past. Forbidden Fruit begins to diverge from this historical narrative.
Hannah Gaengler & Jeremy Hartley