WT, TJ, and Blinky
Becky Suss
(American, born in 1980)
2020
Medium/TechniqueOil on canvas
DimensionsOverall: 35.9 × 45.7 × 2.9 cm (14 1/8 × 18 × 1 1/8 in.)
Credit LineJames N. Krebs Purchase Fund for 21st Century Paintings
Accession number2020.504
On View
Not on viewClassificationsPaintings
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This painting is from a suite of large and small scale paintings, "Where They Are," that foregrounds children's literature as a lens through which to investigate domestic spaces and the relationships they shape. Inflected by new motherhood as well as the teaching philosophies of the renowned inquiry-led student-focused training center of Bank Street Education School in New York, the books in the larger series reflect the titles handed down from her own family and the new ones she has sought out to read to her young son, Sid.
Here, Suss depicts James Baldwin's only children's book, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood, written in 1976 about a four year old boy in Harlem learning about "the challenges and joys of black childhood." Reflecting the arduous, detailed, and solo nature of her own approach to painting, Suss's larger oeuvre argues for the importance, relevance, and necessity of showing viewers the care work and interior objects usually hidden from view and unlikely to be valorized on canvas.Provenance2020, sold by the Jack Shainman Gallery, New York to the MFA. (Accession Date: December 16, 2020)
