Commemorating her solo exhibition at the SCAD Museum of Art, Kenturah Davis: Everything That Cannot Be Known—the artist’s debut monograph—contextualizes Davis’s investigation of the brilliance of Black identity. The catalogue includes an essay by curator Humberto Moro, a conversation between the artist and Stephanie E. Goodalle of BOMB Magazine, and poems by Jayy Dodd.

In larger-than-life-scaled work navigating the space between image and text, Davis explores the role of language in shaping how we understand ourselves and the world around us. Reworking photographs from fact to fiction, she uses mark-making processes, including her own handwriting and rubber letter stamps, to explore the impossibilities of representing Black bodies. Often blurred by other layers of material treatment, her figures seem to display auras or traces of movement in areas of raised or recessed relief. Witnessing the works’ graphic complexity as a metaphor, the viewer ultimately wonders: can the multitudes of our identities ever be known?

Published by SCAD University Press. Paperback, 76 pages. 8 1/4 x 10 1/2 in.

Detail Kenturah Davis, Everything That Cannot Be Known, 2019. Oil paint applied with rubber stamp letters and glass beads on debossed Igarashi kozo paper. Courtesy of the artist, Matthew Brown Los Angeles, and the Rubell Collection, Miami.