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The New Museum has introduced programming and a brand new opening date for “Grief and Grievance: Artwork and Mourning in America,” an exhibition initially conceived by Okwui Enwezor (1963-2019) for the New Museum, and offered with curatorial help from advisors Naomi Beckwith, Massimiliano Gioni, Glenn Ligon, and Mark Nash. The opening of “Grief and Grievance” has now been scheduled for February 17, 2021, and might be on view by way of June 6, 2021.
Previous to the opening, on Thursday, January 21, 2021, the New Museum will host a discussion on Okwui Enwezor’s imaginative and prescient and life’s work, titled “Assembly Worlds.” This dialogue will characteristic Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director of the NTU Centre for Up to date Artwork Singapore and Professor, NTU Faculty of Artwork, Design and Media; Franklin Sirmans, Director of the Pérez Artwork Museum Miami; Terry Smith, Professor of Up to date Artwork Historical past and Idea on the College of Pittsburgh; Octavio Zaya, impartial artwork critic and curator; and moderator Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Inventive Director of the New Museum.
Increasing on important themes in Enwezor’s illustrious curatorial follow, this dialog will discover the interdisciplinary nature of his work because it bridges modern artwork, structure, international histories, and cultural trade. Taking cues from Enwezor’s expansive imaginative and prescient, this program seeks to honor and mirror on the various methods his profession has formed and influenced modern artwork.
This might be joined by a variety of conversations with artists from the exhibition, together with: LaToya Ruby Frasier in dialog with Margot Norton on March 12, at 7:00 p.m. EST; Kerry James Marshall in dialog with Massimiliano Gioni on March 18 at 4:00 p.m.; Hank Willis Thomas in dialog with Margot Norton on April 8 at 7:00 p.m. EST; Rashid Johnson in dialog with Massimiliano Gioni on April 15 at 7:00 p.m. EST; with many extra to be introduced.
On February 24, 2021, the Museum will host “Workshop for Educators: Grief and Grievance: Artwork and Morning in America.” Designed for Ok-12 educators, this program will spotlight and contextualize works within the exhibition with historic and modern social actions, and artists’ considerations at present. The workshop will deal with methods of social justice group organizing that educators can draw from to co-create a safer and braver studying setting—one which acknowledges college students’ lived experiences and prioritizes the well-being and dignity of marginalized individuals, whereas addressing troublesome realities.
Exhibition
This intergenerational exhibition brings collectively thirty-seven artists working in quite a lot of mediums who’ve addressed the idea of mourning, commemoration, and loss as a direct response to the nationwide emergency of racist violence skilled by Black communities throughout America. The exhibition additional considers the intertwined phenomena of Black grief and a politically orchestrated white grievance, as every buildings and defines modern American social and political life. Included in “Grief and Grievance” are works encompassing video, portray, sculpture, set up, images, sound, and efficiency made within the final decade, together with a number of key historic works and a sequence of recent commissions created in response to the idea of the exhibition.
The artists on view will embody: Terry Adkins, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kevin Beasley, Dawoud Bey, Mark Bradford, Garrett Bradley, Melvin Edwards, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Charles Gaines, Ellen Gallagher, Theaster Gates, Arthur Jafa, Daniel LaRueJohnson, Rashid Johnson, Jennie C. Jones, Kahlil Joseph, Deana Lawson, Simone Leigh, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Julie Mehretu, Okwui Okpokwasili, Adam Pendleton, Julia Phillips, Howardena Pindell, Cameron
Rowland, Lorna Simpson, Sable Elyse Smith, Tyshawn Sorey, Diamond Stingily, Henry Taylor, Hank Willis Thomas, Kara Walker, Nari Ward, Carrie Mae Weems, and Jack Whitten.
In 2018, the New Museum invited Okwui Enwezor to arrange “Grief and Grievance: Artwork and Mourning in America.” Round that point, Enwezor was additionally growing a sequence of public talks for the Alain LeRoy Locke Lectures at Harvard College centered on the intersection of Black mourning and white nationalism in American life as articulated within the work of up to date Black American artists. The argument put forth on this sequence–which he sadly was unable to ship–knowledgeable the concepts Enwezor would use as the premise for “Grief and Grievance.” Between the autumn of 2018 and March 2019, Enwezor tirelessly labored on “Grief and Grievance,” drafting his thesis for the exhibition, compiling lists of artists and artworks, choosing {the catalogue} contributors, and talking with lots of the invited artists. In January 2019, Enwezor requested the artist Glenn Ligon to function an advisor to the exhibition. Given the superior state of planning and the significance of the exhibition, following Enwezor’s demise on March 15, 2019, and with the help of his property and of a lot of his associates and collaborators, the New Museum established an advisory staff, comprised of longtime collaborators and associates of Enwezor together with Glenn Ligon; Mark Nash, Professor on the College of California in Santa Cruz, and co-curator of a lot of Enwezor’s tasks, together with The Brief Century and Documenta 11; and Naomi Beckwith, the Manilow Senior Curator of the Museum of Up to date Artwork in Chicago, whom Enwezor had chosen as one of many jurors of his 2015 Venice Biennale. With the help of Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Inventive Director on the New Museum, this curatorial advisory group labored collectively to understand and interpret Enwezor’s imaginative and prescient for “Grief and Grievance.” The curatorial advisors and the New Museum additionally see this exhibition as a tribute to Enwezor’s work and legacy.
Since he started work on the mission, Enwezor had expressed a need to open the exhibition in proximity to the American presidential election, as a strong response to a disaster in American democracy and as a transparent indictment of Donald Trump’s racist politics.
Though the COVID-19 pandemic has delayed the opening of the exhibition, the works included within the exhibition converse powerfully to America’s previous, current, and future. Enwezor noticed “Grief and Grievance” as one among his most private tasks, and one among his most political. Inside “Grief and Grievance,” mourning may be seen as a definite type of politics, one which refuses a singular melancholy in favor of multifaceted types of critique, resistance, and care. As Enwezor wrote in his preliminary narrative for the exhibition, “with the media’s normalization of white nationalism, the final two years have made clear that there’s a new urgency to evaluate the function that artists, by way of artworks, have performed to light up the searing contours of the American physique politic.” In Enwezor’s view, the works on this exhibition assist illustrate the concept mourning is a follow that permeates the social, financial, and emotional realities of Black life in America as it’s skilled throughout the nation by a number of generations of people, households, and communities.
Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis Director, New Museum, states: “‘Grief and Grievance: Artwork and Mourning in America’ is a tribute to Okwui Enwezor’s braveness, relentless focus, and fierce intelligence as a large in our subject and one of the essential curators of his technology. His presence stays vivid, as does his legacy to rework the historical past of artwork and exhibition-making. We’re honored that Okwui embraced our invitation to current his exhibition on the New Museum, which confronts the uncomfortable truths and ongoing ache of racial injustice in America. Okwui’s imaginative and prescient and the voices of the artists chosen for this exhibition couldn’t be extra related.”
Comprising all three most important exhibition flooring of the New Museum, in addition to the Foyer gallery and public areas, the works included within the exhibition signify cross-disciplinary approaches that incorporate strategies of documentary movie and images, experimental filmmaking, efficiency, and social engagement alongside conventional creative mediums
like portray, drawing, and sculpture. The exhibition contains numerous examples of artists exploring American historical past from the civil rights motion of the Sixties to problems with police violence in america within the Nineteen Nineties and at present. These works thoughtfully mirror upon what catalogue contributor Saidiya Hartman characterizes as “the afterlife of slavery,” as
lots of the collaborating artists mirror on the intersection of historic reminiscence and the social and political realities of the current.
Though the overlapping themes of the exhibition are woven all through the exhibition, every gallery flooring builds off one among three historic cornerstones that hyperlink the expertise of mourning to moments of political motion and engagement throughout American historical past: Jack Whitten’s Birmingham (1964), Daniel LaRue Johnson’s Freedom Now, No 1 (1963–
64), and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Procession (1986). The presence of efficiency and music as areas for group mourning and remembrance, as seen within the works of artists and performers together with Rashid Johnson, Okwui Okpokwasili, and Tyshawn Sorey has additionally been very important to the conception of the exhibition.
One other key theme seen all through the exhibition is using abstraction as a technique for confronting or mediating moments of historic violence or social upheaval, as within the contributions of artists resembling Mark Bradford, Ellen Gallagher, Jennie C. Jones, and Julie Mehretu. Within the wake of the Black Lives Matter motion, intensified discussions about
the circulation of photos of racial violence, demise, and mourning within the digital age have additionally figured into the work of youthful artists throughout quite a lot of varieties. Many artists working at present have constructed upon a convention of confronting media representations of institutional violence and commensurate protest actions.
One essential side of realizing Enwezor’s imaginative and prescient for the exhibition is the inclusion of Glenn Ligon’s main public work A Small Band (2015), which Enwezor had commissioned for his Venice Biennale in 2015 and which might be making its New York premiere. On this piece, Ligon presents three phrases—blues, blood, and bruise—rendered in white neon tubes and black paint. These phrases had been uttered by a younger black teenager, Daniel Hamm, in 1964, when he and his buddy Wallace Baker had been arrested in New York for against the law they didn’t commit and overwhelmed by the police. Emblazoned throughout the façade of the
New Museum, Ligon’s vivid band of phrases will stay on view on the Museum for a complete 12 months because of a collaboration with the Virginia Museum of High-quality Arts.
Contextualizing the work of up to date artists inside an essential legacy of political and aesthetic methods which have outlined the historical past of artwork and illustration in America for many years, the exhibition stands as proof that lots of the considerations driving the present debates round race, discrimination, and violence in America had been left unconfronted for much too lengthy. As Enwezor urged, Black grief has been a nationwide emergency for a few years now, and lots of artists have persistently addressed it of their work.
To respect Enwezor’s needs for the exhibition to coincide with the 2020 US presidential election, the exhibition catalogue printed with Phaidon has been launched forward of the exhibition opening, and consists of contributions from Elizabeth Alexander, Naomi Beckwith, Judith Butler, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Okwui Enwezor, Massimiliano Gioni, Saidiya Hartman, Juliet Hooker, Glenn Ligon, Mark Nash, Claudia Rankine, and Christina Sharpe. The exhibition catalogue was thoughtfully designed by Polymode—Silas Munro and Brian Johnson.
An exhibition narrative by Okwui Enwezor, “Grief and Grievance: Artwork and Mourning in America,” drawn from the exhibition catalogue, is now available here.
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