A new drawing concept rooted in negative space and erasure makes its world premiere at New York City’s Soho Project Space this June as artist, journalist and talk show host Rob Redding debuts work from his forthcoming book Graphic Graphite: Bucking as a Challenge to Racial Narrative.
The exhibition appears during Pride Month on Tuesday June 9 and ahead of the book’s Juneteenth week release on Monday June 15, Redding told Radio Facts. The barrier-breaking book examines how the United States has buried the rape and sexual violence inflicted on Black men during slavery and has distorted the narrative of the Black male body into something to be feared.
“I wanted to create art that does not just gesture toward slavery but is structurally tied to the narratives themselves,” he told Radio Facts. “These drawings come from the words of people who lived it. I am not illustrating history. I am confronting the way America avoids it.”
A Culture of Queer, curated by David Biko and Harvey Redding, no relation, introduces this new visual approach as part of a wider conversation about how queer art operates. The work recognizes that queer expression does not need to depict sexuality or identity directly. It only needs to provoke thought and open new ways of seeing.
This method extends Redding’s Constructive Expressionism (ConEX) into a form that asks audiences to confront what history has obscured and what contemporary culture still struggles to name. Redding, who is bisexual, received a Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing in 2022 from Pratt Institute and a Master in Communication from Marshall University in 2015. The New York City-based host of the talk show “Redding News Review Unrestricted” has expanded his voice into the visual realm by selling his large ConEX paintings for thousands over the last few years. He says he now wants to extend his work into smaller drawings.
“ConEx drawings use erasure and negative space to force the viewer into the work,” he told Radio Facts. “You cannot look at these images passively. You have to complete them. That act of completion is ethical. It is political.”
The premiere image at the art show centers on the relationship between Olaudah Equiano and the young white sailor Richard Baker. The work draws from Vincent Woodard’s The Delectable Negro, a foundational study of erotic consumption and the racial imagination. Redding visualizes Woodard’s argument that Baker fed on Equiano emotionally, socially, and erotically. Equiano appears in full dark complexion with a faint halo that suggests a spirit returning to speak. Baker is rendered in negative space, defined by what he takes rather than what he offers. Their embrace appears gentle, yet the composition reveals a deeper truth. The image shows a love shaped by domination, longing, and the quiet cannibalism that slavery produced.
This image is one part of a larger corpus that includes drawings based on accounts of bucking, forced intimacy, coerced affection, and the psychological strategies enslaved men used to survive. The book includes scenes drawn from testimony recorded in the WPA narratives, Equiano’s autobiography, and lesser known archival fragments. The project confronts the silence surrounding the rape of Black men and challenges the sanitized narratives that dominate public memory.
The work places Redding in conversation with Black artists who have shaped the visual language of slavery and racial memory. These include Kara Walker, Glenn Ligon, Hank Willis Thomas, Kerry James Marshall, Fred Wilson, Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, Whitfield Lovell, Radcliffe Bailey, and Charles Gaines. The project also draws from scholars whose writing has transformed how we understand race, sexuality, and power. These include Vincent Woodard, Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Christina Sharpe, Frank Wilderson, Jared Sexton, Omise’eke Tinsley, Roderick Ferguson, and Darieck Scott.
Together, these artists and scholars form the intellectual and creative architecture of Graphic Graphite: Bucking as a Challenge to Racial Narrative. The project is not an illustration of history. It is a study of the inner worlds that history often hides. It asks the viewer to consider how intimacy, desire, and identity are shaped by power and how these dynamics echo into the present.
On the reverse side of the Richard Baker and Olaudah Equiano piece, Redding places a new painting that pushes his exploration of power, desire and representation into a different register. Colonization uses the same monochrome language as his earlier work but turns its attention to how the story of Africa has been claimed and reshaped by whiteness. Only after encountering this inversion does the argument of Origination come fully into view, the earlier painting asserting that all life comes out of Africa and reclaiming that truth through the Black body. Seen together, the two works expose how the origins of humanity have been repeatedly overwritten while Black artists are denied the authority to narrate their own beginnings. The pairing becomes a single argument about authorship, desire and the right to define where the world begins.
“My work confronts the parts of history that America refuses to name,” Redding told Radio Facts. “The rape of Black men is not a metaphor. It is documented in the record and in the voices of enslaved people. I am creating images that come from their testimony, not from the myths we tell ourselves. This project is about desire, survival, and the cost of being seen. It is about what happens when the body becomes a site of memory and a site of erasure at the same time.”
Redding authored 18 books, including 11 number one bestsellers, that address politics, culture, and Black life in the United States. His show airs daily on his website ReddingNewsReview.com.
