WHAT IF... THE BLACK HOUSE

“At the heart of The Black House, is an unusual scene of nobility, beauty, royalty, Black pride, and bloodshed. Folklore artist, Willie Torbert, has created a stunning plantation of angelic pom poms
of white cotton. The majesty of a Black gangster president and his
queen, who are on a stroll are the center of attention, is an imaginative Afro Futurist narrative of American History, inverted, turned upside down.

Befitting of the Inversion series, by Torbert, The Black House shocks
you and crystallizes that looks can be deceiving. Your gaze is set-on
the splendor of the landscape and then you start to see, as Torbert,
directs your eye through the rows of clean white cotton, that at first
camouflages the inhumanity being waged against the White bodies
of enslaved people.

The Black House plantation, on a literal tip conjures up Black Like
Me, by John Howard Griffin, about a White man who went undercover in the deep South, darkening his skin as a Black man, in 1960.
The question the artist seems to be asking is this: Can White people
ever know what it feels like to be Black in America?

The pain inflicted on the White slaves, in this rendering, by the ruling
class of Black nobility and elite is and of itself, futuristic, yet, not cut
from the same cloth as a Black Panther Wakanda forever moment.
Torbert makes you see the dearth of Black existence on the naked
bodies of White people, hung out to dry like curing meat.

What if. . . “

- Written by Gilda Rogers

Executive Director
T. Thomas Fortune Foundation &
Cultural Center, Red Bank, NJ