Jarvis Boyland’s work contemplates the past to help us question how we romanticize it. His figurative paintings and drawings conjure retro environments that evoke the 1970s. Through his idyllic color palette and delicate rendering of textiles and flesh, Boyland offers moments of personal reconciliation that traverse time.
Over the years, Boyland has negotiated aspects of his Southern religious upbringing through aspirational images of Black relationships. His sensitively rendered portraits of people from his community, often situated in fictitious domestic environments, consider gender and intimacy.
Jarvis Boyland is currently pursuing his MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles. His work has been collected by numerous private and public collections including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and the Brooklyn Museum. Boyland lives and works in Los Angeles.
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All that Light: Works Detail
10.
In-Between
Jarvis Boyland
2022
Colored pencil on paper
Arts Incubator
Curator’s Notes
Born in Memphis, Jarvis Boyland counts Chicago's Kerry James Marshall as one of the painters he most admires. Boyland's own compelling depictions of black male intimacy demonstrate his own virtuosic facility at figuration and call to mind photographs made by Jamel Shabazz whose depictions of the bonds between black men in 1980s and early 1990s NYC defy attempts to reduce the closeness and complexity of those bonds.
Additional Reading
Interview with Jarvis Boyland at https://www.toanmagazine.com/jarvis-boyland
More about photographer Jamel Shabazz at https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/jun/01/jamel-shabazz-photographs