Robert Pruitt (Born 1975 in Houston) creates sculpture, drawings, video, and installation works about the African-American experience in the United States and the global impact of black cultural production. He is perhaps best-known for large-scale, multimedia drawings on paper featuring portraits of African-Americans. His careful and sensitive treatment of the subjects—from their features to dress and comportment—combines with a wide array of references to traditional cultures, hip-hop music, science, technology, and political struggles. Pruitt describes his work as attempting “to string together the breadth of the black experience and diaspora to create a sense of commonality and humanity … lacking in many forms of black representation.”

Woman with X-Patterned Dress (After Bill Traylor) features a female figure standing in profile, her arms behind her back, and her feet slightly apart. Everything about the woman conveys a sense of strength and resolve—from her grounded stance to the sharp outlines of her face. One quickly notices that behind her back she clasps a box cutter, razor extended. This disarming detail imbues the portrait with a sense of pending violence. Pruitt used black crayon on brown butcher paper, allowing the paper to provide the underlying hue of the figure’s skin. The figure’s clothing is quite distinctive: a highly patterned, quilt-like dress combined with a pair of sneakers, both drawn in high contrast white crayon against black. The artwork’s title makes reference to Bill Traylor, a celebrated, prolific, and self-taught African-American artist who first began to draw at the age of eighty-five in 1939. Pruitt’s interest in Traylor speaks to his interest in diverse African-American histories as a means of forming new representations of black experience.