Rashaun Rucker | Graphic Impressions

Reflective Looking–Black Printmakers Finding Self and Community Through Print

Curated by Althea Murphy-Price

Rashaun Rucker

About the Artist

Born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Rashaun Rucker attended North Carolina Central University and Marygrove College. He makes photographs, prints and drawings and has won more than 40 national and state awards for his work.

In 2008, Rucker became the first African American to be named Michigan Press Photographer of the Year. The same year, he won an Emmy Award for documentary photography on the pitbull culture in Detroit. Rucker has held numerous fellowships and residencies, including: the Maynard Fellowship at Harvard in 2009; a Hearst visiting professional in the journalism department at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 2013; an artist residency at the Red Bull House of Art in 2014; Kresge Arts Fellowship in 2019; a residency at the International Studios and Curatorial Program in Brooklyn, New York in 2021; and a Mellon Fellowship at the University of Michigan Institute of Humanities in 2021.

Rucker has been honored as a Modern Man by Black Enterprise magazine in 2016 and created the original artwork for the critically acclaimed Detroit Free Press documentary 12 and Clairmount. His work was recently featured in HBO’s celebrated series Random Acts of Flyness and Native Son. In 2019, Rucker was awarded the Red Bull Arts Detroit micro grant that was followed by A Sustainable Arts Foundation award in 2020 and a Visual Arts Grant by the Harpo Foundation in 2021.

Currently, Rucker is pursuing an MFA in print media at Cranbrook Academy of Art. His diverse work is represented in numerous public and private collections.

Artist:

Rashaun Rucker

Exhibition

Reflective Looking–Black Printmakers Finding Self and Community Through Print

Artist Statement

I am looking to find an innovative language that would serve my desire to study a more focused area of black American culture that intersects with religion, the deep south, and personal family histories.

These works hope to specifically address what I term being “Covered in Black”. When I speak on being covered, I am talking about the prayers, pleadings, and rituals that are practiced in the black community to offer a protection of those in the family and communities. Some of these practices are calling on the ancestors, the laying on of hands, altar calls, morning prayers, and the never-ending river of advice given. The work is also considering who my personal saints are and trying to find God in people.

On how Rucker’s work relates to the metaphor of reflection:

In this new body of work “Patron Saints of a Black Boy” the work is all about reflection. As I get older and especially coming out of the pandemic and losing people around me I often started reflecting on what sustains me. Growing up in Black Baptist churches in North Carolina you often heard the elders sing or talk about how they got over. That Mahalia Jackson gospel song “How I Got Over” says “my soul looks back and wonders.” I began to wonder who and how. Who were my personal saints? My personal reflections on church, family, and North Carolina are informing this work in all mediums.