Carnegie Hall

Visual Music depicts an elaborately crafted universe of fantastical creatures with the purpose of creating an allegorical history rooted in African American hip-hop culture, synthesized with Japanese art historical and contemporary aesthetics. The works are painted in flat planes of color and strong lines in the style of the Ukiyo-e woodblock prints of the Edo period. American painter Rozeal continues her investigation of the power of consumer society to undermine individual identity, introduced in her highly successful blackface series (2001–2005). This new body of work reads like an epic fable, lush and hallucinatory, in which lessons of the hip-hop–era gods and goddesses are preached to the young, often falling on deaf ears. The spiritual and the material worlds co-exist in a chaotic realm of good versus evil, which is at once contemporary and timeless.

Visual Music will be on show through April 11.