Khalif Kelly (b. 1980)

Executed in 2007, Neighborhood Haircut Contest is a rich example of Khalif Kelley’s allegorical visual language. Depicting a group of children gathered around a central protagonist, it represents a chapter in the artist’s extensive saga of a young hero journeying through an imaginary land. With scenes frequently drawn from his own childhood memories, Kelley’s canvases have been interpreted as commentaries upon the African-American condition at large. Though superficially nostalgic – combining influences from sources as diverse as Old Master paintings to computer graphics and 1930s cartoons – they are underpinned by lingering narratives of race, history and identity. The figures he depicts are a mixture of racial archetypes, and are often captured in the process of play: an important site of self-formation, in which children learn to distinguish the boundaries between fact and fiction. For Kelley, it is in these moments that stereotypes become entrenched in cultural consciousness; by deliberately restaging them, he seeks to glimpse – however briefly – the possibility of an alternative reality.