Michael A. Booker: WAVE PATTERNS

January 19 to May 3, 2024
Idea Lab

Wave Patterns features a new body of work by Maryland-based artist Michael A. Booker that explores affinities among three communication systems: the flags of the International Code of Signals (INTERCO), ocean waves, and Black hairstyles. The word wave in the exhibition’s title simultaneously refers to the undulating lines central to Booker’s drawing style, the shape that the strands of many Black people’s hair form, the transfer of energy in liquids or gases, and a physical movement.

INTERCO flags—a standardized marine communication system—are employed when verbal communication is impossible and facial expressions are imperceptible. Similarly, Booker frequently conceals the facial expressions of his subjects while featuring their hair and INTERCO flags. He explains, “I wanted to use hair as a communication system instead of facial expressions to imply the person is hiding their emotions. But there are signs that there is something deeper there—hence the flags.”

For centuries, Black people have used hairstyles as a form of expression. In one work, Booker depicts multiple images of the style known as waves, in which curls are brushed and/or combed and flattened out, creating a ripple pattern. The artist renders the images in various colors, alluding to the vastness of Black cultural expression. Elsewhere, Booker depicts lake and ocean waves to reference memory, tranquility, and power, and the transatlantic slave trade, as well as the histories and experiences of Black people, which have been—and continue to be—created, lost, and reimagined in and around water.

Wave Patterns emphasizes how codes function inside and outside specific cultural contexts. In our era, characterized and polarized by fast-paced transmission systems such as social media, Booker highlights how three seemingly unrelated modalities all relay and receive nuanced information while also signaling to African American culture.

Phillip Townsend, AGBS Curator of Art