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In Erasure’s Edge, Louisville-born, New York-based artist Noel W. Anderson (b. 1981) compiles a series of newer and older works that parse through multiple interpretations for erasure, probing its meaning as an action or instance of erasing, as well as a site where something has been erased. By means of his ongoing alterations of vintage Ebony magazines and Jacquard tapestries, Anderson filters found images from a personal archive and from pop culture through specific art and craft media that help bring African American history and trauma into a critical discourse about Black representation within the often-complicated areas of American art, sports, and entertainment.

With a growing collection of mugshots, police photography, and media representations of Black men and culture that binds the Black body in a space of physical and conceptual confinement, Anderson’s artistic practice offers ways to untangle and even repair some of the adverse effects of our inherited systems of colonialism and white supremacy. Brushing chemicals onto the pages of Ebony magazines and onto the surfaces of woven tapestries helps erase portions of the printed image to reveal a new space and a new way of seeing. For Anderson, discovering the full scope of ideas that erasure can represent provided a process whereby “the erased page became a promising site/sight,” a promise that his artistic practice of erasure might clear a space for better images of the Black experience and heal the pain of misrepresentation and negative stereotypes that often proliferate in the public space. Erasure’s Edge is his challenge to “the demonization and criminalization of African American men through the hyper-visibility and circulation of violent representations of Black peoples.”