Does race matter anymore in the art world? For artists of color in the 1990s, it certainly did. The first half of that decade represented the high-water mark of art about identity politics, and the forms that work took could be quite confrontational. During the 1993 Whitney Biennial, for example, multimedia artist Daniel Martinez handed out little visitor pins, like the ones at the Met, that read i can’t imagine ever wanting to be white. Kara Walker’s paper-cutout murals, styled in the fashion of 18th-century portrait silhouettes, depicted America’s racial history as a plantation from hell, filled with unremitting violence and sexual depredation.

Kori Newkirk, Void of Silence

Today, artists like Walker are established midcareer icons (she’ll be having a major solo show at the Whitney this fall), while the politics of identity seem as dead as Kurt Cobain. “Identity has become one of those taboo words,” says Los Angeles artist Kori Newkirk. “Nobody wants their work to be identified with ‘identity.’”

Newkirk, 37, is one of the younger African-American artists associated with “postblack” art. Not a new notion, the term emerged in conjunction with a 2001 exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem called “Freestyle,” which took the pulse of a new generation of African-American artists following in the wake of Walker and others like Fred Wilson and Lorna Simpson. “It was something we coined and threw out there,” says Christine Y. Kim, the SMH associate curator who co-organized the show with the institution’s director, Thelma Golden. “Since then, it’s taken on a life of its own.”

Indeed, but what postblack means, exactly, is apparently hard to pin down. “I’m defined as being one of the first artists to fit that label,” Newkirk allows, “but I couldn’t define it for you.” Kim is equally elliptical. “There is no correct usage,” she says, “but it’s not a negation of being black, like someone saying, ‘I’m not going to tell you what color I am, only that I went to Yale.’ A postblack artist may or may not make reference to being black or to blackness in their work. In that sense, the term is a springboard to a more complicated discussion about race.”

Newkirk’s work is a blend of ambiguous meanings couched in economical gestures. His mixed-media installations often use images that seem neutral enough at first glance, but on closer inspection become freighted somehow: a fiberglass shark flocked with artificial snow; murals applied with a mixture of pigment and hair pomade picturing subjects like helicopters or enlarged fingerprints. Insofar as Newkirk deals with race in his work, it is to show who he is, not what he is.

Similarly, Nina Buxenbaum, 33, a painter who portrays herself and her friends (black or not), says that “as a black person, your work is going to be about what’s emotionally and intellectually interesting to you. It’s going to be coming out of your own experience.” And she adds, “people are more comfortable in their blackness.” Accordingly, her work is free of the didacticism that characterized some of the identity-themed work of the ’90s.

To a certain extent, this change in attitude is a result of the transformation in race relations since the days of the civil rights movement. It’s also due to the fact that thanks to immigration and globalization, being black in America no longer necessarily means being an African-American with roots in slavery. “People are coming to the issue of blackness from a lot of different perspectives,” Buxenbaum says. “African-American versus Caribbean-American versus being a first-generation American from Africa—there are more conversations available to people on blackness.”

But if it’s hard to say what postblack is, it’s easier to say what it is not: the harbinger of racial harmony. The brutal history of slavery and segregation still weighs too heavily on the present for something like that. And artists of color remain a minority in the art world, as they do in the country as a whole. “As much as we’re part of Western culture, we’re still an ‘other’ here,” Buxenbaum points out.

Still, if postblack as a concept suggests anything, it may be this: that race can be dealt with on a more nuanced level. Or at least it can be explored without automatically defaulting to an exchange of angry recrimination.

Additional reporting by Sarah Schmerler.