Matisse in Black: THIS IS CULTURAL APPROPRIATION!!!

Untitled
Nina Chanel Abney

Matisse is one of my favorite artists. I will recognize a Matisse anywhere, and also anyone who is "influenced" by him.

I found the above collage at This is Worldtown's instagram page where they're calling for art submissions:

thisisworldtown CALL FOR CONTRIBUTORS

We are now accepting visual and written works by women of colour artists and storytellers on the theme Invisible Love.
Invisible Love :: Your mother never said it. Your first crush was the girl you couldn't tell. The love of your life you couldn't share with the world. The feeling of being desired but never wholly loved. The ways in which our chosen family cares for us. The way the love we desire is about undoing the patriarchy. The way we feel seen but not always loved. The way we feel love that isn't always seen.

And the artist is a black American woman (couldn't they find a black Canadian woman?):

Her first solo exhibition in a museum, Nina Chanel Abney: Royal Flush, opened at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina in February 2017. Curated by Marshall N. Price, the exhibition included about 30 of her paintings, watercolors, and collages and spans 10 years of her work. The works contain a wide range of art historical references, including medieval icons, Northern Renaissance still lifes, and artists such as Henri Matisse and John Wesley. They illustrate narcissism, celebrity culture, the objectification of women, issues of race, and police brutality. [source]

Imagine using a Matisse collage to "illustrate narcissism, celebrity culture, the objectification of women, issues of race, and police brutality."

It is a clever re-creation. I suppose that the palm leaf over the black face's lips indicates "silencing." And the "xs" are "negation," but coupled wth the "os" and the hearts mean "love." There is also a bird in there - a dove? And a circle on the top left corner of the face which looks 3-D and could be a globe. And the triangles? Pointing direction upwards, a secularized reference to heaven? Or the supremacy of the (black) female (the big triangle "holds" the face); the Black Goddess? But then there's the red, clown's nose describing: "The way we feel seen but not always loved"?

But why Matisse? Again, couldn't Nina Chanel Abney find a black (American) woman artist to re-create her "message" filled collage?

THIS IS CULTURAL APPROPRIATION!!!