Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America

In 2018, the New Museum invited Okwui Enwezor to prepare 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 targeted on the intersection of Black mourning and white nationalism in American life as articulated within the work of latest 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, deciding on {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 loss of life on March 15, 2019, and with the help of his property and of lots of his buddies and collaborators, the New Museum established an advisory group, comprised of longtime collaborators and buddies of Enwezor together with Glenn Ligon; Mark Nash, Professor on the College of California in Santa Cruz, and co-curator of lots of Enwezor’s initiatives, together with The Brief Century and Documenta 11; and Naomi Beckwith, the Manilow Senior Curator of the Museum of Modern 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 Creative Director on the New Museum, this curatorial advisory group labored collectively to appreciate 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 challenge, Enwezor had expressed a need to open the exhibition in proximity to the American presidential election, as a robust 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 communicate powerfully to America’s previous, current, and future.

Enwezor noticed Grief and Grievance as one among his most private initiatives, and one among his most political. Inside Grief and Grievance mourning will 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, via 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 that 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.