Rob Redding
New York City artist, journalist and talk show host Rob Redding is presenting a new drawing concept rooted in negative space and erasure Tuesday at Soho Project Space during Pride Month ahead of the Juneteenth week release of his forthcoming book Graphic Graphite: Bucking as a Challenge to Racial Narrative.
Redding says the project is built from the testimony of enslaved people and archival accounts of sexual violence against Black men. He explains that the drawings are meant to confront the parts of history that are often avoided.
“I am creating images that come directly from the record. These stories have been documented, but they have not been fully seen,” Redding said. “My goal is to make the viewer engage with what the work makes visible.”
The exhibition, titled A Culture of Queer, is curated by David Biko and Harvey Redding. It introduces this new visual approach as part of a broader conversation about how queer art operates. The work extends Redding’s Constructive Expressionism into a form that asks audiences to consider how power, desire and memory shape the way history is understood.
“This method requires the viewer to participate in the image,” Redding said. “The act of looking becomes a form of responsibility.”
Redding’s forthcoming book expands this method into a larger body of work. It draws from the WPA narratives, the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano and lesser known archival fragments. The project examines how enslaved men described intimacy, survival and the psychological strategies they used to navigate coercion. Redding positions the work within a lineage of Black artists and scholars who have shaped the visual and intellectual language of racial memory, including Kara Walker, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, Vincent Woodard and Saidiya Hartman.
Redding holds a Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing from Pratt Institute and a Master in Communication from Marshall University. He is the host of the daily talk show “Redding News Review Unrestricted” and the author of 18 books, including 11 number one bestsellers.
