In 2007, soon after a screening of Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth at the San Francisco International Film Festival, I went for a long walk through Golden Gate Park and decided on a whim to explore the de Young Museum. I don’t remember much about the visit except for the 20 minutes I spent standing in front of Aaron Douglas’s Aspiration (1936). (I wrote at length about that experience here.) I was overwhelmed by the uncanny similarities between his brand of Modernism and Costa’s, and I’ve had it in the back of my mind ever since to write an essay drawing a line between the two. If I do it would eventually pass through a number of African-American novelists and the anonymous designers of so many funk, soul, and jazz album covers. That essay seems even more necessary now that Costa is being accused of “aestheticizing poverty.”
